Octavia Butler stands as one of the most trailblazing figures in Black science fiction. Few authors have shaped the genre as profoundly as she did, and her legacy continues to reverberate. She won multiple national awards, among them the Hugo Award for Best Short Story, the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. She is also a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant and an inductee into both the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Her body of work includes twelve novels, five short stories, four novelettes, and a number of essays. She also left behind several incomplete works, which are documented–along with other manuscripts, letters, and photographs–at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The world lost Butler too soon, but her voice lives on, continuing to shape how we see ourselves and our world.
I want to take a moment to meditate on one of my favorite books of all time, “Kindred (1979).” Butler’s groundbreaking and seminal work continues to resonate with readers today–so much so that it was adapted into a graphic novel in 2017 by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. The novel tells the story of Dana Franklin, who is mysteriously summoned to the antebellum past by her white ancestor Rufus Weylin, whom she must repeatedly save. Without revealing too much detail–because I strongly recommend reading the novel in both forms (!)–Dana finds herself torn as she not only witnesses but endures, and at times even enables, acts of violence that exact a heavy toll on her mind, body, and spirit. For readers, the novel offers a character and a speculative experience in a deeply relatable way: we can see ourselves in Dana, a figure of the present, as we journey with her into the past.
This book resonates profoundly with our current moment. Even though Dana’s “present” is in the 1970s, readers today can still relate to her. She has studied and is aware of slavery, yet being pulled back into it signals that something remains unsettled. Every day, we are reminded of how far we have come as a nation, and yet the impact of slavery reveals itself in various systems and encounters. Butler crafted a narrative where past and present collide, urging us to confront the “past that is not past” in order to reclaim power from it. This text is strikingly powerful, deeply emotional, and offers a method of engaging with the peculiar history of slavery outside the limits of traditional history books. It is certainly worth the read, and Butler will always be worth the investment.