Most Recent Articles from Utopian Studies

• Editorial 

  Octavia Butler died in February of 2006; she left behind a body of work exploring the impulse toward utopia and the potential for dystopia. This...

  06/22/08 by Claire Curtis · More from publication

• The certainty of the flesh: Octavia Butler's use of the erotic in the Xenogenesis trilogy 

  Personally, I find utopias ridiculous. We're not going to have a perfect human society until we get a few perfect humans, and that seems unlikely....

  06/22/08 by Nolan Belk · More from publication

• "Every age has the vampire it needs": Octavia Butler's vampiric vision in Fledgling 

  In both movies and novels, the "traditional" vampire is often presented as the "other" who threatens humanity. A white male who penetrates both...

  06/22/08 by Ali Brox · More from publication

• Theorizing fear: Octavia Butler and the realist utopia 

  "Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all."...

  06/22/08 by Claire P. Curtis · More from publication

• Diversity, change, violence: Octavia Butler's pedagogical philosophy 

  The deliberate and relentless depiction of violence in Octavia Butler's science fiction is striking. Her books are full of conflict that ranges...

  06/22/08 by Sarah Outterson · More from publication

• Of gifted children and gated communities: Paul Theroux's O-Zone and Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower 

  Skywalker began his life as a slave on Tatooine, cared for by his mother, Shmi Skywalker, and owned by a Toydarian spare-parts dealer named Watto....

  06/22/08 by Douglas W. Texter · More from publication

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