For starters, Dana, played by newcomer Mallori Johnson, is not a woman living in 1976, the year when the book takes place, but instead lives in 2016.
Kindred takes some creative liberties with the story, making some significant detours that are not entirely faithful to their cherished text.
And Kindred - which blends time travel, historical fiction, and a love story when a (then) modern-day Black woman is inexplicably whisked back and forth from her California home to a plantation in the year 1815 - is a pioneering work so revered that it’s still taught in college lit classes and has inspired enough scholarship, essays, and critical analysis to fill a whole library.įans of the book may need to find ways to soothe themselves then when the eight episodes drop on Hulu on December 13. Their anxieties were certainly understandable: Butler is considered the first Black writer to find success in the sci-fi genre.
#OCTAVIA E BUTLER HISTORICAL FICTION SERIES#
Butler’s Kindred was being adapted into a TV series for FX, fans of the 1979 novel seemed as hopeful and excited as they were territorial - glad Butler’s work was finally reaching screens but fiercely protective and adamant that nobody screw it up. Bloodchild and Other Stories is a good place to begin discovering her work.When word came that Octavia E. Crushingly, she died at the height of her powers. "Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles," Butler stated, "and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together." Butler's writing is courageous, stimulating and infused with a rare purity of intention. They gaze unflinchingly on power dynamics. Her narratives leave space for the reader's involvement while exploring the nature of change. A serious writer working in a field that is seldom taken seriously, Butler addressed biological control, gender, humanity's relationship with aliens, genetics and even the development of a fictional religion. Critically respected, she won the Hugo and Nebula awards, received a Clarke nomination, the PEN lifetime achievement award and a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Kindred tells the wrenching and unforgettable story of a young black woman who time-travels and saves the life of her slaveholder ancestor, but it is, in Butler's words, "a grim fantasy", not science fiction.īeginning in the 1970s, Butler wrote three sequences of novels: the Patternist books, the Lilith's Brood series and the Parable novels (incomplete at her tragic death in 2006). For many years, Butler was the sole African-American woman novelist in science fiction. I thought I was familiar with science fiction, but I'd never heard of her – nor have a great many other readers, I suspect. It caught my attention because Butler was described as a science-fiction writer. I was teaching in New York when I came across Octavia E Butler's Kindred in a secondary-school catalogue of novels recommended to support diversity. An American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field.Ĭomment by Tricia Sullivan, on The Guardian:
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