As host and executive producer of the classic children's show "Reading Rainbow," LeVar Burton has become a literary hero for countless young readers. Burton recently chatted with HuffPost Live about the show, his varied entertainment career, and his wildly popular Kickstarter campaign to reboot "Reading Rainbow" as a web series -- and along the way, he had the chance to talk about a literary hero of his own.

In response to a question about which author he would be most excited to have a Skype conversation with, Burton barely hesitated before naming the legendary science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. Butler, who died in 2006, was an award-winning and celebrated author who penned such sci-fi classics as Kindred and the Xenogenesis trilogy. A black woman who was hugely successful in a predominantly white, male genre, Butler often explored challenging themes such as racism, sex, and slavery in her work.

In describing Butler's importance to him, Burton noted that seeing her depictions of black characters in sci-fi settings was refreshing to him as a reader. "I'm a huge science fiction fan," he said, "and to have grown up in a world where it was not all that often to see heroes in the pages of those science fiction novels who look like me, to have encountered Octavia Butler as an adult was just like a breath of fresh air."