Octavia Butler

During the summer just after my sophomore year, I--as was my habbit even then--read about 25 books including The Nighttime Guy, The River and the Stone, Brain, XPD, Headlong, King of Kings, Vision Quest, Social Studies, Dollar Princesses, and Shike: Book 1: Time of the Dragons; but it was Kindred that stayed with me. On Friday March 3, I caught a portion of a rebroadcast of an interview with Octavia Butler. She had died on February 24 at age 58. She is noted for her Patternist series about telepaths and xenogenesis trilogy. In 1985, Butler began this trilogy, about the Oankali, extraterrestrials who come to Earth to repopulate the planet with human/alien hybrids after a devastating war. Butler's aliens are notable for having a plausible third gender, known as ooloi.

In 1979, she published Kindred, a novel about an African-American woman who is repeatedly thrown from 1976 to the ante-bellum South, where she is forced to deal with life in a culture based on slavery. Butler herself categorized it not as science fiction but rather as a "grim fantasy." Kindred became the most popular of all her books, with a quarter of a million copies currently in print. "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you," she said of the book. (Extracted from Wikipedia.)

I found the interplay of races intriguing in Kindred. There was the protagonist and Rufus, the plantation owner's son. But this was not the only important relationship she had with a European-American male for her husband, Kevin Franklin, was a leading supporting character in the novel. Robert Crossley in an introduction to the edition recorded by RFB&D mentions how Kevin and Rufus become more alike as the novel continues. I didn't see that as he had.

I found the cookhouse scene between Sarah and the protagonist where Sarah tells her that "White-trash Margaret had my babies sold so she could buy furniture and china" to be quite illustrative of slavery and how tenuous any slave's position really was.

Not the romantic South of Gone with the Wind, this book is a definite read for the high school class or college class discussing diversity and how any form of slavery is as poisonous to slave masters as it is to the slaves themselves!

Butler's last novel, 2005's Fledgling, deals with vampirism. Click here to read the excellent review, noted horror critic, June M. Pulliam, has written for Nicropsy.

Apologies if the audio of the interview and the books was not as clear as could be. The original NLS recording, RC 16072, is over 25 years old. My radio experienced some static during my recording of that mini-sample of the Butler interview.