Kindred

"Well, I just will say that I’ve selected these books as the best introduction to her work, not as her best work. We writers like to make those sorts of lawyerly distinctions. I selected Kindred because it is one of two portals to her work that most people come across, and she wrote it to reach a certain audience. Kindred is the story of Dana, a 1970s African-American woman—‘black’ as she calls herself at the time—who is drawn back through time to preserve the life of one of her ancestors who is white and a slave owner in the South. And over a number of confrontations with him, he grows, he becomes increasingly dangerous to her and she eventually comes out of this situation physically maimed and intellectually changed. In the 1970s she’s married to a white man—again, very revolutionary for the time to be writing about this—and her husband goes back with her on one of these chronological jaunts and he also has a very disturbing experience there. That’s all I can say without spoiling it, but it’s hopefully enough to entice people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I wrote about it for Tor.com ; I called it ‘Grandmother Paradox’ because the ancestor who needs to be born before Dana can give up on saving the slave owner’s life is her great-great-grandmother. So that’s a little bit about how the book goes. It works so well because the initial impetus for the book was that Octavia was upset with her contemporaries in college, who downplayed the rigors that their enslaved ancestors endured and denigrated them as Uncle Toms and as kow-towing too easily to white oppression. And she wanted to show them that, actually, they too would have been right there in the kitchen, begging for scraps. I think that that’s why it’s so effective, because it is written with a mission to show something to people that they were ignorant about. I can see that. But I don’t think of it as emotional bribery. I think it’s a question of survival: ‘I will not exist if this does not happen.’ It is a good metaphor for emotional bribery, but it’s also just a question of existence. That was one of the knotty complex problems that she turned her mind to all the time. I don’t believe I ever heard her say that she felt that her writing was part of the Black Power movement. But I do understand her take on it as complementary, if that makes sense, supporting it and accompanying it. She was not illustrating points of the movement, but she was responding to the atmosphere that the movement created."

"It’s a real classic. Butler gives a really different twist to the question of preserving the timeline. This is another book from the 1970s. She’s a writer, and she’s black, and she’s happily partnered with this white guy. Then she’s snatched back in time – she doesn’t know why, it’s just a weird, sort of magical thing, there’s no time machine or anything – to a plantation in the American South before the Civil War . It’s a plantation with slaves, and it turns out that her ancestor – her great, great, great… I don’t know how many greats – was a slave owner. So she’s been sent back to do the classic time travel plot: protect your ancestors so that you can be born. Except her ancestor is this racist bastard who raped her female ancestor. She basically has to become friends with this guy, to protect him. At a certain point, her white partner is sucked back in time as well, and has to cope with living in the Antebellum South. So we get to see their different experiences as a white person and a black person. “She’s beloved in the sci-fi community, she’s treated as literature in English departments, and she’s just a giant of 20th-century fiction, period” For me, as a reader and writer, the only way I can get excited about a time travel paradox is when there are these larger social questions that have to be answered. Octavia Butler always forces you, as a reader, to jam your face right into all the contradictions and injustices in society, and how much we allow them to continue happening in order to survive. So she’s posed this question: ‘What if you had to save your white, slave-owning ancestor?’ It’s such a great metaphor, or conceit, for why it is that we buy into unjust systems; how we get emotionally bribed into participating in systems that oppress us. It’s so good. There’s a reason this book is taught in so many classes. So my favourite paradox is Kindred . Yes, she won many awards in her lifetime, including a MacArthur Fellowship, which is for literature in general. It’s a very nice pot of money intended to support the writer for, hopefully, the rest of their life. I believe she was the first science fiction writer to win it, so she’s a pioneer. She’s one of the writers that made it clear that science fiction was not some grubby, low-class genre; in fact, science fiction could be just as literary as Faulkner. So one of the great things about her is that she crossed over. She’s beloved in the science fiction community, she’s treated as literature in English departments, and she’s just a giant of 20th-century fiction, period."

"Not enough folks know what a great book "Kindred," by Octavia E. Butler, is. It's powerful."

"I would happily recommend to anyone: "Kindred," by Octavia Butler, and "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow," by Gabrielle Zevin."

"I recently read Kindred, by Octavia Butler, and, if 'classic' means a book that everyone should read and learn from, that's the one. I saw it, opened the cover, and read it in a day. The description of the narrator passing back and forth in time between being a slave in the family of some of her ancestors and living her current life in Los Angeles is transfixing."

"I'd strike Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"... and replace it with, say, Octavia Butler's "Kindred.""