A 12-year-old girl watching the terrible sci-fi film Devil Girl from Mars decided she could write a better story, and Octavia E. Butler went on to rewrite the rules of speculative fiction. This episode follows her from a segregated 1950s Pasadena, where she watched her mother enter white employers’ homes through the back door, through shyness, bullying, and dyslexia, to the big pink notebook and the Remington typewriter her mother bought her at age ten.

We cover the mother who spent rent money and dental savings on her daughter’s career, the aunt who said people of their race could not be writers, the years of 2 a.m. writing sessions before warehouse shifts, Harlan Ellison’s mentorship, the Clarion workshop, and five years of rejections before she could live by her pen in 1978. We then explore Kindred, the Xenogenesis trilogy, Bloodchild, Fledgling, and the Parable novels with their Earthseed philosophy that God is change, along with the 1995 MacArthur grant, her struggles with depression and writer’s block, her death at 58, and the Mars landing site that bears her name.

• How salvaged books from her mother’s employers became her education
• Two-finger typing on a Remington and manuscripts submitted through a junior high teacher
• The college classmate’s judgment of enslaved ancestors that inspired Kindred
• Hierarchy as a biological flaw in Lilith’s Brood and hyper-empathy in Parable of the Sower
• The MacArthur Genius Grant, Butler Mons on Pluto’s moon, and the Octavia E. Butler Landing on Mars