[9] Growing up in Pasadena, Butler experienced limited cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of de facto racial segregation in the surrounding area.

An African-American classmate involved in the Black Power movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites.

As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival.

The titular survivor is Alanna, the adopted child of the Missionaries, fundamentalist Christians who have traveled to another planet to escape Patternist control and Clayark infection.

[9][12][25] In 1983, Butler published "Speech Sounds", a story set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where a pandemic has caused most humans to lose their ability to read, speak, or write.

Set in the Mojave Desert, it focuses on a colony of humans infected by an extraterrestrial microorganism brought to Earth by the one surviving astronaut of the spaceship Clay's Ark.

The series examines the theme of alienation by creating situations in which humans are forced to coexist with other species to survive and extends Butler's recurring exploration of genetically altered, hybrid individuals and communities.

Set thirty years after humanity's return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith's part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali.

[9] It details the invasion of Acorn by right-wing fundamentalist Christians, Lauren's attempts to survive their religious "re-education," and the final triumph of Earthseed as a community and a doctrine.

[10] Set on the West Coast, it tells of the coming-of-age of a young female hybrid vampire named Shori, whose species is called Ina.

[35] During her last years, Butler struggled with writer's block and depression, partly caused by the side effects of medication for high blood pressure.

[41] In multiple interviews and essays, Butler explained her view of humanity: inherently flawed by an innate tendency towards hierarchical thinking which leads to tribalism, caste, intolerance, violence and, if not checked, the ultimate destruction of our species.

[44] Specifically, Butler's stories feature gene manipulation, interbreeding, interracial marriage and miscegenation, symbiosis, mutation, alien contact, rape, contamination, and other forms of hybridity as the means to correct the sociobiological causes of hierarchical violence.

[45] As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, "in [Butler's] narratives the undoing of the human body is both literal and metaphorical, for it signifies the profound changes necessary to shape a world not organized by hierarchical violence.

"[46] The evolutionary maturity achieved by the bioengineered hybrid protagonist at the end of the story, then, signals the possible evolution of the dominant community in terms of tolerance, acceptance of diversity, and a desire to wield power responsibly.

As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai note, her stories focus on minority characters whose historical background makes them already intimate with brutal violation and exploitation, and therefore the need to compromise to survive.

[46] Even when endowed with extra, paranormal abilities, these characters are forced to experience unprecedented physical, mental, and emotional distress and exclusion to ensure a minimal degree of agency and to prevent humanity from achieving self-destruction.

Members may be humans of African, European, or Asian descent, extraterrestrial (such as the N'Tlic in Bloodchild), from a different species (such as the vampiric Ina in Fledgling), and cross-species (such as the human-Oankali Akin and Jodahs in the Xenogenesis trilogy).

Thus, Butler creates bonds between groups that are generally considered to be separate and unrelated, and suggests hybridity as "the potential root of good family and blessed community life".

As Farah Peterson comments, in an American society gripped by racism, it took "a fantasy novelist... to imagine how one of these marriages would work in practice" and write the possibility of such a relationship into literary history.

As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai explain in their 2010 memorial to Butler, while keeping "an afro-centric sensibility at the core of narratives", her "insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort" and grim themes deny both the ethnocentric escapism of afrofuturism and the sanitized perspective of white-dominated liberal pluralism.

[46] Wild Seed, of the Patternist series, is considered to particularly fit ideas of Afrofuturist thematic concerns, as the narrative of two immortal Africans Doro and Anyanwu features science fiction technologies and an alternate anti-colonialist history of seventeenth-century America.

"[56] The Houston Post ranked her "among the best SF writers, blessed with a mind capable of conceiving complicated futuristic situations that shed considerable light on our current affairs.

"[57] Some scholars have focused on Butler's choice to write from the point of view of marginal characters and communities and thus "expanded SF to reflect the experiences and expertise of the disenfranchised".

She bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was 10 years old, and, seeing her hard at work on a story casually remarked that maybe one day she could become a writer, causing Butler to realize that it was possible to make a living as an author.

[62] Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre's unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists.

"[13] Butler's stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.

[67] To visually differentiate the time periods in which Butler set the story, Jennings used muted colors for the present and vibrant ones for the past to demonstrate how the remnants and relevance of slavery are still with us.

[71] Dawn is currently being adapted for television by producers Ava DuVernay and Charles D. King's Macro Ventures, alongside writer Victoria Mahoney.

A television series based on Wild Seed is also in the works for Amazon Prime Video with a screenplay co-written by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu.