Two stories in this book are about humans being dominated by nightmarish aliens. After reading Butler's time travel and slavery novel "Kindred", and knowing what a pioneer she was as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, it's hard to miss the influence her real life had on her fiction.

But there's a tremendous compassion and hope for reconciliation in her stories. Anger and outrage are built into the premise of a Butler story, but the future always contains love and optimism... more than the domineering aliens seem to deserve. Her stories have such clarity and simplicity, and I feel like I know her personally, or I WANT to know her, even as she's creating one her uniquely bizarre science fiction scenarios. Everything I've read by her makes me feel her loss. 58 is too young.

I take half a star off only because I thought the story "Near of Kin" was distasteful. Maybe you need to have a different relationship with the Christian bible to get it, but I think it was a rare failure. It's probably the least significant of the stories in this little collection, and others refloated the book as I read on.