Octavia Butler: the dyslexic Black woman who became sci-fi's greatest prophet. Growing up poor in 1950s Pasadena, she faced rejection for years—but kept writing. Her 1993 novel predicted climate crisis, fascism, and "Make America Great Again." When she won the MacArthur Genius Grant, she bought her mother—a lifelong maid—a house. She didn't write to help us escape reality. She wrote to warn us. DISCLAIMER: This story is based on publicly available biographical information about Octavia Butler's

@npr Octavia Butler’s career started with a bad movie. When Butler – who is remembered as one of the greatest American science fiction writers of all time – watched the British sci-fi film “Devil Girl from Mars” at the age of 12, her first thought was, “Geez, I can write a better story than that.” And so she did. Throughout a very successful decades-long writing career, Butler combined history, science fiction, and fantasy to imagine a liberated future through a Black lens. Her alternate realiti