Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires is a timely text that critically situates Butler's fiction in several fields of study including American, African-American, gender, and science fiction studies. This book attempts to avoid excluding as many readers as possible by evading esoteric jargon while still engaging the interdisciplinary discourses that respond to Butler's fiction. The study asserts that Butler's fiction transforms the way the body is imagined with reference to race and gender. This text examines how Butler's fiction is able to cross several genre boundaries while simultaneously reshaping the genre of science fiction. This book makes the claim that Butler's fiction is crucial for contemporary and future investigations of identity formation. Discussions of race, class, and sex are reoccurring topic that are inextricable to any understanding of body politics and theory. This book is filled with exciting and insightful discussions that raise questions about what constitutes humanity in Butler's fiction and in the real world. Ultimately, the purpose of the text is to add to the scholarship surrounding Butler and to bring her to the attention of audiences that might otherwise overlook her work. This book is an invitation for readers inside and outside of the academy to discover the fiction of Octavia Butler. “This is a thorough and well-researched examination of the works of one of our finest 20th Century writers, Octavia E. Butler. Scholar Gregory Jerome Hampton helps us better understand the context of Butler's themes of body transformation in her work, and it is a must-read for anyone who wants a fuller appreciation for Butler's contribution to American literature.” ―Tananarive Due, American Book Award winner, author of Blood Colony and My Soul To Keep “At last, a book worthy of the perspicacity and imagination of one of the most vital authors of our time. Gregory Jerome Hampton's Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires lifts the veil on Butler's prolific corpus to tell the truth about Butler, her prodigious mind and the incontestable power of a legacy not yet fully realized. Drawing on not only the insights of traditional criticism, critical theory and genre studies, but on the most revelatory interviews with the author herself, Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler ingeniously extricates Butler from the quicksand debates about her proper place in African American literature and science fiction, and instead highlights the poverty of formal thought and theory until now to situate Butler in the field. Under Hampton's deft hand, Butler's proper place turns out to be, like the question of the body being interrogated in this fine work, situational. Few besides Hampton, whose respect for Butler's extraordinary career is enormous, could have shown this so smartly. Slaves, Aliens and Vampires is a luminous book with the lay and expert reader alike in mind.” ―Maurice Wallace, Duke University “In Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler, Gregory Hampton takes readers on a journey through Butler's most significant works, exploring a range of themes, from maternalism, agency, and the Middle Passage in Wild Seed, to hybridity and hierarchy, oppression and self-determination, symbiosis and slavery, and the complex role of gender and race that is evident in much of her writing. An especially valuable contribution is Hampton's examination of Fledgling, Butler's last novel, a work that has received only little critical attention so far, despite its representing all of these themes. Although scholarship concerning African-American literature and the fantastic has risen in the last decade, at one point there was so little scholarship on this writer, that every volume was a welcome link in an invisible chain. Hampton's work represents a solid addition to an ongoing discussion of a writer whose work we may never tire of examining and celebrating.” ―Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, winners of “This work is a nuanced, careful, and interdisciplinary reading of Octavia E. Butler's works. The center of Hampton's analysis is the body, and the ways in which Butler understood and elaborated upon this theme in her many works. Hampton convinces the reader that Butler was successful in arguing for a new way of understanding the body that was radically different and even subversive. This central theme in Butler's works, Hampton argues, includes notions of race, identity and hybridity. Hampton utilizes with ease the insights from many scholars and disciplines to examine his subject matter, using for the works of Foucault, Carby, DuBois, Govan, Lacan, Melzer, and Lefanu, among others. He is able to link Butler to the multiple traditions of science fiction, African American literature and womanism. Butler, because she wa