Among the long-lived Ina, though, Shori is something new: an experimental birth, containing African American human DNA that gives her brown skin and the feared and fearful ability to go out in sunlight. In time she discovers that she is a vampire, and that there are others like her. Gripping and suspenseful, the novel uses the conceit of time travel to plumb the mutilating structures of slavery and the terrible cost they continue to exact.Ī woman wakes up covered in burns in a mountainside cave with no knowledge of who she is or what has happened to her. In Kindred, Dana, a Black woman whose husband is white, is pulled back and forth between the California present and the pre–Civil War South, where she finds herself enslaved on the plantation of a white ancestor whose life she must save in order to preserve her own. This first volume in the Library of America edition of Butler’s collected works gathers her 1979 masterpiece, Kindred, one of the landmark American novels of the last half century her final novel, Fledgling and her collected short stories. In 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her achievement in creating new aspirations for the genre and for American literature.

She broke new ground with books that featured complex Black female protagonists-“I wrote myself in,” she would later recall-establishing herself as one of the pioneers of the Afrofuturist aesthetic. Butler used the conventions of science fiction to explore the dangerous legacy of racism in America in harrowingly personal terms. An original and eerily prophetic writer, Octavia E.

Kindred series book