She was an utter inspiration,” said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on "Star Wars.” "I don't know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example.” Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre "by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally.... She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work.” "For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing,” he said in an interview Monday. "In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch,” writer Tananarive Due said. "So we just lost our mother, our grandmother.