by Octavia Butler

By the publication of Kindred in 1979, Octavia Estelle Butler had already established herself as the author of three successful and well-reviewed science-fiction novels, the first of which, Patternmaster, appeared when she was 29 years old. Butler was born in Pasadena, California, in 1947. Dyslexic and shy as a child, she began writing fiction very early, motivated in part—as she once confided in an interview—by a need to distance herself from the austere world of her mother and grandmother (O’Connor, p. 36). From these two women (her father died when she was still a baby), she received a strict Baptist upbringing and a vicarious memory of hard, ill-rewarded work: labor in Louisiana’s cane fields in the case of her grandmother, and domestic work in the case of her mother. Butler’s own adult experiences in the early 1970s closely resemble those of Kindred’s Dana...