“Way in the Middle of the Air” may be the single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science fiction by a white author. But its very rarity demonstrates how alien the territory of American science fiction in its so-called golden age, after the second world war, was for black readers and for aspiring writers like Octavia Butler. She has often observed, in response to questions about her nearly unique status as an African-American woman writing science fiction, that you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.
