Flavorwire

Octavia Butler

Not only is Butler one of the absolute best of the few African American women writing in her genre, she’s also one of the absolute best of the humans writing in her genre. Like LeGuin, she has won multiple awards, and in 1995, she received the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the first science fiction writer ever to do so. Her lean, frankly written works are concerned with ecology, religion, gender, and race, and always seem to bend the boundaries of each, a wry sense of humor mixed in with all that gravity.