In the past, Dana becomes involved in the lives of enslaved Black people as well as the cruel white plantation owners and their children, yanked back and forth from her own life. 'Kindred' is about a contemporary Black woman named Dana who starts traveling back in time to a 19th century Maryland plantation in an inexplicable way she has no control over, experiencing firsthand the violence of slavery. Hulu honors Octavia Butler's 'Kindred,' yanking a Black woman out of time to grapple with history What took the world so long to wake up to Butler? Time writes, 'It is absolutely wild that it has taken nearly half a century' for Butler's work to make it to the screen. Her 1979 novel ' Kindred' has come to the screen in a new FX series by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and it's aching and necessary - but the adaptation was a long time coming. The first Black woman to win both the Nebula and Hugo awards, Butler was the first science fiction writer to be awarded a MacArthur genius grant. She was prolific until her death, at only 58. Her first novel ' Patternmaster' was published in 1976. She would go on to publish a dozen, along with a collection of short stories. She said the moment she decided to be a writer of science fiction was when she saw the 1954 B-movie ' Devil Girl from Mars ' as a 9-year-old. She loved comics, superheroes and sci-fi, loved a genre that took its time loving her back. Butler 'never told an aspiring writer they should give up, rather that they should learn, study, observe, and persist.' Butler could have been speaking of her own life, a writerly existence of fairly early publishing success but a consistent struggle for financial security and the uphill battle of being a Black woman in a genre dominated by white men.īutler is now considered a visionary if not the mother of Afrofuturism, which Ramtin Arablouei of NPR describes as 'an open-ended genre combining science fiction, fantasy and history to imagine a liberated future through a Black lens.' Butler was raised by her widowed mother, who worked for wealthy white women, and grandmother in Pasadena, California. In a beautiful essay in Vulture, published earlier this year, E.

Novel kindred