Neurodivergent
They built billion-dollar companies, invented entire fields of science, and created art that defined generations. Almost every single one of them was told something was fundamentally wrong with how their mind worked.
Neurodivergent is an AI-powered biographical series from the Neural Broadcast Network. Each episode is a cinematic character study of an iconic builder, artist, or outlier, told through a neurodivergent lens. Every claim is sourced from the public record.
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Neurodivergent
Octavia Butler's Dyslexia Made Her Rewrite Science Fiction from Scratch
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About Neurodivergent
Neurodivergent is a stylized character study of iconic builders, artists, and outliers through a neurodivergent lens. Using AI, we examine how neurodivergent wiring shaped their success.
Brought to you by Neural Broadcast Network (NBN).
This is Neurodivergent, an original series from the neurobroadcast network. Dyslexic, grew up poor in Pasadena, wrote herself into science fiction when the genre had no room for black women. This is the story of Octavia Butler. And I mean, we are not just Talking about the MacArthur genius or the science fiction pioneer. We want to build a portrait of a person whose mind processed the world through a profoundly different wiring. Right. Because her perspective, it allowed her to see human hierarchies, symbiosis, survival, all in ways that the rest of the world simply could not. And that fundamentally changed the landscape of literature forever. So let's start in the late 1950s in Pasadena, California. Imagine you were standing in a small, modest home. There's a 10 year old girl standing in front of her mother, and her mother is a widowed housemaid. She spends her days scrubbing the floors of wealthy families. Yeah. And the girl is begging for something highly specific, something that to an outsider might seem like an impossible luxury for a family that is just struggling to survive. She wants a Remington typewriter, which is such a massive request. It really is. And this girl, she possesses an almost paralyzing shyness. The very act of socializing, of navigating all those unspoken rules on the childhood playgrounds, it is agonizing for her. Oh, absolutely. So instead of playing outside, she spends her time retreating into a private world of imagination. She just documents everything in a big pink notebook. To understand the gravity of that request, that Remington typewriter, we really have to look at the architecture of the world you would have navigated if you were born in her shoes. Pasadena in the 1950s. Exactly. It was a place defined by strict, de facto racial segregation. A world of rigid boundaries. The record shows that Octavia would frequently accompany her mother to her cleaning jobs. Right. So imagine being a young, fiercely observant child walking up to the back doors of white people's houses because the front doors were forbidden to. You just absorbing that daily reality. Yeah. She watched her mother, who was a woman of immense dignity, be humiliated and treated poorly by her employers day after day. And then at home, she was raised in a strict bactus environment. So there are rules everywhere. Rules everywhere. So if we look at the immense pressure of this environment, we have to ask, well, what did the world expect of a poor, shy black girl in Pasadena at this time? The expectation was absolute conformity, invisibility, really. Survival through subservience. You keep your head down, you do the work, and you absolutely do not ask for a Remington typewriter to Write stories. That is the exact baseline of her reality and the friction between what was expected of her and how her mind actually worked. It started early. The systems of the 1950s classroom were entirely hostile to a mind wired like hers. Wait, I need to stop and challenge something here, though. Yeah. The documentation of her early school years says she experienced slight dyslexia. Right. In her own words, schoolwork was a torment. But if her brain processed written language differently, making reading a mechanical struggle, why on earth was she begging for a typewriter? It seems like a contradiction. Yeah. Wouldn't a dyslexic child naturally pivot away from words and move toward, say, visual arts or mathematics? You would think so, but this is where her specific cognitive wiring demands a closer look. Dyslexia isn't just, you know, reading words backwards. Which is the common simplified myth, Right? The stereotype. Exactly. It is a fundamental difference in how the brain processes language, sounds, and symbols. The standardized methods of the 1950s educational system failed her completely because they required a linear, uniform way of processing information. But her mind still craved complex input. Yes. It just needed the right environment to process it at its own rhythm. So the classroom was essentially a hostile architecture. Entirely hostile. This difficulty with reading, combined with her intense introversion and just, you know, physical awkwardness, made her an easy target for bullies, which is brutal for a kid. It is. She internalized this friction deeply. She wrote later that she believed herself to be ugly and stupid, clumsy and socially hopeless. But she found a workaround. The library. Yes. Her retreat to the Pasadena Central Library wasn't merely an escape from bullies. It was the deliberate creation of an alternative habitat. Because the library is quiet, it is structured. It is entirely predictable. In the library, there is no cross traffic of chaotic social cues. If you think about an overwhelmed nervous system, the library is a sensory controlled environment. That makes so much sense there. She could take her time with the text. She wasn't failing to engage with the world. She was finding a different world to engage with, immersing herself in magazines like Amazing Stories and Galaxy Science Fiction. And that immersion leads to a highly specific defining moment. She is 12 years old. She is watching a movie called Devil Girl from Mars. Oh, the 1954 B movie. Yeah, exactly. And as she watches this film, something clicks in her divergent mind. She doesn't just think, I like this or I hate this. She actively analyzes the structure. She sees the glaring flaws in the narrative logic. And she realizes with absolute clarity that she can write a better story. That is the pattern matching capability of her Mind at work. She isn't just absorbing a story. She is taking apart the mechanics of the narrative and realizing she can build a better machine. And she immediately drafts the conceptual basis for what would eventually become her sprawling, complex patternist novels. She is 12. Wow. I mean, think about being 12 years old and sketching out a multigenerational telepathic universe just because a B movie had plot holes. It's staggering. But the world was quick to remind her of the rigid box she was supposed to occupy. Yeah. At age 13, she shares these ambitions with her aunt Hazel. Her aunt, likely speaking from a place of protective, hard earned pragmatism, looks her and says, honey, Negroes can't be writers. The tragedy of that moment is heavy. Put yourself in that room. Inside this young girl's mind, an expansive, limitless universe is building. She's conceiving of entirely new forms of human existence. But on the outside, she is being told that her physical reality, her race, her gender, her class, means she is not allowed to participate in the creation of culture. The world demanded she fit into a narrow, restrictive box, but she had the pink notebook. And eventually her mother scraped together the money for that Remington typewriter. And Octavia would just pick out stories with two fingers. Yeah. But the systems around her pushed back even harder as she entered adulthood. The transition from childhood into early adulthood is often where the friction between a divergent mind and a neuronormative society becomes visible in high definition. Because the scaffolding falls away. Exactly. The scaffolding of school falls away, and the economic realities of survival take over. Her mother, acting out of love and a desperate desire for her daughter to have stability, pushes Octavia to become a secretary, which makes perfect sense from the mother's perspective. It represents steady income, clean work. It's a step up from the back doors of Pasadena. But Octavia refuses. Instead, she chooses a path that seems entirely counterintuitive to anyone looking at her from the outside. She takes a series of temporary jobs. Factory work. Factory work, Sorting potato chips, sweeping floors, warehouse labor. These jobs are physically exhausting and financially precarious. Very precarious. I have to admit, sorted potato chips sounds like a form of psychological torture for a mind that is capable of building galaxies. Why would she choose the warehouse over the secretarial desk? Well, think of executive function like an air traffic controller in your brain. For most of us, that controller naturally organizes what lands, what takes off, what needs immediate attention, and what can wait. For Octavia, that tower was effectively unmanned when it came to socializing or navigating. Office politics. Secretarial work requires continuous executive function because you're constantly managing other people. Yes. It requires masking the act of artificially performing neurotypical behaviors to blend in. It demands constant social navigation, reading the room and continuously tracking someone else's priorities. That drains the battery. It drains the exact cognitive battery she needed for her writing. The temporary jobs, while physically demanding, were intellectually vacant. They allowed her to dissociate. Ah, so she could just zone out. Exactly. She took those terrible jobs specifically so she could preserve her mental architecture for the freezing pre dawn hours. She would wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning every single day when the world was quiet and devoid of sensory interruptions to write. It is during this period that a deeply clarifying moment of friction occurs. She is taking night classes at Pasadena City College. Right. It is the height of the black power movement in the 1960s. Right. She is sitting in a classroom and a young black classmate stands up. He loudly and passionately criticizes previous generations of African Americans for their subservience to white people. He's condemning them for not fighting back. Yes. Condemning them for enduring the humiliation. Now, a standard historical reading treats this as a generic political awakening. But if you view this through Octavia's divergent wiring, something much more complex is happening. How so? Where others in that room saw a political argument, Octavia's mind, which was meticulously wired to observe complex systems of power, biology and survival, saw a profound failure of empathy. Because she knew her mother's life. She knew the physical reality of those back doors in Pasadena. Yes. But she didn't argue back with the young man in the moment. Her processing speed for verbal real time confrontation was not her strength. Her strength was deep systemic synthesis. She processed the friction of that moment by deciding to write a narrative that forces the reader to understand subservience not as cowardice, but as silent, agonizing, courageous survival. That specific classroom fiction became the direct catalyst for her literary masterpiece, Kindred. Absolutely. Let's look at how she mechanics that story. She doesn't just write a historical essay defending her mother's generation. She pulls a modern black woman, Dana, from 1970s California and violently drags her backward in time to an antebellum plantation in Maryland. And she builds a deeply unsettling biological tether into the plot. Dana is forced to ensure the survival of her white slave owning ancestor, Rufus Whelan. To guarantee her own future birth. Octavia sought to map the trauma of the past directly onto the consciousness of the present. But during this early period Success is entirely elusive. She is waking up at 2am pouring her soul into the typewriter and receiving nothing but rejection slips. Just a wall of rejection. And the tragedy is that she is trying to style her stories after the white male dominated science fiction she grew up reading. She's trying to write like John Brunner or Theodore Sturgeon. Right? If we look at the sources, her early masked writing was full of these square jaw, generic space captains doing standard interstellar heroics. This is a classic masking behavior translated onto the page. Think of masking like running emulation software on a computer. You know, so a Mac can run Windows programs. Okay? It takes up a massive amount of background processing power and it never runs quite right. Her dyslexic, hyper observant mind is overflowing with complex biological narratives. But she is forcing all of that raw data through a filter. Make it acceptable. Exactly. She is trying to fit her divergent black female perspective into a rigid conventional template built by white men. She assumes that to be accepted by the genre, she must mimic the genre. And the result is that she is isolated on all sides. The publishing world rejects her mimics as unconvincing. And her own community questions her solitary, obsessive path. She is told by every system she interacts with that she is wrong. The masking was exhausting her. After years of collecting rejection slips, of sorting potato chips and waking up in the dark, the attempt to contort her mind into a shape that wasn't hers was unsustainable. It just couldn't hold. No. She needed to find a room where the actual architecture of her mind made sense. That room turned out to be the Open Door workshop of the Writers Guild of America West. It was a program specifically designed to mentor minority writers, right and teaching. This workshop is Harlem. Ellison, a massive towering figure in the science fiction world. Imagine her state of mind walking into that room. She is in her 20s. She has endured years of baffling rejections. She's taken her work to standard composition teachers who either fundamentally do not understand the mechanics of speculative fiction or who simply cannot parse her voice. So she's defensive, defensive, exhausted. And yet relentlessly driven. Ellison reads her work and he does something that completely changes her trajectory. He doesn't offer empty praise. He doesn't give her a polite, dismissive pat on the back. No, he gives her brutally honest, constructive criticism. Underneath the clumsy, masked attempts to sound like a standard 1960s sci fi writer, Ellison sees the raw, divergent brilliance of her mind. He sees the systemic way she views the world. He Recognizes the underlying pattern. And crucially, he gives her permission to stop masking. He tells her to write what only she can write. The tangible nature of Ellison's belief in her is staggering. He encourages her to attend the six week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. But Clarion costs money and Octavia has none, right? So Harlan Ellison takes $100 out of his own pocket to contribute toward her application fee. Wow. And her mother, the woman who bought the Remington typewriter, the woman who endured the back doors, takes the money she had painstakingly saved for her own necessary dental work and uses it to pay the rest of Octavia's way. The mother's physical sacrifice, giving up her own healthcare, combined with Ellison's recognition provides the literal ticket out of the void. She goes to Clarion. She is suddenly in an environment entirely saturated with speculative fiction. She meets Samuel R. Delaney, a brilliant black science fiction writer who becomes a lifelong friend. And most importantly, she sells her first story, titled Child Finder, to Harlan Ellison for his anthology. On the surface, it is the classic narrative of the mentor recognizing the unrecognized genius. Sure, but we have to complicate this. Look at the environment of Clarion in the publishing industry of the 1970s. Was this pure recognition? Yes. Ellison gave her permission to unmask her ideas, but she was entering a space that was still heavily dominated by a very specific, neuronormative, male driven structure of how a writer should produce, how they should network, and what the ultimate shape of a career looked like. Are you asking if modeling herself within that specific professional environment created a blueprint for how she would eventually push herself to produce at a dangerous pace later in life? Yes, exactly. The systems of traditional publishing demand relentless scheduled output. Her unique wiring was finally recognized as an asset. But she was now plugged into a machine that consumed assets. That's a heavy shift. Still, the threshold is crossed. She moves from the isolated temp worker sorting potato chips, rejected by the world, into a community where her profound difference is the very thing that makes her valuable. Gaining entry to the room was only the first step. The mind that had been confined, bullied and forced to mask for decades was unleashed. And it began to build worlds at a staggering, all consuming pace. Once the dam breaks, we see the defining pursuit of her life take over entirely. After Clarion, it wasn't an instant path to glamour. There are still five more years of rejection slips and terrible jobs. But she's no longer questioning if she's a writer. She's relentlessly writing the Patternist series, the Output is incredible. She writes Patternmaster, then Minds of My Mind, then Survivor. By 1978, after a lifetime of poverty and temp work, she is finally able to stop taking manual labor jobs. She is living solely on her income as a writer. To understand the magnitude of what she is creating during this period, we have to map her neurodivergent traits directly to the architecture of her novels. What was she seeing that the titans of the golden age of sci fi missed? Right, because she's doing something entirely different. While other writers were focused on the hard physics of shiny spaceships, laser battles and interstellar conquest, Octavia's mind was systematically dissecting human biology and social hierarchies. The record shows she viewed humanity as inherently fatally flawed by what she called a simple peck order. Bullying. She saw our biological intelligence constantly at war with our hierarchical tendencies. Yes, she believed that unless this biological flaw was corrected, it would inevitably lead to our self destruction. This is where her divergent mind creates profound art. She doesn't just write a political essay about hierarchy. She imagines radical, unsettling biological solutions. She explores symbiosis, like in Xenogenesis. Let's look at the Xenogenesis trilogy. She forces humanity to interbreed with extraterrestrials called the Oankoli. And the Oankly are not your standard little green men. Explain the biological mechanics she invents here because it directly reflect how her mind processed human interaction. The Oankali are a spacefaring species that trade in genetics. They survive by merging with other species. They have three male, female, and Uloy. The Uloy possess sensory tentacles that allow them to perceive and manipulate DNA directly. When the Oankli arrive on a devastated Earth, they they diagnose humanity's problem immediately. They see that humans are intelligent but fundamentally hierarchical. And that combination is lethal. It is a lethal genetic contradiction. So the Alumkuli offer a solution, but it is deeply uncomfortable. Humans must merge with them, fundamentally altering the human genome to breed the hierarchical flaw out of existence. She uses the biological dismantling of the human body as a metaphor for dismantling the systems of power that kept her mother walking through the back doors of Pasadena. And the execution of these ideas requires a masterclass. In hyper focus, she takes a break from the telepathic empires of the Paternus series to write Kindred, which we discussed. Then comes the avalanche of recognition. She writes speech sounds a story set in a post apocalyptic Los Angeles where humanity is infected by a virus that removes the ability to read, speak or write. Wow. Think about that for a second. Imagine you are a profoundly dyslexic author whose greatest childhood torment was the mechanical act of reading. And you win the Hugo Award for a story about the devastating violence that erupts when language is biologically stripped away from the entire species. It's chilling. The infected communicate through grunts, gestures, and brutal physical dominance. It is a breathtaking synthesis of her own neurological friction projected onto a global scale. The next year, she wins the Hugo and the Nebula for Blood Child, the story she referred to as her Pregnant man story. Right. Where human refugees must gestate the alien young inside their own bodies to pay for their protection. Yeah. And to research her sprawling Xenogenesis trilogy, she travels deep into the Amazon rainforests and the Andes. She isn't just reading about jungles. She is immersing herself completely in the physical, sensory environments she wants to write about. Gathering all that raw data. She is documenting the humidity, the flora, the systemic biology of the rainforest in her notebooks. She is a giant in the field. She has achieved the extraordinary, dismantling the entire genre from the inside out. But we cannot land on a clean, triumphant conclusion here. We have to ask the difficult question. Was this success simply the result of her wiring, or did it come at an extracting cost? Right. The hyper focus that allowed her to hold the complex genealogies of the Paternus series in her head. The outsider perspective that let her see the lethal flaws in human behavior. These gave her the tools to conquer the genre, but at what cost, exactly? Her brilliance was inextricably linked to the trauma of her marginalization. She was running her nervous system like a supercomputer, processing the darkest aspects of human history and projecting them into the future. She achieved the absolute peak of creative triumph. You have to feel the monumental weight of what this poor, shy, dyslexic girl from Pasadena had managed to build. But the same mind that could map the end of the world, that could simulate the collapse of society with terrifying accuracy, was about to turn that prophetic lens inward. And the weight of seeing the future so clearly was becoming unbearable. It is the mid-1990s. To the outside world, Octavia Butler is standing at the absolute pinnacle of American letters. In 1995, she receives the ultimate validation. She becomes the first science fiction writer in history to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. It's a genius grant. Yes. It comes with a prize of $295,000. The financial anxiety of the temp jobs, the potato chip sorting, the freezing 2am mornings. All of it should be over but this is the midpoint shift. This is the moment where the public narrative of the triumphant genius and the private reality of her physical and mental state drastically diverge. Because while she's being handed a quarter of a million dollars and hailed as a visionary, something inside her is already breaking. She is deep into writing the Parable series. She has published Parable of the Sower, and she is working on Parable of the Talents. Let's detail what these books actually are. They follow a young black woman named Lauren Olamina navigating a collapsing United States ravaged by climate change, wealth inequality and political extremism. Lauren experiences hyperempathy syndrome. Right? That's a condition where she physically feels the pain of anyone she witnesses being injured. Hyperempathy is a direct agonizing manifestation of Octavia's own internal state. And the research required to build this world is entirely consuming her. It's just non stop processing. She is heavily obsessively researching political collapse, the rise of religious fundamentalism, corporate greed, climate change and environmental destruction. She is reading news reports, historical texts and political theory, feeding it all into her pattern matching mind. I want to pause on the choice she makes next because it makes the coming cost inevitable. She doesn't step away. No, she doesn't. She decides to double down. She plans out an entire universe of suffering. She outlines four more parable novels. Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. She forces her mind to hyper focus on the absolute, darkest, most realistic dystopian trajectories of humanity. The physical and mental reality underneath. This output is devastating. The research doesn't just inform her fiction, it overwhelms her central nervous system. She falls into a deep, paralyzing depression. The toll is immense. The stress of holding the collapse of civilization in her head manifests physically. She develops severe high blood pressure. She is prescribed medication for the blood pressure, but the side effects of the medication exacerbate the severe depression. A profound, immovable writer's block sets in. This is the gap between the two versions of her life. What did Octavia believe she was doing? She believed she was fulfilling her solemn mission as a writer. In the Parable books, Lauren Alamina creates a philosophy called Earthseed, which posits that the destiny of humanity is to take root among the stars. Octavia thought she was building a survival manual for the species. She felt a profound obligation to warn humanity. But what was actually happening was that her profound empathy and her divergent ability to pattern match societal collapse were destroying Her. Her brain could not maintain the boundary between the fiction she was creating and the reality she was researching. She was internalizing the apocalypse. That's a huge burden. The systems of traditional publishing demanded more books. The MacArthur grant validated her genius, but the actual physical brain required to do the work was shutting down. The dissonance is heartbreaking. Imagine what a MacArthur grant is supposed to feel like. It is supposed to feel like freedom. But her reality was a paralyzing depression, physical illness, and the creeping realization that the architecture of her own mind simply refused to move forward. She had built an entire universe. But as she sat down to write the next chapter, she hit a wall. We have to look closely at what that wall actually looked like. We cannot just summarize these difficult years as a montage of writer's block set the scene. It is the late 1990s, stretching into the early 2000s. Octavia has moved to Lay Forest Park, Washington. Yes, she moved there after the death of her mother, her original believer, the woman who scrubbed floors to buy the Remington typewriter. The loss of her mother is a profound, untethering blow. Put yourself in that room with her in Washington. The house is quiet. The MacArthur genius, the visionary whose name is spoken with reverence in literary circles, is sitting alone at her desk. She is staring at the manuscript for Parable of the Trickster. She has tried repeatedly to start this book. There are documented accounts of her starting, stopping, throwing pages away, starting again. The physical act of writing the thing that saved her as a child in the Pasadena library has become a site of failure. She writes a sentence. She stops. She is fighting a war on multiple fronts inside her own body. She is fighting the fog of the high blood pressure medication. She is fighting the crushing, heavy weight of clinical depression. And she is fighting the absolute block blockade of executive dysfunction. The executive function required to organize a novel, to hold the plot threads together, to push characters through a narrative arc, is completely gone. This is the mind that effortlessly wove centuries of telepathic history across multiple continents in the pattern of Ceres. This is the mind that conceived the complex 3 gendered reproductive biology of the Onkale aliens. And right now, that mind is completely, terrifyingly frozen. She is sitting at that desk, confronting the absolute limits of her own biology. The machine is broken. There is no spark. There is only the weight of the dystopia she has researched for the last decade pressing down on her shoulders in an empty house. And in that room, she makes an agonizing decision. She decides to surrender. She stops working on the parable series entirely the grand architecture of the four remaining books. Trickster, teacher, Chaos, Clay, she abandons them. We have to sit in the quiet, devastating reality of a brilliant mind hitting an absolute wall. She is isolated in Washington, physically unwell, grieving her mother, and entirely unable to do the one single thing she Woke up at 2am her entire life to do. The brilliance that allowed her to see the fatal flaws of humanity and the fractures that caused her mind to freeze under the weight of that knowledge, are completely inseparable. The cost of seeing the world so intensely, of mapping the future so clearly, is the sudden, catastrophic inability to look at it anymore. In that silence, with the heavy prophetic work abandoned on her desk, she had to find a way to survive her own mind. Survival for Octavia Butler meant transformation. She had to pivot. If the heavy prophetic research of the Parable series was literally killing her, she decided she would write something in her own words, lightweight and fun. But Octavia Butler's version of lightweight and fun still radically disrupted an entire literary genre. She writes her final novel, Fledgling. It is a science fiction vampire novel, but she completely dismantles the white, paternalistic, gothic tropes of the vampire genre. How so? She centers the narrative on a petite black female protagonist named Shori, who appears to be a young girl, but is actually a genetically modified 53 year old vampire. She returns to her core defining themes of symbiosis, biology and the creation of alternative communities. The vampires in Fledgling don't prey on humans. They live in a deeply complex mutualistic symbiosis. With them, the vampire bite offers humans a longer life and enhanced physical health. That's classic Butler. Exactly. She is still exploring the same neurological obsessions that defined her career. But she is doing it on her own terms, free from the crushing depressive weight of trying to warn the real world about its impending collapse. This is the resurrection. She didn't come back and write a conventional book. She found a way to use her divergent wiring without letting it destroy her. So how does understanding Octavia through the neurodivergent lens change the story we thought we knew? Well, the conventional textbook biographical narrative says Octavia Butler was a poor black girl from Pasadena who experienced racism and poverty, worked incredibly hard, and became a science fiction legend through sheer willpower. But the reframed story, the True Portrait, shows a mind that worked differently from day one. It was a dyslexic, intensely introverted mind that processed language uniquely right. It was a mind that looked at the human race and saw a lethal biological flaw in our hierarchical behavior. She used speculative fiction not to escape the world that rejected her, but to forcefully, meticulously remake it. Yes, her dyslexia, her agonizing shyness, her hyperfocus, her systemic pattern matching, these were not obstacles she overcame to achieve her genius. They were the very architecture of her genius. She died suddenly outside her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, in 2006. She was only 58 years old. It was a devastating, premature loss to literature. But to understand her legacy, we have to return to where we began. Return to the image of the shy 10 year old girl in the late 1950s standing in the Pasadena Central Library. She has slight dyslexia. The world tells her she is clumsy, socially hopeless, and destined for the back doors. She is clutching a big pink notebook, retreating into her mine because the world outside is too loud and too hostile. The papers from that mine, the drafts, the journals, the notes she took in the freezing early morning hours now fill 386 boxes in the permanent research collection of the Huntington Library. The girl who was told by her aunt that Negroes couldn't be writers now has an asteroid in the cosmos bearing her name. Asteroid 7052. Octavia Butler. The International Astronomical Union named a mountain on a moon of Pluto, Butler Mons. And when NASA sent the Perseverance rover to Mars, they named its touchdown site the Octavia E. Butler Landing. The girl who wasn't allowed through the front door rode herself into the stars. Octavia Butler didn't just build new worlds to escape a society that rejected her. She built them to teach us how to survive our own. This has been Neurodivergent, an original series from the Neural Broadcast Network. All sources for this episode are available at NBN fm. Neurodivergent. Next time on Neurodivergent. Bobby Fischer.