It’s the birthday of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the first science fiction author in the entire universe to be awarded a MacArthur genius grant (1995). She was also one of few African-American women writing in a genre dominated by white men. Her books sold more than a million copies and were widely read both inside and outside the science fiction community.

Butler was born in Pasadena, California, and raised by her widowed mother, who was a maid. Painfully shy and nearly six feet tall by 16, Butler wrote from a young age and loved science fiction for its “limitless possibilities.” She studied at Pasadena City College and California State University, Los Angeles, and was mentored by Harlan Ellison. (If you’re not big into science fiction you may not realize, as I did not, that Harlan Ellison is a Big Noise.) Her first novel, Patternmaster (1976), is about a hierarchical world run by the telepathic Patternists; she eventually wrote four more novels in the series. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy began with Dawn in 1987 and explores the forced integration of humans with an alien race.

Much of Butler’s writing drew on her experience as an outsider (she was a self-described loner) and on observations of the humiliations her mother endured as a black maid for white people—such as her 1979 novel, Kindred, in which a black woman time-travels to the old South to save a slaveholding planter who is her own ancestor. This book has often been used as a text in high school and college courses and is one of Butler’s best known and best loved works.

In 1999, Butler left Los Angeles, where she’d lived for fifty years, and moved with 300 boxes of books to Seattle, where she felt a sense of community that she’d never found in her former home. After about seven years of writer’s block exacerbated by medication for hypertension, Butler published Fledgling, her final novel, in 2005. Fledgling is about a 53-year-old vampire who becomes a young girl with amnesia. (Been there, right?) Butler died the next year at the age of 58 after falling and hitting her head.

Have a lovely Friday, good luck concentrating if the world’s cutest distraction wants attention on the second day of summer vacation, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.