When an interviewer asked Hugo- and Macarthur-winning novelist Octavia Butler what she thought of her books being classed as science fiction, she said, “Really, it doesn’t matter. A good story is a good story.” Here is (some of) the story of Butler’s life.

Butler grew up in Pasadena, raised by a single mother who’d had to leave school after the third grade. Of her own early years, Butler has written,

At school I was always taller than the rest of my class, and because I was an only child I was comfortable with adults, but shy and awkward with other kids. I was quiet, bookish, and in spite of my size, hopeless at sports. In short, I was different. And even in the earliest grades, I got pounded for it. I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.

But she also discovered writing at the age of 10 – she chose science fiction, she says, because “because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.” Her books – the first, Patternmaster, was published in 1976, and the last, Fledgling, came out in 2005 – did more than examine. They also reflected the deep inequalities plaguing America – and humanity as a whole — and sounded a warning for the future. Butler said her novel Parable of the Sower “calls people’s attention to the fact that so much needs to be done and obviously [there] are people who are running this country who don’t care.”