In Kindred, horror and science-fiction intersect. Dana stands at the junction between the monstrous past and the alien world of post-racial America-a perpetually elusive dream since the assassination of Dr. Dana Franklin, Kindred’s protagonist, must survive antebellum plantation life from the perspective of 1976’s racial politics. Butler presented slavery as a haunting science that created monstrosities, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In it, Butler merged history with the present, and a contemporary Black woman’s body became a time machine-a device to fold time back on itself. Americans confronted the horrors of slavery on their televisions in the form of young LeVar Burton’s defiant Kunta Kente.
Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in August 1976 and the miniseries premiered in January 1977. Slavery was the terrain of historical fiction, and the late ‘70s were a pinnacle for those stories. “Make people touch and taste and know,” she wrote in one of her journals. It was a hard lesson to digest, and it was an idea that she instilled in her teaching: We are a flawed species and in order to convey that in our stories, we had to study our surroundings and say something big about the world with close details.
This is also true for Black people and other marginalized groups, she told me. Eradicate one group and another will take its place. Butler believed that humans crave dominance. I was a young, idealistic Pan-Africanist and feminist who believed that Black liberation could be achieved by dismantling patriarchy and white supremacy. The idea that human beings are hierarchical permeates Butler’s work, and it’s what she tried to explain to me during an in-depth conversation at a party in Seattle. Butler simply paid close attention to human behavior.
She was a lover of science, an inquisitive writer, and a keen observer of society. While Butler’s novels are certainly cautionary tales, she was not a fortune teller. Having grown up with a healthy diet of science-fiction movies and TV shows as a child of the ‘80s, reading about Black girls and women in the future was validating.
I, like many others, became a fan long before the T-shirts and the Butler-tried-to-tell-us social media posts. Butler had attended a Clarion workshop 30 years prior as a student, but now she was back to teach eager pupils like me. Back in 2001, I was an aspiring writer attending the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in Seattle.
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