Review: Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
264 pages
Beacon Press (1979)
Read this if you like: Time travel sci-fi, Afro-horror, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Doomsday Book series by Connie Willis
tl;dr summary: Modern black woman is pulled back in time to save her slaveholding ancestor.
As much as I appreciate detailed worldbuilding, I’m equally impressed by writers who know when not to explain, and that’s true of Butler’s time travel mechanism in Kindred. It’s established in the prologue as a crazy thing that even the people who experienced it don’t understand, and while the characters learn some rules for how it happens and speculate on what could be causing it, the how and why of the time travel are never fully explained.
This is in part because Kindred isn’t a book about time travel. I see the core thought experiment here as generational trauma playing out in real time, a story about how the past bleeds into the future and how history can influence identity. Time traveling functions as both a plot device and a metaphor but the story gets its energy and meaning from Dana’s interactions with the past, not the act of getting there. More explanation of how the time travel happens would only dilute the story, not enhance it, and I’m glad it’s left as something the reader can reason through on their own, should they choose to.
I was also enamored by how Butler mimicked Dana’s time traveling in the structure of Kindred. This starts with the prologue, where the reader knows from the first sentence that Dana has just made her last trip home, then experiences the story fully in flashback. Because of this, we know both Dana and Kevin are alive and in the present time when all is said and done, the same way Dana knows, going into each jump, that Rufus must survive at least long enough to sire her ancestor. It's a flavor of dramatic tension that could easily feel gimmicky in another context, but it works here because it ties another thread between the reader and Dana.
This is enhanced once the jumps start by the way their length and the span between them matches Dana’s experience of that time. The first is the shortest, just 5 pages for the reader and a few minutes for Dana, followed by a brief respite in the present. Both these sections are short whirlwinds told entirely in scene, immediate and fast-paced. Later visits not only take up more page-space to match how they take up more time, but they quickly abandon the all in-scene approach. When Dana stays long enough to settle into an everyday rhythm, much of the story is told in summary, the prose falling into a similar rhythm for the reader. The way Butler manages her narrative time reinforces the closeness of the first-person perspective and it’s easy to get immersed in the story as a result.
The prose in Kindred has the transparency I love in old-school sci-fi, but I was still surprised when I checked the jacket cover and realized this was published in 1979. It was easy to forget that the “present” Dana returned to was 1976, I suppose in part because so little of the narrative takes place in that present and most of what does happens in a single apartment. Because so much of the story’s focus is on the past it gives the present scenes a timelessness a lot of books from this era lack. It also helps that its themes are still relevant. The “modern gaze” on early 1800s America has changed disappointingly little from 1979 to 2022, and as a result, this still feels like a novel of the times 40+ years after it was first published.
Octavia Butler is one of those authors that everyone who wants to write sci-fi needs to at least be aware of, one of the first (if not the first) black female authors to be accepted into the genre’s canon. For anyone looking to read some Butler and not sure where to start in her prolific three-decade career, Kindred is an excellent point of introduction.
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