Briefly Noted

This nimble biography examines the life of the legendary science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose works, such as "Parable of the Sower," often articulated unsettling visions of social collapse. Born in California in 1947 to a domestic worker and a veteran, Butler found escape in sci-fi books as a child. As Morris shows, Butler's stories, which reckoned with chattel slavery, climate catastrophe, and fascism, were as deeply attuned to West African culture and myth as they were to the American civil-rights movement. Yet Morris contends that Butler's stories "were not nihilistic predictions but a sort of love offering for readers to receive and be changed by." In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a "generalized evolutionary theory" to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding "how everything came to be."