Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires is a timely text that critically situates Butler's fiction in several fields of study including American, African-American, gender, and science fiction studies. This book attempts to avoid excluding as many readers as possible by evading esoteric jargon while still engaging the interdisciplinary discourses that respond to Butler's fiction. The study asserts that Butler's fiction transforms the way the body is imagined with reference to race and gender. This text examines how Butler's fiction is able to cross several genre boundaries while simultaneously reshaping the genre of science fiction. This book makes the claim that Butler's fiction is crucial for contemporary and future investigations of identity formation. Discussions of race, class, and sex are reoccurring topic that are inextricable to any understanding of body politics and theory. This book is filled with exciting and insightful discussions that raise questions about what constitutes humanity in Butler's fiction and in the real world. Ultimately, the purpose of the text is to add to the scholarship surrounding Butler and to bring her to the attention of audiences that might otherwise overlook her work. This book is an invitation for readers inside and outside of the academy to discover the fiction of Octavia Butler.

"...The highlights of this book were more the interviews, mostly because before her unfortunate death from a fall in 2006, I hadn’t come across any by her. It is interesting that she points out that she didn’t like to be pegged in either the SF or fantasy genres... If you are interested in Octavia Butler, then you will find this book of interest and should be added to your reading list." - SFCrowsnest

"Changing Bodies is a solid, straightforward investigation of Octavia Butler’s books and beliefs. Even though it tends to assume that science fiction is a homogeneous field, it has the considerable merit of clearly placing her work in the broader spectrum of African-American and American literature. Moreover, it shows how Butler wrote to empower other people, eventually opening sf up to diverse readerships and, maybe, making it easier for other writers of colo to engage in such a “white” genre." - Science Fiction Studies

"In the past few years, the black race as a subject in science fiction has gained plenty of attention. Gregory Jerome Hampton’s Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires is reflective of this claim …. Hampton’s book is quirkily structured around what comes after the colon in his title, “Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires,” the bodies of which cleverly reflect his personal history of reading Butler as well as his topic concerning the body, its construction, its value, and its marginalization." - The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts