Octavia Butler, A Lonely, Bright Star Of the Sci-Fi Universe

The public and private lives of Butler, Due says, were remarkable to watch. "It's almost as if she lived in two worlds."

"I'm very happy alone," Butler once told Post writer David Streitfeld. "If I had to change myself into something else, I'd probably be unhappy."

She grew up poor in Southern California, where her father shined shoes before he died when she was a young girl, and her mother cleaned houses. Butler was a young black woman coming of age at a time when black women were mainly invisible. And when she was noticed, it was with unkind eyes. She was six feet tall by the time she was in her teens, a girl with deep brown skin and short hair. She was sometimes mistaken for a man, she would say. Early as a child, she cocooned herself in a world of books and nurtured audacious ambitions.

"She obviously had spent a tremendous amount of her early life feeling very, very alone," Barnes said. "She had no tribe. She didn't fit in any place. Her own family thought she was nuts . . . because of what she wanted to do with her life."

At one time Barnes lived just six blocks from Butler and they would spend time together, having dinner or just talking. One of the questions she seemed to care greatly about was, "Why is it that we are so cruel to each other?" Barnes says.

"The fact that she was so concerned with that made me think she had faced a lot of that" cruelty in her life, he adds.

She explored the question in a field that was forced, whether it wanted to or not, to acknowledge her talents.

"Women in general were rare in the science fiction field, and black women, ha," Barnes says.

She had to cloak her ideas thickly in metaphor, he says. "She was forced to speak through layers of obsfucation." Those challenges may have ultimately made her a better writer but must have taken their toll.

"It was like trying to drive in the Indy 500 with your brakes on," Barnes says. "You burn up."

Due last spoke with Butler in the summer when Butler was planning to send her last manuscript, "Fledgling," which was recently published to acclaim.

She and Barnes had been worried about Butler, who had been ill and on several medications. The side effects, she told them, made it hard for her to write. It must have been particularly trying for such a perfectionist, they say.

They worried about her, up there alone and probably pushing herself far too much, both in her writing and her travels. But she was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, they say, with its natural beauty and its opportunities for true solitude. Due wanted to call, but worried about interrupting her writing, the words that seemed so hard to come by lately.

I wonder if in all that aloneness, in all her solitude, she knew just how beautiful she was and that she was loved.