@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