She was an excellent and important author and her passing should be noted.

Ms. Butler is a great and original talent who helped to open up the genre, and should be long remembered and lauded. She's gone too soon.

Butle was an amazing author and is certainly worthy of having a feature piece done on the real site. Alas, she was only a women so she must be regulated to the ghetto of Salon with all of the other girly things.

I would agree with both the person that said thanks for noting this, and also with the person that suggested a larger write-up would be appreciated. Octavia Butler was a staggering talent as an author and it would be great to see one of your literary critics do a write-up or retrospective of her work and life.

What a goddamn tragedy. I admired her not only as a talented writer and critic, but also as an intelligent, committed, sweet, and caring human being. She probably helped race relations advance more than a thousand marching activists.

I hope her work will continue on through her influence on other writers.

Chalk up another vote for a longer article on Octavia - it might be difficult to gather all that much info on a "comfortably reclusive" person, but her work is fantastic, especially Kindred & Parable of the Sower, and it would be great if you could get more people turned on to it.

I have to admit that I'd never heard of Butler until reading this item, but I'm moved to seek out her work. Thanks for posting this.

Another vote here for a full feature on Octavia Butler. She was a unique voice in fiction, not just SF.

Author Tananarive Due has written a moving elegy about her late friend, Octavia Butler at http://tananarivedue.com/Octavia%20Butler.htm. The literary world is missing a wonderful voice and her readers will miss the expectation of her next work. We all feel cheated by her death.

Where's the full-length write up Butler deserves?

for sharing the news that one of my favorite authors has died. I'm sorry to see that this news hasn't made it beyond Broadsheet. Butler was a visionary and wrote wonderful, challenging books that I read over and over again. She deserves far more attention than this.

There's a short article on her in "Slate" from yesterday.

http://www.slate.com/id/2137269/