Kevin Kuhn's Reviews > Kindred

Butler published this novel in 1979, and despite it becoming a bestseller and being the first black woman to write a science fiction novel, it inexplicitly won no awards. However, it has remained popular since it’s release and Author Octavia E. Butler did go on to win the Hugo and Locus Awards for other works and was the first science fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship. I highly recommend reading this book anytime, but especially during Black History Month. I will also warn that it is an emotionally devastating story.

'Kindred' follows Dana Franklin, a modern day 26-year-old female black writer, through a series of time travel episodes that pull her into a pre-Civil War plantation located in Maryland. While the novel is horrifying, dealing with whippings, suicide, rape, and slavery sales that separate families, I read that Butler decided to lessen the violence and brutality that she read in historical accounts, to allow the story to be more approachable – a shuddering revelation.

What intrigued me right away, is that Butler could have written a straight-up powerful critic of American history and the continuing issues of racism and bigotry. But she chose to dive deeper, by having Dana be married to a white husband in her modern life. In addition, Dana is intricately connected to an ancestor, Rufus - the white son of the plantation slave owner. Rufus has a dysfunctional attraction to a black woman who was born free but enslaved for attempting to help her slave husband to escape north. Dana knows that Alice must give birth to a daughter by Rufus to allow Dana to exist in the future. But it’s these complex interracial relationships that allow Butler to investigate all types of subtleties of theme. The resulting exploration of power dynamics, guilt, and trauma make the book a much more effective examination of sexism, bigotry, and racism and its wake and allows it to be a powerful lesson for today’s issues.

A well-told, emotionally difficult, but necessary read. Butler’s tale is science fiction at it’s best, using the improbable to expose and magnify humanities’ past atrocities and reveal why learning from that past is even more important today. Five stars.