When I meet a science fiction newbie or skeptic and I want to show them one book that contains all the power and profundity of the genre, I show them Dawn by Octavia Butler. It’s not the genre’s longest book. It clocks in at a manageable 256 pages. It’s certainly not the most expansive in terms of setting. The entire novel actually takes place in one unique but contained space. But it’s perfect — both as an introduction to and an ultimate justification for what science fiction can do.

If I described the story at all to you, it would ruin the wonderment of its opening moments. So I won’t. I will only say that through its meticulous exploration of a very alien culture — everything from its ways of eating, thinking and making love to its distinct sense of time, history and progress — the novel provides, somewhat ironically, one of literature’s deepest explorations of what it means to be human.

Like all great science fiction writers, Butler grounds her boundless imagination in that very real human experience. All her stories are complex allegories that challenge us in the here and now.

That’s not to say that Butler’s work doesn’t transcend the science fiction genre. Her prose is effortless — Hemingwayesque in its deceptive simplicity. And her narrative style is always engaging, allowing us to lose ourselves in what should be extremely foreign worlds.

Her work is as an essential part of our culture — as Americans, as humans — as any writer’s or artist’s that I know.

Butler died this past weekend at the age of 58, having left a collection of short stories and about a dozen novels. I have no doubt she had at least a dozen more in her. The loss of that potential — and more significantly, an intensely compassionate, empathetic and justice-seeking person — hurts me deeply. But maybe the best I can do is appreciate her deep legacy.

Her latest work, published late last year to gushing reviews, was Fledgling, an unconventional take on a very popular genre: the vampire story.

But possibly her best known work is Parable of the Sower, the story an 18-year-old woman with a hyperempathy syndrome who must wander through a ravaged dystopian American landscape feeling everyone’s pain. She ultimately must — as many of Butler’s women do — shoulder the responsibility for the future of the human race.

Her first novel — Kindred — is also well-known and widely taught in secondary school and college. It tells the story of an African American woman who is periodically transported mysteriously and involuntarily back into the antebellum South. While the gripping narrative reads like a great action movie (in the best sense), it tackles such weighty issues as our collective responsibility for — and the collective legacy of — slavery in America.

Despite the critical acclaim for these novels, she actually won the highest honors in science fiction — the Hugo and Nebula awards — for two separate short stories, both of which are collected in Bloodchild

Besides appreciating Butler herself, I’m sure she would want us to ensure that the field of science fiction continued to welcome other writers and artists that shared her sensibilities.

In that spirit, I imagine Butler must have tuned into Battlestar Galactica — with its multitude of strong female characters (at least one of which, Starbuck, seems to carry the burden of saving humanity) and, as evidenced in its most recent episode, a very complex use of an “alien” culture to ask penetrating questions about human nature.

After all, she had originally been inspired to become a science fiction writer at age 12 after watching the film Devil Girl From Mars — and thinking she could do a whole lot better than that.