The aim of this essay is to demonstrate why and how African American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler’s fiction is taught at Karlstad University, Sweden. Over the past twenty years, a number of her novels and short stories have been included in various courses in English at different levels at this university. The essay focuses in particular on why and how Butler’s novel Wild Seed (1980) is integrated into an M.A. course on African American women writers’ novels, which was taught in the springs of 2019 and 2020. This novel is contextualized both in terms of the course as a whole, which includes novels from Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) to Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991), and the genres of speculative fiction and the neoslave narrative. The essay also briefly brings up and reflects on student responses to Wild Seed, concerning gender issues and sexuality. It concludes that there are numerous reasons for including this novel in a course on African American women’s novels. In general, Octavia Butler is among the most important and influential American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and her works have much to offer in a contemporary European classroom.