In Positive Obsession, Susana M. Morris offers a powerful and richly contextualized portrait of Octavia Butler, illuminating the life and legacy of one of science fiction’s most groundbreaking writers. With the skill of both a biographer and a devoted scholar, Morris brings us into the sociopolitical world that shaped Butler’s vision during postwar America, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and the quiet resistance embodied by her mother, a domestic worker who endured daily racism.

Morris doesn’t just trace Butler’s timeline for readers, she connects the dots, weaving Butler’s personal history with the intellectual and political forces that fueled her prophetic imagination. I love the ways this book illuminates Butler's vulnerability, persistence, and what she herself called a “positive obsession”—the compulsion to write despite fear, doubt, and marginalization.

This book is both tribute and testimony, written by someone who has clearly lived with Butler’s work in the classroom and on the page. It reminds us why Butler’s stories still matter: because they center the very people history tries to erase and ask us to imagine something more just, more human, and more possible.