Google Doodle honors writer Octavia E. Butler 

Today’s Google Doodle honors science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler on her 71st birthday.

Butler, who died in 2006, was a groundbreaking writer in several ways.

She won awards for her work as an African-American woman, in a time when “when the genre was heavily populated by white men, and many saw it as the territory of white men,” as The Mary Sue put it.

And Butler was also the first science-fiction writer, period, to receive the MacArthur Fellowship.

You can learn more about her on The Mary Sue as well as in a piece that explores the brutality — and modern-day relevance — of her novel Kindred on Literary Hub.