SEATTLE (AP) - Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to
gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close
friend said Sunday. She was 58.

Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her
home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science
Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and
could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found
outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and
died Friday, Howle said.

Butler's work wasn't preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said,
but used the genre's artistic freedom to explore race, poverty,
politics, religion and human nature.

"She stands alone for what she did," Howle said. "She was such a beacon
and a light in that way."

Jane Jewell, executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers of America, said Butler was one of the first black women to
explore the genre and the most prominent. But Butler would have been a
major writer of science fiction regardless of race or gender, she said.

"She is a world-class science fiction writer in her own right," Jewell
said. "She was one of the first and one of the best to discuss gender
and race in science fiction."

Butler began writing at age 10, and told Howle she embraced science
fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called Devil Girl from Mars and
thought, "I can write a better story than that." In 1970, she took a
bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers
workshop in East Lansing, Mich.

Her first novel, Kindred, in 1979, featured a black woman who travels
back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write
about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most
recent work, Fledgling, an examination of the Dracula legend, was
published last fall.

She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science
fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine
T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.

Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married.

"Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing," Seattle-based science
fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in
Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the
same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging
imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."