Kindred is the novel that began to shape Octavia Butler’s career as a prolific and prophetic writer. It is a science fiction time-travel novel that touches on issues of slavery, feminism, history, ancestry, and time. Butler has been lauded in general for the immediacy of her work and the way she takes American history and the systems it has generated and critiques them through compelling, imaginative stories.
Butler began writing Kindred in college after a young black man criticized his ancestors for not resisting hard enough. He blamed them for being complicit in their enslavement. Butler wrote Kindred to show an honest portrayal of the brutality of slavery and what kind of resistance...
