that those people existed” (p. 264), readers of this fantastic invention may also find their felt understanding of history enriched and deepened. In Kindred Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.
—May 2003
1. Kenan, 498.
2. Salvaggio in Barr, et al., 33.
Notes
3. Rushdy’s “Families of Orphans” comments astutely on the concept of home in Kindred; the chapter on Kindred in his later book, Remembering Generations, makes an extensive analysis of family as a social construct. For the most compre- hensive discussions of Kindred and history see Govan’s “Homage to Tradition,” Levecq’s “Power and Repetition,” and Kubitschek’s chapter in Claiming the Heritage.
4. Beal, 14; Kenan, 495; Potts, 336–37. Not all her critics have been willing to accept Butler’s disclaimer, and some have seen genetics and sociobiology, not physics, as the sciences underlying Kindred. See the essays by Elyce Rae Helford and Nancy Jesser.
5. Mixon, 12.
6. See Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession” in Bloodchild and Other Stories,
125–35.
7. Beal, 15; Rowell, 51.
8. McCaffery, 65.
9. Octavia Butler in a note to Beacon Press, 12 February 1988.
10. George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), which imagines the evolution of a new culture in the aftermath of a biological catastrophe in North America, fea- tures a black matriarch who mothers the new society and warns against repeating the colonialist patterns of dominance and enslavement in the old culture. In More Than Human (1953), Theodore Sturgeon’s three linked novellas about social out- casts with psychic powers, twin black girls with telekinetic powers help form the
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alternative human community the novelist calls homo gestalt. In both books, how- ever, the black characters are largely stereotypical and play secondary roles to white men.
11. Bradbury, 96.
12. Quoted by Govan, “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks,” 87, n. l2.
13. McCaffery, 69.
14. Kubitschek, 27.
15. Harrison, 32–33. See also Butler’s short essay “The Monophobic Re- sponse.”
16. Kenan, 497. For a similar blurring of past and present and of the identities of ancestral slaver and contemporary husband see Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).
17. Kubitschek offers an alternative reading, suggesting that physical affini- ties between Kevin and Rufus actually point to fundamental differences in char- acter.
18. Douglass, 52.
19. The conclusion of Kindred can be compared with the final episode of the other notable feminist time-travel novel of the 1970s, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), in which Consuela Ramos kills her doctors in self- defense, a revolutionary act made in the hope of bringing into being the utopian future she has visited.
20. Jacobs, 56.
Select Bibliography
Works by Octavia E. Butler
Adulthood Rites. New York: Warner Books, 1988.
Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows,
1995. [In addition to the title story, this volume collects “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” “Near of Kin,” “Speech Sounds,” and “Crossover” with two essays, “Positive Obsession” and “Furor Scribendi.”]
Dawn. New York: Warner Books, 1987.
“Future Forum.” Future Life 17 (March 1980): 60.
Imago. New York: Warner Books, 1989.
Kindred. 1979. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.
Lilith’s Brood. New York: Aspect, 2000. [Collects in one volume Dawn,
Adulthood Rites, and Imago.]
“The Lost Races of Science Fiction.” Transmission (Summer 1980):
282
17–18.
