Kindred by Octavia Butler. New York. 1979. Doubleday. 0385150598. 264 pages. hardcover.
DESCRIPTION - Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses. The book is the first-person account of a young African-American writer, Dana, who is repeatedly transported in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 with her white husband and an early 19th-century Maryland plantation just outside Easton. There she meets some of her ancestors: a proud, free Black woman and a white planter who forces her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana stays for longer periods in the past, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. Dana makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time. Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century Black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred crosses genre boundaries and is also classified as African-American literature. Butler categorized the work as "a kind of grim fantasy."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known African-American women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship nicknamed the Genius Grant. Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler), who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was ‘an introspective, only child in a strict Baptist household' and ‘was drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics.' Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 ‘to escape loneliness and boredom'; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. ‘I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars,' she told the journal Black Scholar, ‘and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.'
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