Butler, Octavia - Kindred

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.

READER’S GUIDE

Mind of My Mind. New York: Doubleday, 1977; London: Sidgwick and

Jackson, 1978.

“The Monophobic Response.” In Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora , ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. Patternmaster. New York: Doubleday, 1976.

Survivor. New York: Doubleday, 1978; London: Sidgwick and Jackson,

1978.

Wild Seed. New York: Doubleday, 1980; London: Sidgwick and Jackson,

1980.

Secondary Sources

Allison, Dorothy. “The Future of Female: Octavia Butler’s Mother Lode.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology , Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Beal, Frances M. “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: Inter- view with Octavia Butler.” Black Scholar 17 (March–April 1986):

14–18.

Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann. Black Women Writers and the American Neo- Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered . Westport: Greenwood, 1999.

Bedore, Pamela. “Slavery and Symbiosis in Octavia Butler’s Kindred .”

Foundation 31 (Spring 2002): 73–81.

Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles . 1950; rpt. New York: Bantam,

1954.

Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist . New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Davis, Charles T., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Slave’s Narrative .

New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written By Himself , Benjamin Quarles, ed. Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Originally published 1845.

Foster, Frances Smith. “Octavia Butler’s Black Female Future Fiction.”

Extrapolation 23 (Spring 1982): 37–49.

Friend, Beverly. “Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler.” Extrapolation 23 (Spring 1982): 50–55.

READER’S GUIDE 283

Gomez, Jewelle. “Black Women Heroes: Here’s Reality, Where’s the Fic- tion?” Black Scholar 17 (March–April 1986): 8–13.

Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (Fall 1984): 82–87.

———. “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical

Novel.” MELUS 13 (Spring–Summer 1986): 79–86.

Harrison, Rosalie G. “Sci-Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler.”

Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine 8 (1980): 30–34.

Helford, Elyce Rae. “ ‘Would You Really Rather Die Than Bear My Young?’: The Construction of Gender, Race and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Bloodchild.’” African American Review 28 (Summer 1994):

259–71.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself , ed. Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Originally published 1861.

Jesser, Nancy. “Blood, Genes and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and

Dawn.” Extrapolation 43 (Spring 2002): 36–61.

Kenan, Randall. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” Callaloo 14 (Spring 1991): 495–504.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History . Jackson: University Press of Missis- sippi, 1991.

Levecq, Christine. “Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) His- tory in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred .” Contemporary Literature 41 (Spring 2000): 525–53.

Long, Lisa. “A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata .” College English 55 (February 1993): 135–57.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” In Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers , Larry McCaffery, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

McKible, Adam. “ ‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts.” African American Review 28 (Summer 1994): 223–35.

Mixon, Veronica. “Futurist Woman: Octavia Butler.” Essence (April

1979): 12–15.

O’Connor, Margaret Anne. “Octavia E. Butler.” Dictionary of Literary

284

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Biography, vol. 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, Tha- dious M. Davis and Trudier Harris, eds. Detroit: Gale, 1984.

Potts, Stephen W. “ ‘We Keep Playing the Same Record’: A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler.” Science-Fiction Studies 23 (November 1996):