I’m almost angry that I’m not teaching my science fiction soon because I️ really really want to teach the stories in this book. All of them are fascinating in their own way and as a collection that illustrates how different Butler is from anyone else writing then. Her approach to fiction as a way of refusing a kind of naive optimism without allowing her pessimism to end in nihilism makes her work unlike anyone else's. And her commitment to working out the implications of her premises and their effect on people and on how we see the world—rather than a facile description of new tech with old ideology—is part of why I️ think she’s the best.
I️ also loved the afterwords on this book; Butler's dry observations about her own work are almost worth reading just for themselves.