Rebecca Castillo is a video creator and special projects lead for Los Angeles Times’ High School Insider and other Public Affairs programs. A Southern California native, she is an alumna of Swarthmore ...

Over 30 years ago, Octavia Butler imagined a Los Angeles, consumed by fires, and last week, the cemetery where the iconic author is buried caught fire amid the ongoing wildfires impacting ...

In Parable of the Sower, a fire-ravaged California endures a climate change future that is now reality. In the 1993 speculative fiction classic, American science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler, who ...

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in an Octavia Butler novel. The fires the queen of Afrofuturism predicted would ravage Los Angeles in 2025? They showed up. That political chaos she ...

Considered one of the first Black female science fiction writers, Octavia Butler’s body of work could be described as made-up, dystopian tales of an alternate universe. You know, on some “War ...