Today’s Google Doodle honors Octavia Butler, the visionary science fiction author whose work, including novels like Kindred and Parable of the Sower, deeply influenced both current Afrofuturist thought and genre fiction as a whole.

Born on this day in 1947, Butler was incredibly shy and was diagnosed with mild dyslexia as a child, but she nevertheless discovered a passion for reading. Her mother would bring home books that had been discarded at houses where she was cleaning, and she made frequent trips to her local library. Butler eventually found science fiction, with the novels of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, and others. As a teenager, after watching a TV show and realizing that she could write a better story than…

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