ABSTRACT
Octavia Butler has created a dystopian vision that equals Kim Stanley Robinson's for its creative innovation and political engagement. Like Robinson, Butler focuses on her protagonist's coming of age in an extrapolated version of contemporary US society. Butler's version of this breakdown emblematically focuses on the collapse of the broad "middle" of US society that constitutes its expanded working class. Mid-level jobs and middle-class lifestyles disappear in a social vacuum in which the critical mass needed to mount an anti-corporate movement and build a different social system is no longer viable. In this world, capital's millennial dreams have led to the nightmares of a twenty-first-century world shaped by a postmodern corporate feudalism in which a new population of the propertyless have not yet taken an oppositional stand.
