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, F ...