(Dana financed the move by selling a Brooklyn brownstone she inherited from her late grandmother, also without her aunt’s knowledge.) She’s also callous-toward Kevin, whose understandable concern about ending up stranded she tends to dismiss, but also toward those for whom slavery is more than a flashback. sight unseen without telling her aunt, who lives in the area. But it’s hard to keep things casual when your new love interest keeps teleporting into the past-and then takes you with them, without your full consent.ĭana, it turns out, is not easy to embrace as a heroine. He’s just a waiter she meets on one of her first nights in L.A., a chance encounter that leads to some light flirtation. And the character Kevin (Micah Stock) is no longer Dana’s husband, as he is in the novel. He gives Dana a missing mother, Olivia (Sheria Irving), whose disappearance decades prior seems linked to Dana’s current plight. (Jenkins takes after Butler in more ways than one: He’s a fellow MacArthur honoree.) In turning Kindred into a series, Jenkins also makes some major adjustments. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who developed the novel for television, keeps this core dilemma, which forces Dana to identify with those responsible for real suffering. This truth puts Dana in an awful, awkward position, one that’s the crux of Kindred’s concept. When he grows up, Rufus will enforce a system that brutalizes and controls people like Dana. Like many Black Americans, Dana is descended from both slavers and the enslaved. Slowly, she begins to grasp what ties her and Rufus together. Whenever Dana is yanked back in time, she finds Rufus in mortal danger, reeling from an accident or suffering from illness. Over a few traumatic visits, Dana starts to understand what’s drawn her back in time: Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), a young boy whose parents, Thomas (Ryan Kwanten) and Margaret (Gayle Rankin), own the plantation. Kindred centers on Dana (Mallori Johnson), a writer in Los Angeles who finds herself transported to a Maryland plantation in 1815. Instead, Kindred draws on a terror more true to life: the atrocities of American slavery. Unlike some other seminal Butler stories, Kindred has no immortal telepaths who practice eugenics or centipede-like aliens that use human bodies to hatch their eggs. Kindred uses time travel as its central plot device but otherwise remains realist. (Butler’s first three books were part of her Patternist saga, which would conclude with Clay’s Ark in 1984.) It’s also the most grounded of her works and, perhaps as a result, the first to achieve true crossover success outside the realm of genre writing. Published in 1979, Kindred was Butler’s first novel to stand on its own, outside a series. Kindred, the namesake and source text of a new FX drama now streaming on Hulu, is a logical entry point to Butler’s oeuvre for readers and Hollywood alike. The latter aims to introduce her ideas to a new generation of fans-and prove their enduring relevance. The former milestone cements Butler as part of a shared cultural canon. (The first volume is available now, with three more forthcoming.) And starting this week, her stories will make the long-overdue transition from the page to the screen. That began to change last year, when Butler notched yet another first: She is now the sole Black science fiction writer to be collected and republished by the Library of America. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. Butler herself, however, remained just out of the limelight. To the trained eye, traces of her work are everywhere, from the films of Jordan Peele to the career of author N. Yet, until recently, Butler’s body of work had been left untouched by this rising tide. The past few years have seen a boom in adaptations of genre fiction once deemed “unfilmable” for its dense lore and epic scope: Frank Herbert’s Dune, itself a favorite of Butler’s Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, soon to be a series on Netflix from the creators of Game of Thrones. And when critic Mark Dery coined the term “Afrofuturism” in 1994, Butler was one of the first examples he cited of Black artists transposing their own history and aesthetic onto an imagined future.īut after her death in 2006-from a fall outside her home near Seattle, at just 58-Butler’s massive influence fell out of step with her latter-day footprint. She was the first science fiction author of any gender or race to win a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Butler was the first Black woman to win a Hugo or a Nebula, two of her field’s highest honors. The science fiction writer Octavia Butler was a pioneer in her time.
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