Episode 32 transcription: Octavia E. Butler - "Kindred" (1979)

introductions, Butler biography, non-spoiler discussion

(listen to the episode on Anchor)

(main Chrononauts theme)

Nate:

Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and J.M. How are you guys doing tonight?

JM and Gretchen:

I'm doing really well.

JM:

(laughs) We both are.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

I'm just trying to start the new year off, waiting to hear back from a couple of work people. It's like things are sort of slow still, but it's so far, so far so good I guess. It'll be even better than last year.

Gretchen:

Yes. I'm enjoying my last week or so of break before I go back into classes. I was saying before we started the recording, I had a bit of a cold after the holidays, but I'm feeling pretty good now, so I'm glad to be going back towards health.

JM:

Getting sick after the holidays used to happen to me a lot. When I was a kid in school, sometimes I'd go back to school the first day and then the rest of the week and be like, hey, I don't think so. Seemed to be a pattern, but yeah. No winter colds for me yet, so hopefully it'll stay that way.

Nate:

Well, hopefully all of our listeners out there have had a good holiday season as well. The last time we were together talking about some science fiction novels we read was in November of last year and we took a bit of a break off for the holidays and we did a bonus episode during that time where we run down some of our favorite reads of 2022, both on the podcast and off the podcast. So if you haven't listened to that one, check that out.

JM:

Nate, you visited some of our authors, a couple of our authors homes recently, didn't you?

Nate:

Oh yeah, right. So I recently took a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, and I got to see the exterior of the House of the Seven Gables, which is directly next to Nathaniel Hawthorne's birth site. Unfortunately, the buildings were closed for the season, but you know, you could still check out the outside and they're pretty creepy looking buildings.

JM:

So you were at the Poe, the Poe estate recently too, weren't you?

Nate:

That's right. Yeah, at least one of them, the site in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Right. The interesting location, I guess, he wrote the Raven there. He was only there for a year or two. The rooms and displays are a little sparse as far as what they actually have in the building, but there's like a reading room with some interesting items they had, an original printing of the Tell-tale Heart in the magazine that it appeared in. I'm blanking on the magazine now, but it's a pretty cool piece. I think the Poe site in Baltimore is a little more expansive and comprehensive, because I think you spent a lot more time there than in Philadelphia.

JM:

But yeah, that's kind of known as his home turf in Baltimore, I guess.

Nate:

Right. Yeah, exactly. So good holiday break season, and definitely excited to be back here in the new year. And we have some interesting things on the podcast tonight, but I guess before we get into that, we are on all the major podcast platforms, Spotify, Apple, Anchor, Google, and so forth. You could also find us on YouTube. Additionally, you could follow us on Twitter at ChrononautsSF, Facebook at ChrononautsPodcast, and we have a Blogspot where we post texts and translations of stories that haven't been either digitized before or haven't been translated in English before that are in the public domain, and you can find that at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com.

So for tonight's story, we're going to be doing something a little bit different on the podcast. If you've been listening to the podcast since the beginning, you might notice that the early episodes we did took a pretty much chronological approach to the history of science fiction. Episode one literally starts with a work from the Roman Empire, the earliest known genre adjacent, if you want to call it, fiction there is, and we pretty much took it in a straightforward chronological fashion up through Mary Shelley and a little bit beyond.

And once you get into the 1850s or so, there starts to become a lot more stories written, and we thought it would be interesting to take a look at the origins of some of the tropes of science fiction and how they kind of manifest themselves throughout history as we've slowly been progressing forward through time. Now we decided to do a series of what we are calling "Host Choice" episodes in that we use this as an opportunity to break a little bit from format, either covering something a little more recent, something a little more adjacent to SF than the SF adjacent topics we've been covering. So it gives us a chance to, I guess, choose some of our personal favorites that fit into either of those areas, something a little less science fiction-y, something a little more recent, something maybe a little bit of both as we might see tonight.

So last episode we did on Amazing Stories, we rolled the dice to see who gets to kick off the first choice, first host choice episode

JM:

It's surprisingly hard to say it.

Gretchen:

A little bit tongue twister.

Nate:

It is, yeah. But Gretchen's dice roll won out and your choice is, well, I guess, why don't you tell us a little bit about your choice and why you picked this work and your personal history with this author and work?

Gretchen:

All right. Well, my choice is "Kindred" by Octavia E. Butler, and my choice was the only one out of the three of ours that one of us had read before. And the reason I chose it is because I had read it back in high school several years ago, and it was a work that really stuck with me. I think Octavia E. Butler does a really great job with this novel. And I feel like both of you have agreed with that.

Nate:

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yes. I think that the way that she handles something that's very heavy in a way that's very easy to read it prose wise and is able to convey such complex themes with the prose that is not as detailed and flowery, I guess, is really great. I think she does a great execution of the work. And it's not the only Butler that I've read. I've also read her short story collection, Blood Child and Other Stories, which is also great. And you can see why she did win several awards for the stories in that collection.

JM:

Blood Child is an awesome story.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's really great. And that actually, as I will mention in the bio, she won several awards for. And I've also read her Parable or Earth Seed series, which I also very much enjoyed. But "Kindred" still remains my favorite of the works I've read by her so far.

Nate:

Yeah, it's definitely an excellent novel. And it's a really, like you said, a really heavy novel, but I guess in ways that we haven't really gone there on the podcast yet, even though we do cover some serious themes and political ramifications. This one just feels so much more personal in ways that a lot of the other titles we've covered on the podcast just aren't.

JM:

Yeah, it's a real contrast to the last episode we did stories on in November. We were doing a pulp adventure, and we've done a few other things that are kind of like that already. And this is very much not like that. It's definitely something new for us, something that's a little off of our normal purview, I guess, so far because and it is, I mean, it can sort of go back to what Jack Williamson said about science fiction, though, is that it can essentially address any social or technological problem at all. So and here we have something that's taking it all very seriously. And it's not a comfortable read. And yet it is a really, really good book. And what I thought was interesting, or one of the things I thought was interesting was that I didn't immediately register how I felt about it. And a lot of my reading of the book was actually quite fast, initially. And I guess a lot of my feelings about it sort of crystallized after I'd finished. And then I kind of I mean, we can get more into it, maybe a little bit later, but like her style is very stripped back and it's very unadorned. And so I think that if I had read this when I was younger, it might not have stuck with me as much. But now it does. And yeah, I'm really glad that we read this book. I definitely will be recommending it to people, even though it might not be pleasant all the time and it might not be as fun as some of the other stuff that we do. I think it is going to be really stimulating to talk about.

Gretchen:

I did want to say that yeah, the first time I read this book, I really sped through it, because it is, like you said, very unadorned. And it is, but it is one of those books that really sticks with you after the fact. And it's one that the implications of it really hit you after the experience and they stay with you.

Nate:

And I think Butler really spent a lot of time with this one herself. And it really reads like that, that this is a very tight novel, and that there's pretty much no fat on it whatsoever. It does exactly what it needs to do in the amount of time it has. And that's a real asset here with this kind of material. And we'll get into why that is probably a little later and maybe some other views of the work that probably stray from that a little bit.

JM:

Yeah, for sure.

Nate:

Yeah, no, it's really well written and just very well paced and plotted out. And she clearly spent a lot of time revising it based on the interviews that I'd read with her preparing for this.

JM:

Yeah, I agree that it's a very tight book. And that's one of the things that I really like about it, too. I want to say something before we really start getting into our views of it and maybe now is a good time. This book is, Butler doesn't, she doesn't really spend a lot of time telling you what you are supposed to think. And so what I've noticed, and I think what we may have all noticed when we were looking into some of the criticism that's been done about this work is that there are a lot of different viewpoints. And some of them are sort of contradictory. And when I express a viewpoint, and I guess, you know, this may be goes for all of us, but when we express a viewpoint, it's not necessarily always going to be our viewpoint. What do I actually think? How do I interpret the text? Well, I don't know, really, you know, this is kind of one of the things that I'm hoping to gain from this discussion, maybe the questions sometimes are more interesting than the answers, though, anyway. And one of the reasons why the book has stuck with me since I read it is that I wonder about certain things, you know, I wonder what what she meant. What maybe what could be more important is what I take away from it, or what we all take away from it and what the readers take away from it, because it does seem like there's many different lens with which a person can look at this book. And, you know, there's the second wave feminist lens, and there's the more modern feminist lens, and there's the racial lens. And there just seems to be a lot of different, not like not all the analysis comes to the same conclusions. So if you're listening to the episode and you think we're contradicting ourselves, there might be a reason for it.

Gretchen:

Yes. And I have been reading quite a few interviews from Octavia Butler, most of which is going to be the basis of what I wrote for her bio. But she, in her interviews, she did say at times, you know, she's very she encourages different viewpoints, and she is not at all upset with different viewpoints on her work. She acknowledges that readers bring their own experiences and their own ideas to the work anytime they read something. So I think that's something that she was very aware of as she was writing this book.

Nate:

And I guess that's another way that this novel and author are slightly different than some of the other people we've covered on the podcast before, because I mean, some of the authors where we've tried to look into their biography, and there's like maybe a sentence or two about their life, and we just like kind of shrug and be like, well, it's anybody's guess. This novel has like a huge body of criticism behind it. And yeah, I made a comment during a previous episode that where we to start an entire podcast on 19th century mathematical trends, we would have no shortage of material to go on for a while. Likewise, if we decided to start a podcast on just going over "Kindred" criticism, we would have a very long running podcast for a while.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

So I got through maybe like seven or eight papers, something like that. A couple, I thought were just like a little too incomprehensible for me. But I will post, as always, a full bibliography of all the papers we found, which I think is like something like 25 papers easily accessible. And that's just like scratching the surface. I didn't do any citation chasing or anything like that for this aside from just a couple interviews from Butler that seemed relevant and interesting to take a look into.

JM:

Yeah, I don't know that I got through seven, maybe five or six papers. And yeah, I definitely not used to reading that kind of, I mean, we've come across a few different things in our background research for the podcast. Gretchen, you're a little bit more embroiled in the sort of academic study world right now. So you probably see a lot more of this than say I do. Sometimes it seems like there's a lot of jargon being used and there's a lot of sort of shaping things to fit a particular agenda that the writer of the paper wants to promote. And you sort of have to take it a little bit as useful, but not necessarily the sole interpretation. And again, that's kind of why it's been interesting reading the different papers because a lot of them have different viewpoints. And they're not all the same, you know, it's not like there's an academic consensus around "Kindred" and what it means.

Gretchen:

Well, as someone who is very active in academia right now and has been embroiled in that for a thesis, I can definitely say something academics love to do is argue and disagree with each other. So it's not too surprising. There's many interpretations of this work.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nate:

And what I thought was interesting, I forget what paper it was, but it was one of the earlier papers on "Kindred" criticism, like from the early 2000s or so. And they made the remark that like the work up to that point has almost been ignored by scholars and academics. And it just seems like since then, there's been this huge body of work and attention given to it, which is, I think, pretty interesting how trends in academia change what works get picked up on in the long term, what don't. I mean, academics are not looking at a lot of the pulp stuff from Amazing aside from a handful of people who are doing specific histories of the genre.

JM:

But now it'd be interesting to discuss because Butler has written a lot of other stuff and much of it is a lot more overtly science fictional than this one. And so it could be that the fact that this particular work is considered more literary that in fact, how it sort of permits the academic world to be a little more embracing of it, maybe.

Gretchen:

You did run into when I was reading some of the interviews, you know, "Kindred" obviously came up quite a bit more than some of her other works. And it's been compared with, you know, a lot of more magical realism. And there's comparisons to like Toni Morrison, you know, Beloved. And so there is that sort of maybe this is considered more literary. However, it does seem as though just Butler in general has gained popularity since her death. And I think that if you did look to see what was written about her other works, you still would definitely find a lot more, especially now than was written about in during her lifetime.

Nate:

Sure. Yeah.

JM:

And this work is linked a lot to to 19th century slave narratives. I haven't read any of those. The one I was going to look up was "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs. But I didn't get a chance to find it. So it's referenced a lot in some of the background material, along with a few others by Frederick Douglass and others. And there's been some work done on how this book relates to those, but also how it contrasts with them, and supposedly takes a less sentimentalized approach in some ways. But I don't really know enough about the original narratives to say whether that's the case or not. There was one paper which was basically talking about how different its approach to handling discussing bodies and pain was. And although I understood what the writer was saying on an abstract level, it was difficult for me to really concretely grasp how it was different. So I don't know if either of you are familiar with any of those and can comment on that.

Gretchen:

Well, I have read a couple of slave narratives, particularly Frederick Douglass's narrative. I have not read "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", although I do have that book. And I have also read Sojourner Truth's narrative. I know that Butler, in an interview, did say about... She did obviously do a lot of research and read a lot of narratives herself while writing this book. And she actually said she consciously wanted to write what she called a cleaned up version of slavery because she didn't want to linger on just how gruesome some parts of it were in her prose. And I think that that's something I found very interesting when reading those interviews.

JM:

Yeah, so I came across that quote too. So was she kind of meant that she was hiding some of its more grotesque aspects?

Gretchen:

The way that it sounds is that she didn't think people would be able to be able to read it if she wrote the true extent of what slavery was like. So she kind of had to make it in some ways a bit more palatable to read.

JM:

Yeah, I can kind of see that.

Nate:

One interesting thing about the Harriet Jacobs slave narrative is that until the early 1980s, it was accepted academic consensus that it wasn't a legitimate autobiographical account at all, but it was a fictional novel. And I'm forgetting, or I didn't write down the name of the scholar who basically did a lot of primary research and proved that no, this was indeed a legitimate account.

JM:

I mean, she changed all the names and everything, which made people... made it seem fictionalized, I suppose.

Nate:

Yeah, but I thought that was kind of an interesting like little footnote there to how these kind of come together because Butler had written this novel when it was still thought of as a fictional novel and not an actual like legitimate account. And the author of the paper that points this out mentions that when the character Dana is doing research on slavery and looking through slave narratives, that was one of the titles that are not cited in Dana's research. So a kind of interesting point that comes up. But...

JM:

Do we want to talk a little bit about Butler and her background?

Gretchen:

Yes. Octavia E. Butler was born in Pasadena, California on June 22nd, 1947. Her father, who worked as a shoe shiner, would die while she was very young. So she was mostly raised by her mother, who worked as a maid. Butler's mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, who had very little formal education before leaving school to work and support her family, was very passionate about her daughter's learning. She would bring home any and every book her employers didn't want for Butler to read. Although Butler initially was embarrassed by her mother's occupation, she would later discuss her gratitude for the sacrifices she made so that her child could achieve a better future. Butler's family hoped she would be able to earn a career as a secretary, what they believed would be one of the higher career paths she could pursue. Though Butler, around the age of 10, was already beginning to dream of becoming a writer, she wasn't encouraged to follow this aspiration. In fact, Butler once recalled her aunt flat out telling her, while she was a child, that black people couldn't be writers. However, this didn't prevent her from begging her mother for a typewriter, which she used to type out some of her first stories. Butler was 12 when she started to focus on writing science fiction. Watching the film "Devil Girl from Mars" on television one night, she decided that she could write a better story. After that, she also began to read more science fiction. She bought amazing stories and fantastic adventures and read the works of Zenna Henderson, John Wyndham, and Isaac Asimov. In one interview, when asked about works she enjoyed, she would specifically name Frank Herbert's "Dune" as a favorite, as well as Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" later in her life. She claimed not to care for more humorous and satirical sci-fi, claiming she had little sense of humor as a kid. "The stuff I was writing was incredibly grim, so grim that teachers would accuse me of having copied it from somewhere."

Although many of Butler's teachers were not impressed with her use of science fiction in her pieces, as a freshman at Pasadena City College, she won a school-wide short story contest and received $15, the first award and money her writing would earn her. She continued to attempt to get her stories published during this period and continuously received rejection slips. Butler writes in "Positive Obsession", one of her essays on writing, "when I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn't believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine", which is one of my favorite quotes from her. After graduating from the college in 1968, she was admitted to the Open Door Workshop, which was designed to encourage and mentor minority writers. One of the teachers in the program was Harlan Ellison, who realized Butler's potential and recommended that she attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania.

While there, Butler met Samuel R. Delany as well as Joanna Russ. The latter encouraged her not to use her initials as she had been doing but to write her full name. She also sold her first two stories there, one for the Clarion Anthology, a story called "Crossover" that is available in her collection Blood Child and Other Stories, and one to Harlan Ellison for a planned anthology that never happened. There would be five years between that and the next work she'd sell. During that period, Butler took on whatever jobs she could. She worked in warehouses, cataloging inventory, washed dishes, sorted potato chips as a factory worker, and took a job as a telemarketer. She woke up at 2 a.m. to write, and by 1976 published her first novel, "Pattern Master". The work, which was the result of several iterations of the concept Butler had written in the past, became part of one of Butler's series of novels known as the Patternist Series. As Butler continued to take writing courses at UCLA and at that time was taking one from Theodore Sturgeon, she showed him the acceptance letter for her novel.

After that, she was quite prolific, publishing 12 novels and a collection of short stories over her three decade long career, nine of the books between 1976 and 1990. Between 1984 and 1985, she won several awards, four of them, including a Hugo and Nebula Award, were for her novellette "Bloodchild", and the other, another Hugo for her short story, "Speech Sounds". In 1995, Butler earned the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, the first science fiction writer to do so. With the money, she was able to buy her first house. During the 90s, she was writing her Parable series, which consisted of "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents". The latter secured Butler another Nebula in 1999, this one for best novel. While Butler had garnered a good amount of acclaim and a growing audience before these books, this series began to further cement her fame.

Unfortunately, Butler would pass away only a few years later, on February 24th, 2006. In 2010, she was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Regarding the work we are covering tonight, "Kindred", it is actually the work Butler herself didn't recognize as truly science fiction, instead labeling it as fantasy, although on this podcast, we're pretty familiar with the blurriness of genres.

Nate:

Yeah, and the genre question does come up in a lot of the papers we've talked about.

JM:

Yeah. One writer even goes quite far to prove that it is a work of science fiction. In some kind of strange ways, maybe we can talk about that just a tiny bit when we finish the plot synopsis. But yeah, it's interesting. It's again, kind of just showing how differently people view this work.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

Yeah, and I think it's interesting in that, again, this differs from a lot of the other works that we've covered, where the themes are kind of revolving around the plot and some of the pulpy stories. And there's not really too much to talk about in a non-spoiler sense, whereas I think the plot to this is almost like second to the themes that it explores. So there's probably a lot we can go into in a non-spoiler and general sense here, because it does really engage in a very personal and deep way on the subject of identity, specifically of black identity and what that legacy means for people living in the present. The plot device of the novel just kind of revolves around traveling back in time to the antebellum south. And it's just juxtaposed this time travel with the slave trade itself, where people had their identities removed and taken from them, their language, their culture, their names and their family were all gone. And Dana, the character in the novel gets forcibly dragged through time and space in the same way that a slave at an auction would being forcibly dragged through time and space away from everything that they known before. And it's a very interesting juxtaposition between the two, how she pairs the I guess seemingly sci-fi time travel device with a very realistic portrayal, if you want to call it that, of the antebellum south.

JM:

And I mean, even though it's based upon a past that was very real, the word dystopian is used a lot in the criticism. And I can kind of see why I mean, it does really like like a dystopian novel would in a lot of ways.

N ate:

Yeah.

JM:

 Which I guess also kind of ties it into the science fiction tradition, even though it is real, based on things that actually happened. And also linked to the present in perhaps ways that some might find uncomfortable. It seems, I mean, she is asking the question, are we all this is still with us now? And in some ways, we consider ourselves more civilized and more fair and equitable, but nothing's ever going to be perfect. And the scars in the case of Dana literally remain.

Gretchen:

Yes. And I think that when thinking about this idea of the past and the present kind of blending together, you know, there's still the past within the present. The book kind of reminds me of that William Faulkner quote of "the past isn't dead, it's not even past". And I think that's something that Butler is covering in this novel. I mean, there's definitely some parts when we do get into after the summary that I definitely would like to mention regarding that.

JM:

Yeah, absolutely.

Nate:

Yeah. I mean, there are some final plot points at the end that's really tied in together. And what I think I really like about this novel is she opens it in such a good way, you know, she the loss of her arm is pretty much like the first sentence.

Gretchen:

Yeah, that first sentence really just drags you in.

JM:

At first, I wasn't sure about that.

Gretchen:

I was very captured by that first sentence. I think it does well to hook you.

Nate:

Yeah, it makes you wonder, you know, what's going to happen throughout the entire course of the novel. And you get that at the end that it's just such a powerful moment that you knew was coming. But she handled it just so well, anyway, and I think one thing that plays into that, which we'll get into later is the idea of the banality of evil, you know, how people aren't like inherently evil rotten people, that people that do evil things are just regular people. I mean, when I was reading this, and Dana is talking about some of the images and scenes about the Holocaust she read about in comparison to her, you know, experience witnessing the antebellum south firsthand, that kind of reminded me of those pictures I saw of like those smiling chipper young women who were working at Auschwitz, you know, processing the extermination of millions of people. But they're just like normal looking college age women, or whatever, who play volleyball on the weekend. You know, that normal people can do horrible and evil things. And I think that's one thing that she really does get across well to the reader in this novel.

Gretchen:

Yes. Yeah, I think that all of the characters in this are so nuanced and they feel like real people. There's not any flatness or, you know, black and white characters in this. And you get that with both the victims and the oppressors.

JM:

Yeah. And I think Nate, how you talk about the banality of evil and the reasoning for that. I mean, is what she seems to be saying throughout the book too is that people fall into certain systems and like, yeah, the average person, like, like, let's say all your family and your friends and everybody says that the things that you're doing are the way they're supposed to be and they're okay. And so, you know, you're part of that system, even if you're perhaps a very progressive person, like Dana's husband, who I'll get to when we talk about the book.

Nate:

Yeah, there's this one paper that I read, Marissa Parham's "Saying Yes: Textual Traumas and Octavian Butler's "Kindred". And she has a couple of really good quotes here where she talks about her experiences teaching, I don't know if it was this novel in particular, but other slave narratives and things like that. And she quotes Lisa Long as saying, "as student responses to these novels indicate contemporary Americans, both white and African American, all want to imagine that we would be the defiant and brave African American slave or white underground railroad worker. We would not be the ones maimed or killed and surely not the ones doing the maiming and the killing."

And Parham goes on to say: "I cannot recall a single instance when a student has willingly engaged with even the good white characters, much less engaged in an extended recognition of an aggressor or oppressor who could not in some way claim a victim status. It is typical for students to avoid identifications with slaves, but absolutely taboo for them to think too deeply about the slaveholders. If I am not careful, white people, except as a sort of shadowy menacing force are actively disappeared from class discussions. They are simply too difficult to deal with outside of their caricatures."

And I think that is a very interesting point and that being an academic who's teaching this stuff to probably a bunch of 19 year olds that have never really dealt with this on any meaningful way before, she kind of deals first hand with that perspective of ignorance, of really not understanding the issues at play and how all these issues are incredibly complex and not just like a good guy, bad guy type thing.

JM:

Yeah, that definitely wouldn't oversimplify things. Like definitely something else I'm going to get to is that at times I identified a little bit with a certain character and maybe a little bit too much and made me feel uncomfortable. And that's kind of what she was, I think, doing on purpose.

Gretchen:

Because it is more uncomfortable to think of these people as nuanced and as people than to think of them as that caricature of evil and of monsters. When they aren't, it does mean that you can see a part of yourself in them and that's something that a lot of people don't want to address.

Nate:

Yeah, I think there is a tendency to, in a sense, dehumanize people who commit these kinds of evil and atrocities, not taking into account that they are people too.

JM:

Yeah. And that actually makes it a lot scarier.

Nate:

Right, exactly.

JM:

You might not need to convince that person of anything. They might already, this is getting into specifics of the book, but when Rufus reads all the abolitionist texts and everything and he's like, I get it, but it doesn't really, I mean, he's like, well, yeah, but what's it got to do with me kind of thing, right? It's 1819 everywhere. Yeah. So I don't know. It's just, yeah, this book definitely, and what I really admire about it, is it does it without any kind of pontificating or any kind of like real point of view besides Dana's. And Dana doesn't always tell you what she's thinking about things. She does sometimes and she's pretty clear about it, but it's very like unemotional almost, but in a way that works, like in a way that's, like even when she's when she's describing like the pain that she sees others feeling, you know that she, how she must feel about it, but it's very like, okay, this is what happened and this is what it was like. And I think again, it goes to the fact that this is such a such a tight book that there's no excess on it at all. And it leaves you thinking about a lot of things and pondering like, I guess, the different emotional levels and the different interpretations you could have of various things because like there's not very many characters in this book. And even though we don't really see most of their points of view first hand, they're all very well delineated and all very different. And they all have different relationships, but are in some ways equally tied into whatever system they're in. All this stuff about like, this is an ancestral call, this is a call from blood to blood. And yet it's like, it's not fair that this should happen to Dana, you know, like it's not, it's a she should have to make these kind of choices and do these kind of things because she's preserving things that maybe you shouldn't be preserved in sometimes, right?

And she's, then you get the question is, is she doing all this for self preservation? How much of this is altruistic? What does it all mean? Like, it's such an interesting question. And none of it's apparent immediately and right away. And that's why it's just been so remarkable to me finishing this book and thinking about it so much afterwards.

Gretchen:

I think regarding what you've been saying about self preservation and what drives a person to have to make such choices in their lives. And just for the book in general, I did want to mention a couple of the inspirations that Butler had for this novel.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

So one of the major inspirations was something she encountered while she was attending college. She was a member of a black student union and knew another member who while knowledgeable on black history and the legacies of slavery did not as Butler says it, "feel it in his gut". He had a lot of disdain for earlier generations who he believed didn't fight back enough and held black people back. It was Butler thought a similar feeling she had towards her mother when she was younger. She decided to write "Kindred" to be about a modern black person of the same upbringing as this fellow student to see how they would fare in the antebellum south. And she also discussed slavery in one particular interview and I'd like to read out this quote:

"Let me tell you an anecdote about slavery. When I was about 13, I found out on a visceral level what slavery was. Before that, I hadn't understood why the slaves had not simply run away because that's what I assumed I would have done. But when I was around 13, we moved into a house with another house in the back and in that other house lived people who beat their children. Not only could you hear the kids screaming, you could actually hear the blows landing. This was naturally terrifying to me. And I used to ask my mother if there wasn't something she could do or somebody we could call like the police. My mother's attitude was that those children belonged to their parents and that they had the right to do what they wanted to with their own children. I realized that those kids really had nowhere to go. They were about my age and younger and if they had tried to run away, they would have been sent right back to their parents who would probably treat them a lot worse for having tried to run away. That I realized was slavery. Human beings treated as if they were possessions. I stored that away in the back of my mind without realizing I was doing it until at a certain point in my work, I needed to call it up. The nice thing about being a writer is that anything that doesn't kill or dismember you is typewriter fodder. Whatever it is, no matter how terrible, can be used later."

I think that's a quote that's could be very helpful while thinking about this book.

JM:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's really apropos, definitely. We'll get into the whole property thing soon enough.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, and that does tie to the book's discussion of, you know, ancestral memory, what being literal property people for 400 years does to your ancestry, does to your heritage, does to, you know, where you come from as a person. And I think that's one of the issues that this novel really tries to grapple with and comment on. The Parham paper makes an interesting point about the knowledge of history and what we can gleam from it. And she says: "most people from professor to third grader can espouse the benefits of knowing one's history, most often asserting that we must learn history so that history does not repeat itself. I must admit, I have never quite understood this claim, which I find much akin to the deterrent model of criminal justice. The fact of jail does not prevent most crime. The fact of the Holocaust did not prevent, for instance, ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, just as Argentina's disappearances did not prevent disappearances in Guatemala. In other words, there is little evidence that perpetrators learned from history."

And I think that that's also one of the things that Butler is getting at, and we'll discuss the specifics of that in the plot summary and at the end. But I think that she's really making the comment here, and she doesn't really dwell too much in the present timeline, but very much saying that the past, even if it's 200 years ago, can still very much affect the present as people aren't learning these lessons. People are just going about on autopilot, really. I mean, they're doing what's comfortable for them in the systems and situations that benefit them and not really challenging themselves in trying to learn more or do better with their behavior. A lot of those lessons just don't seem to be learned as we see the same behaviors, atrocities, and willingness to accept evil continue throughout history up until the present day and probably for the centuries to come.

JM:

Yes, definitely a story about the perpetuation of these evil systems from the past and the present and into the future. I think we can get into more specifics of that as we do our plot synopsis. So feel free to cut in, we're going to alternate. I'm going to do the first three chapters, and then I believe Gretchen will take over. Right?

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

Before we get into the actual plot summary, there is one thing that I wanted to mention real quick. It doesn't really have to do with the novel, really. But it's just one thing that Butler said in an interview that I thought was just kind of fascinating on how we might approach the genre from a young age is she's talking about theater of the mind and not really knowing the meaning of various words that you hear on radio or the TV, but your mind associates images and concepts with them anyway and just the directions her mind would take her when she would hear various terms like liquidation on the radio. I thought that was just fascinating and such a great capture of how we kind of think of the world when we're that age. But yeah, just a minor footnote that I wanted to mention.

JM:

Cool.

Gretchen:

I recommend reading some of the interviews and the nonfiction works that Butler has put out because there's some really great quotes and ideas in them.

JM:

Yeah. And I definitely can identify with that the theater of the mind and listening to listening to stuff. I mean, like as well as the radio, which I mean, okay, when I was a kid, there wasn't a lot of drama and stuff like that. But stuff like like the Doctor Who series that I pretty much just listened to on my own, like right from a young age. So the kind of broadcasting is, but you picture certain things in your mind that are different. And it's interesting to read about her getting into science fiction from a young age and how she thought about certain things. And it doesn't seem like there were many at least out in the open, black American science fiction writers before the late 1960s. So she was one of the first.

Nate:

Yeah, I think she remarked that she went to a science fiction convention in 1970 and saw only one other black person there.

JM:

Yeah, like, I mean, obviously, previously we talked about Schuyler, but he's kind of a different case.

Nate:

Oh, yeah, he definitely is.

JM:

After that was Samuel Delany.

Nate:

Right. Who I'm sure we'll talk about at more length in later podcast episodes.

JM:

Definitely. Yeah.

Nate:

I surely want to dig into his work. I know he has some really long ones, but maybe figure out how to tackle those.

JM:

Yeah, Gretchen, you're going to lead us on a discussion of Dhalgren.

Gretchen:

Yeah, the only one that I've read is Dhalgren. So I really need to I want to read more of his work, but I have read I think one of his longest.

Nate:

I think that's supposed to be the classic to read. So we'll try to figure out how to work that one into the podcast later. But I thought there was an interesting parallel here with Butler's experiences and Schuyler's and that Schuyler and Butler seem to be both really put off by the radical elements of the black liberation movement. I mean, they had different responses to that, of course, like Schuyler thought it was part of the was part of the international communist conspiracy to destroy Western civilization or whatever. And I think Butler probably wrote a more meaningful response to that situation. But the Philip Militic paper talks about some of the black power movements in the 1960s and highlights some of the sexist rhetoric that came out of the male leaders, which I think really turned off Butler and in part kind of inspired her to write this as Dana being a woman, the main character of this novel being a woman and not a man. She also talks about if this was a man as a main character, he would have gotten himself killed right away or something like that. And in some ways a woman could navigate this situation better.

Gretchen:

Yeah, because they would be perceived as less dangerous and less of a threat.

JM:

Yeah. And Dana's life in the 1976 time zone does seem to resemble butler's in some ways.

Nate:

It does. Yeah.

JM:

I don't think there's a necessarily, you know, we don't want to say, Oh, it's autobiography. But I mean, there's definitely the talk about the being a temporary worker and stuff and trying to get along being a writer, doing these other jobs and stuff like that when you really want to be, you know, you want to do what you want to do. And even her husband can help but ask her to type out his shit.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

All right. So I guess, yeah, that was my little tangent there. So should we get into the actual weeds of the novel?

JM:

Yeah, so that's a good segueway into the fact that Dana and her husband are writers and they have just moved into a new house.

spoiler plot summary

(reverbed out minimalist string-based music)

JM:

When our story begins, they have just in fact bought this house together, I believe. But the book doesn't actually start with that. The book starts with Dana having gone on what they think will be her last temporal journey into the past. And this time, she's lost an arm and she rematerialized partially inside the wall of the house. And the police were called when Dana came home, screaming from the pain. And they wanted to know what had happened to Dana, obviously. And they suspect Kevin of some form of abuse. But she vehemently denies this. Of course, she can't tell the truth, either. Dana remembers how all this started on June 9th, 1976, Dana's birthday, merely a month previously in the contemporary time stream. Dana's birthday, you see, and in the midst of setting up their new home, she is struck by intense vertigo and finds herself transported to the shore of a river where a child is drowning. This is the very young Rufus, no more than five years old at this point. And she drags him out of the river just as his mother shows up, all hysterical and unable to do anything but scream as Dana commences artificial respiration. And the boy revives, screaming lustily, and daddy shows up, pointing a big, huge gun at this mysterious black woman who's appeared on his land.

So far, in the book, there's been no mention at all of race, of whether, like anybody's race, really. It actually takes a while for that to come up in the book. So we don't learn that Dana is black, we don't learn that Kevin is white. None of that stuff comes to a little bit later, and we don't learn the fact that she's hanging out on this river trying to revive this kid. It just doesn't come up, but obviously to the people in 1819, it would seem to be a bigger deal. But at first, she's just like, she's not clued in as to what's going on, but it doesn't take her long. So she's back in 1976 after the gun is pointed at her and she mysteriously disappears. And her clothes are all wet, and she's a few feet from where she had fallen on her knees. And Kevin is, to say the least, very confounded. According to him, she was only gone for some seconds, but for her, the passage of time was longer, many minutes, and this establishes the pattern for everything that's to come. And it's only now that Dana thinks of the strangeness of her surroundings, wherever she was. The tree is not native to California, and the woman wearing an impractical long dress that looks like something from a bygone era, and they don't waste a lot of time debating the reality of what happened. Dana's already worried it might happen again, and she wants to be prepared somehow.

And I thought there's kind of, I didn't know what to make of this. It seemed extreme to me that she was already comparing herself to a victim of robbery or rape. And just, I guess, I was kind of hinting at that earlier, but you guys were talking back and forth a bit, and I didn't want to diverge it too much. But I at first didn't necessarily, I mean, it's not like I didn't like it, but I didn't, I felt a little bit like, oh, she's just going to throw us into everything, and she's not going to give us, she's not going to give us any background or any like, I don't know, I should have trusted her. But I guess I'm not familiar enough with her writing. And so when I started the book, I was a little bit confounded, and a little bit like, wow, that was sudden.

Nate:

She does throw you right into it, and I  thought she was going to go in like a totally different direction with it opening up at a scene with like the police there and stuff. And, you know, the police only just like play a minor part in the very beginning. And it's just like, not a deal with them.

JM:

I can't remember when it was. I think I think it's when she she's back in the present. And she's kind of starting to relate how She and Kevin met. And I think it was at that point that I realized, oh, okay, like, yeah, she knows what she's doing. She's just like, she's doing it like that. And it works. And this is good thing. I want to highlight this now, because we're going to talk about the new "Kindred" TV show that just came out later on in the episode.

Gretchen:

We've all watched, I think, various amounts of it. I should confess, I've only seen the first episode, and I just became too discouraged to watch the rest of it.

Nate:

Yeah, it's kind of a bummer. I mean, we'll get to it later. But they could have nailed it. They did not.

JM:

Yeah. And here's the thing. She nailed it with that. But I didn't think so at first. So it kind of makes me glimpse a little bit into the process that might have gone into making the TV show. And I'm guessing that somebody responsible for the screenplay maybe read the book in a hurry. I didn't have that much time to think about it. I don't know. Anyway, we'll get to that.

Gretchen:

Yeah. We'll probably have quite a bit to say on that. So yeah.

JM:

Yeah. So Kevin thinks she should try and not think about it. But it isn't long before it does happen again. So Kevin wants to take her out to dinner. And she's like, no, I'm not going anywhere. What if it happens again? And she's she just so convinced. Maybe she feels somehow, due to her journey, she feels like the tie is still there. And something's not finished. Like just the fact that she's so sure it's going to happen again, I think is really interesting already. So it's while they're eating that the vertigo strikes and she finds herself sitting on a child's bed. And the young Rufus is mad about something stupid, and he's ready to set fire to the house. So Dana reacts without thinking. And she pushes him out of the way and throws the drapes out the open window. And since she's averted a disaster, she wonders if she'll just go home now. But no such luck. Not at all. The boy seems to have aged a few years. So at first Dana wonders if it's the same guy. But it is. And they have a conversation. And she finds out that it's the year 1815. And Rufus has seen her before, when he was five and almost drowned.

With his eyes closed, he's caught a glimpse of the living room in the house in California. They're now in Maryland, though, close to Baltimore City. And it takes her a bit to swallow this. But again, not very long. Rufus is young, fairly innocent, and of course racist in his language. From how he talks about bitterly burning the stable because his dad wouldn't give him the horse he wanted, and his recent fury due to being hit by his father, Dana figures Rufus has already found a taste for revenge and wonders about his future. And well she might: the marks of abuse are pretty prominent on Rufus's body. Rufus took money from his father's desk and opines that dad should lose all his money. It will serve him right. Gradually, Dana comes to understand that she was called mentally, telepathically, or through blood, whatever, because Rufus didn't know what to do to save himself. He wanted to put the fire out. And Dana recognizes Rufus's last name, Weylin, and thinks of an ancestor, a woman named Alice, whose name she remembers from way back, and grandma Hagar, born in 1831, Alice's daughter. All this is recorded in  the old family Bible. And now, she realizes Rufus is her great-great-grandfather.

In one of the only concessions to a normal time travel narrative, we get Dana wondering about the potential paradoxes of her situation, being called upon to save her own ancestor so she can be born. And she decides that she can't ignore him if he needs help. Rufus gravely insists that she has to call him master, or else there might be trouble. Dana condescends to Mr. Rufus and hopes it'll do. She wants to know where she can go. She knows it's not safe here. And Rufus suggests Alice's mother's place. Rufus seems to want to see her again, which she finds endearing. And against her better judgment, she seems inclined to mother the boy a bit. Dana makes her way through some slave cabins in the dead of night. She's afraid of running into an older white man, and she does in fact almost run into a patrol, who are on the lookout for runaway slaves. And although what we said about the banality of evil earlier is true, note that these guys don't have to do this job.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

Yeah, I don't know. They might be a special case. She says they're the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nate:

So yeah, I mean, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what they are. And that's where I figured or thought she might be going with the stuff at the police station, you know, tying them also to the beginnings of law enforcement agencies, but she doesn't really make that explicit connection.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. So she's gotten herself lost, but the men soon lead her to the right cabin. And they began terrorizing the family of three inside. They say they think the man is a runaway and whip him severely, his screams and protests reaching Dana. But she's unable to move or do anything. They drag the man away and punch out the woman. And Dana goes out of cover to help. And this is how she meets little Alice. Dana wants refuge for the night and is thinking she'll have to travel north. She's basically resigned to not having any control over getting home and figures she might be stuck in this time. She introduces herself as a free woman from New York. Alice's mother is free too, but not the husband who belongs to the Weylin plantation. Tom Weylin likes his slaves to marry others on the plantation and doesn't give passes for any of them to see their families off the grounds. The mother says Tom Weylin will never own a child of hers. A bit of unfortunate foreshadowing there, perhaps. They're about to settle in for the night when Alice's mother realizes she left the blanket on the ground outside and Dana goes to fetch it and runs straight into one of the patrollers, one who seemed to have been interested in raping Alice's mother. He comments on how much they look alike and wants to turn her in. Dana fights and manages to knock him out with a big branch. And then that's when she passes out and wakes up in her own bed in 1976, with Kevin worriedly leaning over her. Of course she's screaming and trying to get away at first.

Now, according to Kevin, she was gone two or three minutes and he wants to take her to the hospital, but she's set against that. She sleeps so soundly that Kevin washes and dresses her and ties a bag to her waist without her even noticing. The bag, of course, is for in case she leaves again and contains some necessary items like clothes and a big switchblade. So Dana tells what happens as best she can and she says she can't let anything happen to her ancestors, Rufus or Alice. She dares not. And Kevin suggests they forge her free papers or at least write a pass since they don't know what those look like. And Dana thinks a reason teaching blacks to read and write was illegal in some states was to prevent just that very thing from happening.

So now we get to hear about their background a little bit. How they met their families and their respective reactions to their partnership and marriage. Both of them are writers, like I had said earlier, and Kevin had sold a few books already at the time they met at a temporary workers agency jokingly called the slave market.

Kevin is just about to head to the library on his own when the vertigo hits Dana again. This time, Kevin grabs onto her and they are both transported into the woods not far from the Weylin house. And Rufus has fallen out of a tree and Nigel, a black boy who lives on the plantation, is trying to tend to him. Both boys are about 12 and Rufus recognizes Dana immediately and says he saw her lying on a bed as he started to fall. His leg's broken and Nigel goes to fetch help from the plantation. Rufus is seemingly outraged that Kevin and Dana are married. Dana decides to tell him the truth of where they come from and, of course, it's a big thing to swallow. Rufus hasn't read any time travel stories. "The Clock that Went Backwards", "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "Anacronopete", "The Time Machine", those things are still decades away. And it's 1819 everywhere he maintains.

Nate:

Maybe he's read a hollow earth novel or two though.

JM:

Yes. And all of these we've done on Chrononauts except one, which we'll get to soon. Dana and Kevin know that they have to fit in. Dana belongs to Kevin now, the white man. Tom Weylin is just going to leave them there, but Rufus pleads that they should come. Weylin begrudgingly invites them to dinner. And though she does her best to act as a black woman is supposed to in this time and place, Weylin obviously thinks something is strange about her. Her dressing like a man, for instance. At the house, Dana meets some of the other denizens, including Rufus' mother, Margaret. They instantly don't get on. Margaret's alternating between pretending she's not there and ordering her around angrily, assuming she should know everything about service just because she's black. There's Carrie, a mute girl, daughter of Sarah, who spends much of her time in the cookhouse. Luke, Nigel's father, the slave who was driving the wagon and seems to have the run of the place. At the cookhouse, Dana is relieved to note that the slaves aren't made to eat from troughs as she read sometimes happen. Luke is curious about her and her origins. She doesn't quite fit in anywhere, obviously. The slaves think she talks white, more white than some white folks, they say. And Dana sort of slips up saying her mother was a teacher, and that raises more eyebrows. "You'll get into trouble," says Nigel.

Now, she learns a little more about the family and Rufus. Rufus doesn't seem a bad kid. Nigel and he seem genuinely to be friends and Rufus protected Carrie from the other kids when she was younger. Tom, on the other hand. Sarah had three other babies, but Tom sold all of them. She has a lot to be hateful about, including Margaret, whom she refers to as "bitch" under her breath. Kevin made up some bullshit to Tom about him being a traveling writer who was robbed after some inadvisable drinking. And Tom thinks Kevin should sell Dana, and he makes up a story about taking her to Louisiana against her will, which seems to make Tom happy. He offers Kevin a job tutoring Rufus, and Dana proposes to stay close to him, to befriend him and anyone else she can in this time, because she's going to need all the support she can get. And they stay for quite a long time. Dana covertly starts teaching Nigel and even some of the other slave children to read, and this is very much not what Tom wants, obviously. She also has earned the enmity of Margaret, who makes a pretense about finding something dirty, and Kevin and Dana sharing a bed, even though her husband is almost certainly a philanderer, and she herself seems to want to seduce Kevin. And this all after Kevin saw the attic pallet she was sleeping on at first, so of course Dana's special treatment also doesn't exactly earn her favor with all of the slaves, and she spends a lot of time with Rufus and sleeps with their master in a guest bedroom. She's obviously educated and some think she's putting on airs, and they talk about going home and what it might take. Dana fearing for her life, it seems, is what it takes. And Kevin has an idea of arranging a scare for her, but it's never going to come to that. She wants to wait till Rufus has healed to make a good impression on him. He loves it when she reads to him, and they talk about Alice, who still lives nearby with her mother. The husband was sold south. Tom wants to buy Dana from Kevin, and both Rufus and Kevin advise Dana to be very careful. Sarah too. But Kevin's maybe not especially helping at this point, and she has conflicted feelings about being in his room at night.

Kevin almost seems to be getting an adventurous spirit about everything. He talks about going west, and Dana's not so amused and just reminds him, well that's where they're doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks. And it's not so hard for Kevin to fit in, and he and Dana have a discussion about how they're caught between observer and filling a role. And Dana sees the reality of how awful the society is for black people, but Kevin is already kind of starting to take it for granted as a part of history. Not that he disagrees with her though. And while Tom is always depicted as a complex human being, he is very dangerous and definitely thinks of his slaves as his property, and he whips those who commit small offenses and makes an example of them. He doesn't want Dana reading on her own. The library's off limits basically, but she's expected to read to Rufus. Carrie, Sarah's mute daughter, could obviously benefit from being able to write in a rational society. She's learning with Nigel, and of course this is what gets Dana into trouble. Not the teaching itself, which they do keep pretty quiet, but the mere fact that she has a book on her when Tom walks in. "Didn't I tell you I didn't want you reading? I treated you good, and you repay me by stealing my books. Reading!" And he drags her out of the cookhouse and starts whipping her. And the pain is so intense, Dana thinks she's going to die. And that's when she starts to go home without Kevin, whom she can blurrily see running toward her.

Just even recounting that felt kind of strange, but yeah, some of those things. But that's the first, roughly a first quarter of our story, and it just flies by when you read it. It's really interesting how she does it, because I have a lot of books that have been, I guess, really heavy for me to read, or not easy reads. You know, it's hard to read some of this stuff, because it should be, right? Because it's really intense, and the fact that it's true in a way is really unsettling. But she manages to make it very readable.

Gretchen:

At the start of the next section, there is another flashback to Dana and Kevin's past. Before the house the two are moving into at the beginning of the novel, they never truly moved in together, neither one willing to give up some of their books to make everything fit. Dana was still with the labor agency, despite Kevin offering to help with her finances, an offer she refuses so she won't owe anyone when Kevin proposed to Dana. It's then that the two each have to discuss each other with their relatives. Although Kevin believed his sister would be open to it, she, as well as her husband, disapproved of the interracial relationship, and so do Dana's aunt and uncle. With lack of support from their remaining family, both of them having lost their mothers and fathers, they decided to just get married in Vegas, and they come home to find one of Dana's stories have been sold. In the present, Dana wakes alone, Kevin nowhere to be seen with her back in agony. Finding herself in her bathroom, she makes it to the bathtub and soaks in it before struggling to bed and resting. When she again wakes, she makes up another bag of supplies to bring with her during her next experience in the past. It includes soap, toothbrush, and toothpaste, as well as aspirin. She also still has her knife, which she's grateful she didn't use on Weylin, knowing there would have been consequences for herself and possibly also for Kevin now that he was still stuck there. She spends eight days recuperating in the present, tending to her wounds and reading everything she has about slavery and the antebellum period. At one point, she gets a cousin to bring her groceries. The cousin believes upon seeing Dana hurt that Kevin is abusing her.

After the eight days, she is called once again by Rufus. When she arrives in the past, Dana finds him now around 18 or 19 in the middle of a losing fight with a black man. There's a black woman watching the fight whose dress is torn. It looks as though Rufus had assaulted her. Even though this makes Dana believe he deserves to get beaten, she intervenes for her own as well as Kevin's sake. She learns that the man fighting Rufus is Isaac, a slave, and realizes the woman is Alice, who knows about Dana from Rufus. She is also married to Isaac. Rufus had tried to get Isaac sold so he could have Alice to himself. Knowing the severity of the punishment Isaac would get for attacking Rufus, she tells him and Alice to run while she deals with the injured Rufus. Before leaving, Alice tells her that Kevin went north. When Rufus regains consciousness, Dana wants to talk him out of pursuing Isaac to let him get a head start on his escape. Unfortunately, she learns that he did in fact, rape Alice, and she realizes that he may be too far gone. She also finds out that Alice herself will become a slave if she and Isaac are caught. She still makes it clear to Rufus that she wants the couple to have their chance to run and the two have an instance where they realize just how much power they wield over each other. Dana with Rufus' life, Rufus with the information of where Kevin is.

Eventually, Rufus gives in to Dana's wishes, telling her he will claim that white men attacked him, which satisfies Dana enough that she starts on her way to the Weylin House, wondering how time has affected its residents as she does. When she makes it to the house, she is taken in by a stranger, a white man named Jake, who goes to get Weylin. While waiting, Carrie, now pregnant, appears and hugs Dana as she recognizes her. Nigel, now more resembling Luke, greets Dana as well and prepares the carriage that he, Dana and Weylin drive to where Rufus is, bringing him back home. Once back with Rufus, Weylin confronts Dana about who and what she is. She asks about Kevin and he tells her that Rufus has letters from him and offers her a place at the house to wait for his return. Dana then goes to check on Rufus, staying with him and giving him some of her aspirin to ease his pain. Sarah checks in on them too and Dana hears that Margaret's in Baltimore. Nigel visits as well and reveals that he is married to Carrie now, the baby she's carrying, being his. Dana in turn tells Nigel the truth about what happened to Rufus and Nigel is relieved to hear Isaac got away. When Rufus awakes, he expresses confusion over Dana's unchanged appearance, realizing she hasn't aged at all between the times she saved him. She explains to him then the way she has experienced time since her encounters with Rufus have started.

Rufus then gives her three letters sent by Kevin, which all have a different address, displaying Kevin traveling increasingly northward. The last letter mentions his possible moving to Maine. Dana wants to write to him and Rufus tells her he will send it. The doctor then arrives so Dana leaves for the cookhouse where she finds Sarah. The latter has heard from Nigel about Isaac attacking Rufus and Dana confirms that she talked Rufus into hiding that fact. Sarah elaborates on Margaret's condition. After twins she gave birth to died shortly after her mental health declined and she was taken to her relatives in Baltimore. Jake, the stranger who met Dana the night before, is her cousin and the new overseer. Later she finds out why he is needed when Nigel informs her that Luke was sold. When Dana later mentions this to Rufus, he warns her that she might end up like Luke if she isn't careful. Dana also learns from him that Nigel had previously tried to run and he convinced Weylin not to sell him. While writing her letter to Kevin, Rufus comes across a history book about this era Dana also placed in her bag. After Rufus expresses distaste and skepticism about it, there comes this excerpt which I would like to read:

"You're reading history Ruf. Turn a few pages and you'll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That's history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn't happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her south before the Northern Laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south of Dorchester County, was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost eastern shore plantation owners a huge amount of money by guiding 300 of their runaway slaves to freedom. And further down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn't do anything to change history, yet if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man, even a sympathetic white man, might be the thing to change it."

Which I find a really interesting excerpt.

JM;

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Kind of one of those that maybe we were talking about, there's not many time travel tropes in this, but I feel like that part kind of raises some of that.

Nate:

Yeah. And it's, I guess, interesting that whole, you know, you might not, you might disrupt the timeline and erase yourself from existence thing.

JM:

Yeah. I mean, I have to ask myself, like, would Rufus have been, I mean, if this were a standard time travel narrative, she would have probably spent more time thinking about, well, Rufus would be safe without my intervention, because I think most normal people who haven't read time travel narratives anyway, would probably kind of think like that. Like, well, how could that even happen? Right? Why do I have to intervene? But she's compelled. And she does think about the possible paradoxes and definitely will be getting into more stories that deal with that kind of thing.

This book was written in 1979. And for sure, we have several decades of pretty well thought through time travel stories by this point. And the author that we'll be getting to later, L. Sprague De Camp, was considered somebody who often dealt with these kind of stories.

Nate:

And it's an interesting line she walks here. I mean, Dana has to consciously save Rufus through her own action, but yet her own actions can't disrupt the timeline in a way that's going to prevent these major historical figures from doing what they need to do, or prevent her entire line from getting wiped out accidentally if she does something wrong.

JM:

She doesn't know, like, she could cause all kinds of other damage that she doesn't even have nothing to do with her ancestors, right? She could indeed change the timeline. And almost one wonders, you know, it didn't seem like a couple of the papers that I read, the people that wrote them actually were kind of pushing for an idea that, well, that's what she should have done. She should have, like, done something to make it better, right? But she couldn't. And that's not that they were criticizing Butler for writing it that way. But the fact that she wrote it that way was problematic. And that's one of the things that you think about when you read this book. Well, it's such a small thing, right? Like, and here she is protecting this white male ancestor who is doing and will continue to do some pretty deplorable things throughout the book. And, and then Alice, right? I mean, she has to protect her too. But in a way, she's subverting her. She's she's trying to kind of encourage her to do things that she doesn't want to do. And she shouldn't have to do it. Obviously.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah, and it ties in with there's that question. We talked when we were talking about the inspiration for this, how people who were in Butler's generation looked back on these generations with that disdain because they didn't really have the power to do anything. Why didn't they fight back or run away? And of course, it's because they didn't really have the power to it was a question of survival. And I think that even in this quote, there's that focus on power, like Dana can't change anything. She doesn't have the power. But Rufus, who does have power, he can change something.

JM:

But Rufus is powerless. He's very endearing and appealing. But like, he has the power. It's, it's just the system all over again. Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, he fails to act on it in a meaningful way. And I think that's a pretty powerful statement she's making in that he might be a sweet kid and nice as a 12 year old. But once the world he lives in and the system he's a part of start to take an influence as mental being. And those are just the attitudes and mannerisms he's going to adopt in his adult life.

JM:

Yeah. Oh, I was just going to say he might not be as like even as a slave owner that come, he may not be as brutal as Tom is, but he's no less a part of it. And in some ways, he could be worse. He could be interpreted as worse.

Nate:

And we'll certainly see a little bit of that in a minute.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Rufus gets Dana to burn the book so she won't be punished for it, but also forces her to burn a map she brought as well that could help her if she needed to leave the Weylin House, threatening to not mail her letter to Kevin if she doesn't. The day Rufus goes to town with Dana's letter, he returns with an extremely injured near dead Alice. Unfortunately, she and Isaac were caught. Rufus calls for Dana to care for her and she learns from him after tending to Alice's wounds that Isaac was sold further south. He also says that he delivered her letter to Rufus. Sarah, upon hearing about this, urges Dana to ask Nigel, who went with Rufus to town about it, aware that Rufus might just be telling Dana what she wants to hear. When she does ask Nigel, he can confirm if Rufus is telling the truth. He has sent Nigel off on an errand. While Alice's physical wounds begin to heal, her mental health is taking longer to improve. She has regressed to a childlike state and does not have much comprehension of where she is or of the people around her. Three weeks after her arrival, while Dana still tends to her, Carrie goes into labor. While Sarah helps with the birth, Dana and Alice are in the cookhouse together, filling in for her. At this time, during a conversation with Dana, Alice starts to better understand her current situation, realizing that she is now a slave. As her oppressed memories return, she takes out her anger on Dana.

Soon, Dana wants to write another letter to Kevin, worried the other might not have reached him. However, Rufus refuses to send it. He promises to do so only if Dana can convince Alice, now lucid, to accept his advances. Alice has formed a strong bond with Dana and is healing, but Dana knows Alice will be hurt once again if she has to go to Rufus. Ultimately, Dana tells Alice about Rufus wanting her, but she doesn't push her. She tells Alice that if she wants to run again, she will stall Rufus for her. Alice, though, can't go through with escaping, remembering how horrible her experience was last time and does go to Rufus. Afterwards, Rufus mails another letter for Dana. A month with no response has passed when Alice shows Dana a discovery she made looking through Rufus' things, her unsent letters to Kevin. Dana decides then to run away and seek out Kevin herself. Once she has made preparations, Dana, some nights later, goes to sleep with other slaves, but rises during the night when everyone is asleep. She leaves the plantation and walks until sunrise. However, Weylin and Rufus are soon on her trail, much faster than they should have been. Dana knows she has been betrayed by one of the other slaves. The two men find her and she is knocked unconscious, kicked in the face by Weylin. She wakes up, tied on Rufus's horse. Rufus unties her, but tells her she is going to be whipped as a punishment. When she hears this, Dana gets off from the horse and tries to run, but doesn't get far before being caught again. She is whipped by Weylin, then tended to by Carrie and Alice. It is a slave by the name of Liza, who ratted Dana out. She feels threatened by Alice and took it out on Dana as the person who had a close bond to her.

When this is known, Carrie and another slave, that is a friend of Dana's, Tess, beat her. Rufus soon gives Dana a letter from Kevin, who is now on his way to get her. He says that it was Weylin who wrote Kevin after learning about Rufus breaking his word to Dana about sending her letters. While Dana is still recovering, Kevin shows up. When he discovers Weylin whipped her, he wants to confront the man, but Dana urges him not to, in case she needs to return in the future. Dana gets her things prepared, and the two leave together by horse. They then run into Rufus, returning after an errand. Rufus tries to get the two to stay for dinner before heading off, then aims his rifle at them when they refuse. As he is aiming at Kevin, Dana goads Rufus into pointing his gun at her. She soon sincerely believes he is going to shoot her and falls off of Kevin's horse. As she begins to feel the sensation associated with moving through time, she calls out to Kevin and feels him land on top of her before she blacks out.

JM:

Oh, that's one hell of a section down with that one. Yeah. It's so tragic seeing Dana, like, come to this, because she's basically, like, everything that she could possibly have been afraid of happening in this time period to her has now happened pretty much. And yeah, Kevin's around somewhere, and he's going to basically have to come and claim her in order for her to even have a chance at some kind of freedom.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And rereading this book, of course, the entire thing is very heavy and has a lot of terrible moments in it. But I remember dreading getting to this section because it feels like such a low.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. So all right, let's see how this finishes up.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

So Kevin and Dana both arrive in the present uninjured, and they're able to get some sleep. Kevin had been gone for a period of five years and fills Dana in on his experiences. He witnessed a woman die in childbirth. He bounced around from city to city, taught some school and had grown a beard to disguise himself as he got accused of helping slaves escape, which he indeed was doing, And as a result, barely escaped from a mob That was after him.

JM:

Yeah. And I admit, I admit that I wanted to know more about this story. I mean, I'm not saying that as a criticism of the book that it doesn't do that, because it doesn't have to.

Nate:

yeah.

JM:

 And you probably even dilute the point of the book. But I did personally feel engaged enough to wonder what all that was like. And we don't really get a lot of detail on that.

Nate:

No, but I think Butler did spend a lot of time thinking about that and putting this in because it does have an interesting point here where Kevin has a really hard time readjusting to the present. And he's just gotten so used to this alien world of 1818 or 19 or I forget which one it is

JM:

1820 something.

Nate:

1976, it seems so different and easy in comparison and Kevin just keeps expecting some kind of trauma to reappear in his life. I mean, much like Dana herself didn't feel safe after the first incident of her being sucked back in time, Kevin is just traumatized by his whole experience and he just can't get back into the swing of things of leading a normal life.

JM:

All right, hold that thought and Gretchen hold that thought because, yeah, I don't know, there's there's some conflicting views about this whole thing that I didn't even think about until reading some of it. But yeah.

Nate:

Yeah. So I guess while they are in the present, they use the opportunity to restock on supplies. In particular, Dana grabs a pocket knife. As Dana had only been gone for a few hours, the news is still talking about conflicts in Lebanon and South Africa. And Dana has some reflections that some, I guess, South Africans would have liked the 19th century United States.

Gretchen:

This was the part I was thinking about when we were talking about past leading into present, kind of connecting those. Obviously, the connection between the antebellum period and apartheid in South Africa is very deliberate.

Nate:

And I mean, as one of the papers notes with some of the later atrocities that happened after apartheid ended, you know, that's not the end of the story, unfortunately, with the cycle just continuing and continuing on.

JM:

Yeah, that's the story.

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

Continuing cycle.

Nate:

A pessimistic and I guess you described earlier as dystopian, almost a view, but it does seem to be at least some very strong hints of accuracy and really just getting at how the human cycle continues over and over again. And it does feel like you're powerless to change it sometimes. Yeah, so Kevin is musing about how people out of prison readjust to society. And Dana feels it's happening again and sends Kevin for her bag, which she grasps and tells him to go away as she's sucked back in time without him. So Dana comes back to the past in a heavy rainstorm. Rufus is face down in a puddle and Dana can't lift him, but kind of drags him a little and he throws up everywhere. Dana assumes he's drunk, but she prevents him from drowning at least and goes to the house for help, meeting Nigel. And Nigel brings Rufus back and they meet Weylin, who is quite surprised to see Dana. He has Dana change into more appropriate clothes and meet him in the library, and he remarks that she hasn't changed. Dana hints that it's only been a few hours for her and Weylin isn't interested in hearing any of this kind of talk. He curses and insults her a bunch and threatens her with whippings, and Dana tells him that if she's beaten, she will refuse to help Rufus again. And Weylin doesn't take the threats at all and orders her to take care of Rufus under the threat of violence. And Dana realizes that all of society is on his side and her courage just melts away.

Nigel tells Dana that Rufus has been infected with ague, which Dana believes is malaria and mosquito borne. The idea of a mosquito borne illness seems ridiculous to Nigel. The doctors are totally useless in these times who often make things worse for their patients and not better through the use of things like leeches and bloodletting. And it's no use explaining microbial theory to Nigel.

JM:

Even in the early 1820s.

Nate:

Medical advancements did not happen as quickly as some of the other advancements we've talked about on the podcast. Things like the telegraph was starting to come out, not quite this early, but shortly afterwards. They were figuring out electrical stuff and chemistry. But for real advancements in medicine, that doesn't happen until the early 20th century with things like antibiotics and more life-saving drugs, a better understanding of how the human body works. Medicine from around this time just really does feel like you're in the middle ages.

JM:

Quite something to think about. It was like 200 years ago. Yeah, probably I would have been dead.

Nate:

Even in the Civil War time, most people died of some horrible illness they picked up being in horrible conditions in a prison camp or something like that, which is kind of crazy to think about, especially considering how bloody battles were.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

But Rufus says that this feels worse than his previous bouts of ague and Weylin hears of Dana's mosquito theory and calls it ridiculous. She doesn't explain it further as it doesn't look like Rufus has malaria, but it's maybe something worse. And she says that they should get a doctor, and Weylin tells her that she is the doctor and if he dies, then she dies too.

JM:

She's the best he's got. Yeah, sure.

Nate:

Weylin has this strange confidence in her abilities which he perceives in her to have a hint of the supernatural.

JM:

He thinks she's a witch or something.

Nate:

Right, exactly. Yeah. They set up a mosquito netting around Rufus anyways and Sarah helps with a pot of tea with some healing agents in it. She is now much more aged with a limp from dropping a kettle on her foot previously. Rufus has a fever and Dana tries administering aspirin pills and as Rufus has trouble taking them, Alice comes to help who, like Sarah, is also much older and harder looking, jaded and cynical. She has lost two children and has a sickly third. Hagar is still not born yet. Rufus' fever eventually breaks after three days but Weylin has a heart attack and Dana's CPR doesn't work. Rufus tells her that she let him die intentionally as he also has confidence in her healing abilities as they were supernatural or something.

JM:

Yeah. I was feeling, I don't know, understanding more or less of some, most of Rufus's things up till now. This is kind of the point where I was like, okay, this is getting out of hand now, boy.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's not like he hadn't done shitty things before but I guess I was kind of hoping that he would make some cool realizations and kind of be an ally, I guess, but not really.

Nate:

No, he certainly doesn't and this is where he really starts to really become a bad person who is manipulative and cruel and which he, I guess, started to rebel against his father in the early phases of the novel. It's kind of protesting how cruel his father was to him but he just, the cycle repeats itself and Rufus essentially is on his way to becoming his father in more ways than one.

Gretchen:

We see like little hints of that even before this and like even when he's a kid with the way he does treat Margaret, there are those moments when he has those bursts of temper and anger. But you kind of think that maybe he can grow out of it, maybe he can change but he's too far into the ideas of his time and too much under the influence of Weylin and the ideas of what his father thought was right.

JM:

Not only that, Rufus is like his dad but less honest. He's one of those irritating people who feels bad about shit all the time and doesn't really like do anything about it. He feels bad about it but he's not going to change anything, he's not going to change his behavior or try to enact some positive way to make the system better. He's just going to feel really guilty and shitty all the time and drink himself into oblivion and do stuff to hurt himself because now he's like, okay, if I take on the masochistic burden, I can absolve myself of some of the pain I'm causing.

Gretchen:

And we see that, I think that there's that nuance and the complexity of the characters, you really see that with, we know that Tom is a cruel man and he treats his slaves horribly but there's that moment where he's the one that keeps the word that Rufus gave to Dana. He's the one that sends the letter for Kevin and he keeps his word to anyone no matter what their race is but Rufus doesn't keep his word to anyone. So there are those moments when it does seem like Rufus is as bad or worse than Weylin is.

Nate:

Yeah, Weylin values his honor, I mean whatever, you know, that means in particular, but he values his word and he gives a lot of weight behind that whereas Rufus doesn't care, he's so manipulative and he lies and tricks people all the time.

JM:

He'll say things to avoid conflict that makes the other person feel better than it's like.

Gretchen:

Yeah, of course Sarah knew this by saying, you know, he might just be saying what you want to hear so you should check on if he did send that letter because that is what Rufus does. He just wants to appease to people without actually committing.

Nate:

And here in this scene, he is really taking it out on Dana. I mean I don't know if he sincerely believes that she has an element of the supernatural in her like Tom does. I think the whole situation is probably unbelievable for all three characters but Rufus has a little bit more of a glimpse into the situation than Tom does and that he's seen part of Dana's world. He seems to have an easier time accepting that she's from the future maybe because Dana tells him when he's a kid and his mind isn't as fixed in the ways of the adult world and the time and you know you're more likely to believe stuff like that when you're a kid. You know as Butler was talking about the theater of the mind and all I guess is easier for a child's mind to accept sometimes than an adult but here he is really accusing her of letting him die intentionally telling her that she has the power to save him but for some reason she doesn't and that's just like a really awful thing to say somebody who is like clearly sincerely trying to help.

JM:

You know what I think you know what I think it is too. I think he said he has a mommy issue.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

She's supposed to do this thing right because like she's the one that saved him what he needed her right she just came and prevented him from dying right and she's powerful and she's like. His actual mother is pretty ineffectual I mean in her way she really loves him and everything and that's fine but like if he burned himself to death or whatever she she wouldn't be able to do anything about it she wouldn't be able to stop anything from happening. Just run around like a chicken with their head cut off. Yeah I don't know, yeah so, he's he's trying to fill this make her fill this role and he's like. Well she is what she is so she can fill this role if I need her to.

Nate:

Right. And as punishment for not fulfilling the role, Rufus has her sent into the fields so she's to work the cornfields as punishment and she is whipped whenever she makes a mistake which is quite frequently as the work is not only very physically difficult but it's something she's never done before.

JM:

Yeah and it's only been a short time for her since she was recently whipped very severely.

Nate:

Right.

JM:

 so she's had a lot of physical pain as soon as she starts pretty much.

Nate:

Yep. But the women in her row tell her that Evan Fowler who's the current overseer is always excessively hard on new workers including her. At the end of the day she collapses from exhaustion and she thinks she might get sent back to the present through this and that she might see Kevin but no such luck. it's Rufus that she sees instead. Rufus pulls her out of the field and tells her not to cross him or walk away from him again or she'll be going back there. He tells her that he knows she tried to save his father and that he guesses he sent her to the fields as punishment as somebody had to pay was kind of lashing out at whoever is closest to him.

JM:

Please forgive me Dana.

Nate:

The manipulative behavior and just yeah really being an awful person.

So Rufus tells Dana that Margaret is coming home again. She almost died in childbirth and had lost multiple babies. Rufus wants her to be Margaret's caretaker and nurse and at this point Margaret is addicted to laudanum.

JM:

Yeah she's an opium addict now.

Nate:

Yeah I guess that's her way of dealing with things. Alice is pregnant again possibly this time with Hagar and when Margaret arrives her temper has softened quite a bit and wants Dana to read her the Bible. Still she makes Dana sleep on the floor and what she believes is her proper place and Alice is disgusted at Dana's willingness to be subservient to Margaret after being beaten in the fields which leads Dana to ponder on why she didn't fight back and if she's being used to being submissive. While working outside she sees a number of people coming through the woods chained together and it's a procession of slaves that are going to auction to be sold. One of them is Tess, a slave she had made friends with earlier in the novel. Dana tries to speak to her but Tess doesn't respond or acknowledge her and Rufus tells Dana to get away from the procession.

Dana is shocked that the barbaric treatment continues under Rufus. She had assumed that the problem was with Tom but now Rufus is a part of the system. He's in power for the first time and this is how he's using his power. She asked Rufus how he could possibly sell them and he responds naturally that they are his property. Carrie indicates that everybody is being sold and Dana is feeling regretful that she had saved Rufus and she says she understands why some people considered her to be too white. Carrie indicates that she's black no matter what by wiping her face with her fingers and demonstrating that the blackness does not come off. Four days later Rufus summons Dana, they exchange words for a little bit and Rufus says that if she thinks that he's bad then she can wait to see who replaces him if he dies. But he eventually tells her that he wants her to write some letters for him which she accepts. Both the Parham and Militic papers note that she accepts this secretarial position for Rufus but not for Kevin which I thought was kind of an interesting detail.

JM:

Oh, I mean she's been beaten down at this point?

Nate:

Yeah, that is true. But Margaret is becoming a little resentful of her absence as Dana is serving as Rufus's secretary. And one night when Rufus is drunk he comes in on Dana and Alice eating together and makes some comment that Dana and Alice are like one woman. They physically resemble one another. Alice asks Dana if Rufus takes her to bed the bluntness of which startles Dana but likewise her answer back that she doesn't want him surprises Alice.

JM:

Yeah and that's like if Rufus wanted to make somebody want him saying that oh you're just like that other woman is pretty much the furthest, I don't know, it's just the most unappealing thing.

Nate:

Yeah, right. But Dana tells Alice that Rufus likes Alice in bed and Dana out of it. Two sides of the same coin I suppose.

Time is passing slowly.  At a rather wild Christmas party the slaves are having, Dana and Rufus exchange some words. Rufus alludes to the fact that Kevin is far far away from her. It's a bit of a menacing threat. And later she's spending time with Rufus's son Joe and tells Rufus that Joe is quite intelligent which somehow never occurred to Rufus before. Rufus has indicated that he'll free Alice and the children but he seems to be just bluffing and Alice is debating running away again even though she is very pregnant. She'll go again after she gives birth and asks Dana for some laudanum. Dana doesn't like the idea of her going in this situation but can empathize with her and will help her get some supplies.

Alice gives birth in February and the baby is Hagar. Dana feels relieved that the danger to her line is now lifted but the danger to her personally remains and she's no more free than Alice is. Alice wants to leave and Dana tries to get her to stay. They get in a bit of an argument Alice tells Dana that Rufus would hang her if she talked to Rufus the way Dana does. A few days later Dana gives her some supplies including the laudanum and asks Rufus if he means to free Joe to which he says yes. Dana tells him to tell Alice that and when Dana tells Alice herself Alice says that Rufus's word doesn't mean anything. Dana manages to talk Alice into staying until the summer and word is getting out that Dana is teaching people to read. A field hand Sam approaches Dana to ask her if she can teach his kids to read and Dana is hesitant as she doesn't want him to get into trouble. A few days later Sam is sold for this interaction. Sam's family blames Dana, and Dana pleads Rufus not to sell him and in response to this he hits her for the first time making her  stumble back.

Dana then goes to the cookhouse and cuts her wrist. The suicide attempt is what brings her back into the present. Dana wakes up with her wounds bandaged. Kevin had to call a doctor friend to help.

JM:

This whole suicide thing is just so matter of fact. I suppose it sort of occurred to me that she might try something like that, but it felt so sudden and so stark. It was really effective that way. We're going to talk about the TV show a bit but I can have a picture of how they would want to dwell on this for a really long time and make her talk about it and make her obviously think about it. Here it's just, alright this has gone far enough, this is what I have to do and she just does it. She doesn't spend time telling you what she thinks about it or accusing anybody or doing anything other than just getting on with doing what she thinks she needs to do at that time.

Nate:

I'm curious to read the first manuscript of this which was I think she did the first draft in like '68 or something like that, so it was like around 10 years before the final novel. It'd be interesting to compare the two to see how they differ in ways like this. Is the original manuscript this matter of fact? Butler in her interviews talks a lot about the importance of becoming a professional writer and holding your craft and taking writing classes and things like that and presumably that's what she means is getting your novel to a really tight form where you can keep it at a quick pace and really contain these powerful scenes without kind of getting bogged down.

JM:

Yeah and it's really interesting because I am often a person who is like well give us more, give us more. But it just seems like here maybe she started with more and she cut it out and it's actually you can see how it might be better this way.

Nate:

Oh yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah I mean it's that statement of you know less is more and I think that's definitely the case for this book.

Nate:

It works really well with the subject matter that's for sure. I mean it keeps it very short and powerful without a lot of distractions and I think distractions really would take away from the story as we might see in a discussion a little bit. But fortunately Dana's suicide attempt doesn't kill her and Kevin's doctor friend comes into help but her friends are all quite concerned for her well-being and want her to see a psychiatrist especially if she does it again. Dana has been gone for three hours in the present which was eight months in the 1800s timeline and among other things she tells Kevin that Carrie told her that if she had let Rufus die everyone would be sold and separated and that might be a motivation for Dana continuing to help Rufus. They have 15 full days together in the present. The two have an easy time of being in each other's company again but Kevin's appearance has so much changed that Dana has to lie to his friends and says he's been sick.

Still Kevin has trouble readjusting to the present. He can't drive a car, and as they're talking Kevin asks Dana what Rufus did to her. Dana tells Kevin about her conditions and that Rufus didn't rape her but she would kill him if he did. In discussing Tess being led away in chains Kevin says: If your black ancestors had felt that way you wouldn't be here, and Dana responds with, "I told you when all this started that I didn't have their endurance. I still don't. Some of them will go through on struggling to survive no matter what. I'm not like that."

In preparation for the fourth of July party in 1976 the 250th anniversary of the founding of the country Dana is sucked back into time by herself. I think this taking place on the fourth of July is not only a very nice coincidence of Butler kind of holding on to the manuscript for a few years until the 250th anniversary of the country comes around, but it's a really good deliberate choice on the date as well. Presumably she had integrated this right before publication as this experience of slavery is just baked into the country's founding. So I think it is quite significant that the present timeline kind of catches up and ends on the fourth of July in 1976.

So she's now back in the 1800s and Rufus is shocked to see her and asks what she's doing there and Rufus leads her to a barn where Alice is hanging by the neck and Dana is the one to cut her down. Dana meets with Sarah and tells her that Alice is dead and Sarah says it's Rufus' fault. He made Alice commit suicide after he sold her children, both Joe and Hagar, as punishment for Alice trying to run away. Rufus is recklessly playing with a gun and Dana wonders if she was sent back in time to prevent him from shooting himself.

Rufus didn't sell Alice's children but rather there with Margaret and Baltimore. Rufus had sent them there as a way to trick Alice and Dana demands that Rufus free the children as it's the least that he can do. Alice's funeral is the next day, outdoors with everybody in attendance, including somebody yelling that she's going to hell for committing suicide. And after the dinner, Dana finds her way to the library to write out her feelings. Rufus retrieves his children from Baltimore and is starting to act more like a father figure to Joe, but in an uncomfortable and tense conversation, he tells Dana he can't think about her leaving him. Rufus tells Dana that his father thought that she was too dangerous because she knew too many white ways and Alice had agreed that Dana is a troublemaker. Dana says she is indeed black and can't harbor good feelings to someone who sells people. Rufus reiterates to Dana he wants her to stay and Dana says she can't. She has someone to go home to and Rufus says that he wishes he had killed Kevin. He tells Dana that she's so much like Alice and that they're two halves of the same whole and he grabs her and Dana is really creeped out and pushes him off and tells him not to do that again or she might make his dream of death real.

She grabs her knife from her bag and Rufus apologizes and says he's never been so lonely and tries to give her gifts to make up for it, but Dana can only think back to when Joe learned of his mother's death on his first day back on the plantation. Still, he resumes physically restraining her and Dana works up the energy to stab him multiple times. Nigel comes in as Rufus is dying, his hand is still on Dana's arm, and Dana is sucked back into the present with her arm stuck in the wall in the exact same spot where Rufus had grasped her. Now, this is one point that really confused me in one of the papers that we read in the Linh Hua paper. They argue that Nigel pulls Rufus off to deliberately prevent Rufus from traveling forward with her to the future to Maryland and argues that his agency of him moving Rufus off at the last minute is like...

JM:

There was no indication of that. I mean, he screamed Dana's name because he was thinking of her, right? I mean, yeah, and that was that's kind of something, you know, like that was the first thing that came into his head to worry about Dana. And that's, that was cool. But that's as far as she went with it. I think somebody was extrapolating something there that didn't really happen in the book.

Nate:

Yeah, I was kind of confused by this whole argument to me. I mean, many other papers comment that in the scene she's literally killing her own past. And I mean, it's it's pretty straightforward. And I took the loss of her arm and Rufus is kind of pulling it off as her past, you know, literally disfiguring her in the present. You know, the issue of her identity and ancestry being...

JM:

It's like it's almost a sacrifice, but it's not really a traditional sacrifice. But it's like, you know, it's like, this is this is the toll that the past has placed on people like me.

Nate:

Right. Exactly.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And I know that in one of the interviews, Butler is very explicit about that. She mentions that this was, she lost her arm because no one in that period came out of it whole. And if Dana was supposed to live through this and she was supposed to confront this past, she couldn't come out of that whole. She had to. That was the way that she ended up because she couldn't just leave that behind unscathed.

Nate:

Right. And again, that ties in the issue of ancestral memory and identity and all that stuff. And I think it's a really incredibly well done and powerful scene and the way she ties the ending to the beginning of the book. And I think it is just a really excellent way of plotting out the novel just from, you know, sucking the reader in but making this final point really that much more powerful and driving it home.

JM:

Yes. So what happens in the epilogue, Nate?

Nate:

So in the epilogue, we're in the present. Kevin and Dana fly to Maryland to look for the house and Rufus' grave. And research says that the newspaper reports that Rufus had died in a house fire. Dana tells Kevin that Rufus would not have made a will freeing all the slaves as it would be an invitation to his murder. And the newspaper indicates that virtually all the slaves were sold off after his death.

JM:

Yeah. And doesn't that tell you something? It would be an invitation to murder if you did that. Like, yeah, wow. Maybe that's a bad idea.

Nate:

Yeah. There's a really good passage here that I think is a good way to end it. And she says: "I touched the scar Tom Weylin's boot had left in my face, touched my empty left sleeve. I know, I repeated, why did I even want to come here? You think I would have had enough of the past? You probably needed to come for the same reason I did, he shrugged, to try to understand, to touch solid evidence that those people existed, to reassure yourself that you're sane." And the novel kind of leaves us up on this note of our connection with the past and living it.

(tense, simple piano melody which crashes into a wall of noise that grows increasingly harsh)

spoiler general discussion, tv show discussion

JM:

Kevin says, though, the boy is dead, then I guess Rufus was always the boy.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Now, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I wasn't again, sometimes it's possible to perceive something in multiple levels. And I'm not necessarily dead set on this, but there was there was maybe something a little bit unsatisfying in like, not in a Butler did something unsatisfying, but you know, like, yeah, I mean, everything is back to normal. Whoa, that's awesome. Like, I don't know. It was just kind of, you know, like, he's like the boy is dead. And it kind of makes me think, well, I mean, it really does seem like they and Kevin care for each other a lot. They do have a nice relationship. But sometimes he maybe doesn't really get it.

Nate:

Well, he can't get it. I think that's a part of it.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

That's something that only Dana can get.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And I think you get that sense when they're on that third time back when Kevin still hasn't really he's able to not fully but to kind of feel less of the horror of what's going on than Dana is.

JM:

Yeah, it's like to him it was just like this crazy, I mean, obviously he spent a lot of time there. So we got to see how things were for himself. And I think still a part of him is like, Oh, you know, it's this crazy guy and his family and this bullshit that trapped Dana. And it's so much worse than that. And I think that's what like, that's what she's sort of getting at. And that's what maybe Kevin doesn't get. And I think that one of those papers and again, we'll put in the citations in the in the blog thing, but was basically talking a lot about Kevin and how how their relationship is less than ideal. And it is kind of it bothered me a little bit because the fact that the two of them did seem to have a rapport like it meant a little bit of something to me when I was reading the book.

Nate:

I like the relationship a lot. And I guess we'll talk about a bit how the TV show changes it.  That they were both writers who identified with the same professional struggles, and they kind of built on those shared experiences and shared interests to build this relationship they have with one another.

JM:

Yeah. So you think that Butler was trying to be positive with it?

Nate:

She absolutely was.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

And I think that was a very deliberate choice, especially making them an interracial couple. And I think Butler was commenting on the attitudes of the black separatist community at the time, and again, she took her criticisms of that community a lot different than Schuyler did, but she felt that working with white people was the way to go forward, not just like separating and becoming a entity that just doesn't interact or mix with white people at all.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think we see that when the families of both of the characters disapprove of their relationship, both the Kevin's white relatives and Dana's black relatives. And we see that they're both wrong. They're supposed to be treated as, you know, that's very outdated ideas and not ideas we're supposed to approve of.

JM:

Yeah. Definitely. I think while I was reading it, I was kind of wondering sometimes about like what she was trying to say by implying that Kevin just assumed that she would do certain things or she would like, I guess everybody's a part of their system, right, in their own way. And there did seem to be some vilification of Kevin and their relationship in some of the work around the novel. And I found it to be a really interesting and surprising take. Like I generally viewed it to be a positive relationship as well.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

And then there was just like basically saying that like she was subservient to Kevin's wishes all the time and even in like her own time, she couldn't really separate herself from her husband enough to not value his trauma over hers and that kind of thing. I don't know.

I think it's that's the kind of like the second wave feminist view of the novel and it's not even necessarily criticizing Butler, but perhaps it's misunderstanding her motivations for writing the relationship because I mean, I think she doesn't make Kevin perfect, and nobody in this novel is perfect, And that's kind of like part of the essential takeaway from it. But yeah, and he does, he says things sometimes without thinking. I don't know, like they're having this discussion later on in like when they're spending time in the 1800s together. And Kevin's like, Well, you know, I mean, it's not really what I thought it would be right because he thought it would be this like really brutal institution. And he's like to him, he kind of sees, Oh, you know, maybe Tom's, maybe Tom's not so bad, you know, like maybe he like he doesn't he's pretty fair because he doesn't see the whippings and he doesn't see the the other side of it and he doesn't experience what Dana experiences. And Dana's like, yeah, all these things that you say about Tom might in a way be true, but that doesn't change the fact that this is the situation that we are living in. And Kevin is an enlightened person from the 70s who's pretty progressive. And, you know, I mean, he's a reasonable person, but he still doesn't quite, I guess, grasp the situation the way Dana does. But I don't think Butler is condemning condemning him for that. Like, I don't think Butler is saying that he's an irredeemable person or somehow like unworthy of Dana's attention. I don't know, I wanted to read positives into the relationship.

So maybe I'm not as cynical as I thought that I was, but I don't know.

Gretchen:

Well, I think what's really interesting with them, is I think what's interesting about the relationship is there are these multiple points in the novel where Kevin and Rufus are very much paralleled with each other. We get these moments when they say something to Dana that echoes each other and there are those moments when, and of course, the idea that Rufus kind of wants the place of Kevin, he wants to be with Dana. And he's kind of the his double in the way that Dana and Alice are seen to be doubles. And I think that what we see with with Kevin, though, is obviously the narrative, of course, is favoring Kevin over Rufus. He's the one that Dana really wants to be with. She's only connected to Rufus against her will, where she actively chooses Kevin.

JM:

Yeah, that's very true.

Nate:

Kevin feels like it's, I think, a mature and understanding thing that he tells Dana that he can't ever really put himself in her shoes, you know, like he can empathize with her and be there for her, but he's not living the experiences that Dana is.

Gretchen:

Yeah, he's not ignorant of that fact.

Nate:

Right, exactly.

Gretchen:

And acknowledges it.

Nate:

Yeah, right. Whereas Rufus just can't understand at all.

JM:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. He doesn't even try to understand.

Nate:

No, yeah.

JM:

The way Rufus loves and the way Kevin loves, I mean, obviously, those two are in a way foils to each other, right? Like Rufus is the white boy from the past with mommy issues. Kevin is not perfect, but he knows how to love and he understands in his way and they do seem to help each other. And I definitely like reading what some people had to say about this relationship. And I'm like, well, they interpreted it very differently than I did. But is that just because I'm a white man? I don't know. I don't know. But that's just one of those things that people take different things away from this. And I don't know, it's part of the things that makes it powerful because...

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's what Butler intended.

Nate:

Right. Yeah. One thing that I thought was interesting that one of the papers pointed out that I didn't pick up on at all is that there's pretty much no religion in this novel whatsoever.

JM:

No, not really.

Nate:

There's a high religiosity of pretty much everybody at the time, both the plantation owners and the slaves. There's almost no church stuff here.

JM:

There is the mention of the priest that comes that Tom had brought in at some point.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Everybody loved him. He was cool somehow. And I can't remember exactly what...

Gretchen:

Yeah, because he would come and he would give sermons, but he wouldn't say any... He would say that he would tell verses that were basically pro-slavery or could be interpreted as pro-slavery.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And he was like handing out that he had like a bunch of kids. Like, he was like, I don't know, was he handing out stuff to the kids or something like that?

Gretchen:

Handing out candy or something?

JM:

Yeah. But other than that, no, there isn't... Nobody really talks that much about god. It's certainly not a driving force in any of their lives.

Nate:

No. Yeah, but that was something interesting that when the paper mentioned it, it was like, yeah, that's totally right. I did not pick up on that at all when I was reading this. Yeah.

Gretchen:

They do mention a couple of times Margaret reading the Bible and wanting the Bible read to her, but it's not a big...

JM:

Margaret likes to have the Bible read.

Gretchen:

It's not... It's something that's just... Yeah. Yeah. It's not really a big deal.

JM:

Yeah, I think when Margaret likes the Bible, she mostly just likes the noise of the Bible. Like, just that comforting noise of religiosity in the background somewhere. I don't know. That's the impression I get anyway. I don't get the impression that Margaret really cares about theology one way or the other. But yeah, I wanted to talk about Rufus and his, like, because this is definitely something that hasn't changed at all in terms of... Even a lot of people today who are otherwise enlightened can't help but feel this kind of weird, twisted love sensation that Rufus feels where it's like... Yeah, you really feel like you love someone, but it's entirely self-motivated. It's like... Dana said several times that she has no doubt that Rufus, in his way, loves Alice very much. And if everything went awesomely and perfectly smoothly, he would probably give her everything she wanted and things would be alright. But because of the circumstances being the way they are and him being the way he is, where it's like... Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't she want me as much as I want her? Like, that doesn't make sense. It's just so frustrating to have to deal with something like that.

Yeah. So... And Dana... I don't know, Dana is just like... Even when he says, you and Alice are almost the same person. And I don't know, it's my transformation of viewpoint with Rufus. At first, he was the character that was kind of, you know, the one that I was relating to a little bit, because... I don't know, it's just like, I couldn't help but do so. And... Later on, you know, I was just like, oh, Rufus is alright, and then I'm changing my notes and being like, wait a minute, Rufus is horrible.

Nate:

And he gets progressively worse too. Like, his relationship with Alice when they're kids is kind of innocent, but then a few years later, he's like sexually assaulting her and then...

JM:

He's like, it doesn't make sense that she said no. There must have been something wrong with her at the time.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

This kind of, I don't know, yeah, this attitude.

Gretchen:

I think it's fitting in with this, it's a possessive love. He wants to possess people. He wants to possess Alice and he wants to possess Dana. He doesn't want to let them go.

Nate:

And that's really the only way he knows is viewing people as property. And when you view people as property, you're going to have that sense of entitlement. And when you don't get your way and you're a bratty little kid, you're going to lash out and throw temper tantrums. And that's really what he does as an adult too. He's kind of a bratty little kid at heart.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Never outgrew it.

JM:

Yeah. So I guess, how pessimistic do we think this work is regarding, like, I don't know, any notions of futurism or, I guess, prediction that Butler might have had? Because definitely that, again, seems to be, there's so many people trying to put their own slant on this work, which is really interesting. I mean, it's also a little bit frustrating sometimes because you're like, well, where does that come from? Wow. I don't know. But I mean, I don't know that this book is necessarily trying to be optimistic or pessimistic. But again, like, it's just really interesting how when I read the epilogue, I was a little bit like, I don't think she entirely wants to, I mean, obviously, Dana herself is thinking at this point, why did I even come here? Like, why did I even want to find out these things? It's not good. Like, nothing good came of it. And she feels kind of bitter about it. And she feels kind of like not happy. And Kevin's just like, hey, don't worry, the boy's dead. Like, you know, again, it's just kind of, it's just really, it is quite powerful. Like that, and the way the last part ends with the stabbing and like, just, it is kind of grim in a way. And it does make me worry a little bit about the future. So, yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I think it's, in a sense, realistically pessimistic, but hopeful at the same time.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

I mean, Dana survives. I mean, she's disfigured, but she survives. She can live another day and the rest of her life. I mean, it might be changed and she'll have this heavy cloud over her. But she gets through. And I think that's kind of the point that Butler is trying to make ultimately.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think there's also something that can be said in the structure of the novel, because it is circular. We start with the ending, but there is the epilogue. So even though there seems to be a cycle, the epilogue kind of symbolizes a closure and it's almost like they're moving past that. Of course, Dana doesn't come out of that unscathed, but she does, as you said, Nate, she survives it.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, I think beginning it that way was a really smart thing. And I think that just having the patience to go with it and be like, yeah, all right, I accept that she knows what she's doing, Butler knows what she's doing, that is, and bringing me to where I need to be to feel connected is something that happens really succinctly and really tightly. And it's really good starting it that way. Because yeah, for sure, it's intriguing. You want to know how did this happen to her? And there's no mystery as to the what of what's happening to her really. Like she's traveled back in time. We know that. I mean, when I started my summary bit, I pretty much assumed that everybody who was listening already knew that this was a book about a woman who traveled into the past and Butler, you know, doesn't she spend time analyzing that, or going into how that happens, its just right there at the beginning, and Kevin, in his opening scenes with her, those scenes do a lot towards making me feel positive about their relationship, because it does seem like him being there for her is a good thing for her at that time and she really needs that and I don't think Butler wants any of us to be ashamed of that or for her for Dana to feel shame for that, it's an interesting, it's an interesting question And one of the other ones that seems to be a thing is how this actually fits into science fiction.

Nate:

Yes the genre question.

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

Right, and one of the other feminist takes on this kind of science fiction seems to be that making it in a way anti science is making a statement and that the fact that she denies a scientific explanation and the book almost repels the idea of there being one is in fact in its own way a feminist statement. I don't know what we think of that. I was a little bit, I mean I probably haven't done enough reading into the theory and stuff like that. I kind of understood it's like it's important to carve out your own space, but in another way, I'm like I feel like a better thing to do would be to put women in positions of science like not necessarily place yourself against something like science because it's not like just a religion or something like that. I don't know what you guys think about about that kind of thing, but it's just it was different to me trying to get my head around that and understand it I think I did but it was also like well science is a good thing and science is not only that but it's like understanding the whole world around us so is putting yourself in a position against that necessarily a good thing, but I don't know it's just another way to try to frame a novel like this where, yeah in a genre perspective, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I think a similar thing came up in that Bose paper we looked at where the author tried to argue that Bose was like being critical of Western science fiction in the story and like I wasn't entirely on board with that argument, just as I'm not entirely on board with the argument in regards to "Kindred", especially as Butler herself did not consider this as a work of science fiction I mean even though we can recognize some obvious science fiction tropes in the story of stuff that we you know covered before and are gonna cover in the future I think it does relate to the genre in an interesting way. One of the papers, I forget which one it was, kind of contrast how the science fiction tropes and the tropes that you see in the slave narratives kind of play on one another and kind of contradict each other in certain ways that kind of subverts the expectations of either genre. But I think it is important to note here when you're making claims like that about science and the rejection of science is that Butler just did not consider this as science fiction novel. So I mean like it's something she was trying to subvert science fiction that just didn't seem to be part of her thinking whatsoever.

Gretchen:

And the reason she as she claims in one of her interviews, the very reason she doesn't consider this science fiction is because that makes there is no explanation right for Dana's time travel. So she very much believed that science fiction should include science and from what I have heard about her other novels and from what I've read, she does include science and she's actively does that in her other works.

Nate:

Yeah, I'd really like to read her other works at some point on the podcast. From what I understand they deal more like weird alien biology and stuff like that which I thin is really interestingk..

Gretchen:

Yeah, she seemed very interested in biological questions and stuff like that.

Nate:

Yeah, and in a way that kind of plays out here, but I could see that again playing out very interestingly in an alien world where you're just kind of shedding the entire society we're familiar with and it's kind of building from the ground up. But yeah, interesting questions for sure.

Gretchen:

I did just want to mention that one thing that I learned about the book is this is Butler's fourth novel, and she originally had in mind writing this as part of the series she was writing other books for at the time, the Patternist series But she realized as she as the concept developed it would work better as a standalone.

JM:

Oh, so she, what she was? What was she planning to incorporate in it?

Gretchen:

I did not see the interview wasn't very clear on what she originally planned, she just mentioned that when she first got the idea she had originally planned for it to be part of the series I don't know how much, I'm sure it changed quite a bit from that initial concept, but I think that's very interesting. I think that part of that might have been because she realized the direction she wanted to go would be a less scientific bend.

Nate:

It is kind of interesting I was reading that "Kindred" was only one of two of her standalone novels that she preferred to write novels in these series which, I guess some authors do but again it's not really something that we've covered on the podcast before somebody who writes a lot of these I guess novel series, and that's like primarily what they do then again.

JM:

We haven't really talked about Tolkien and he was doing that pretty early on.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, I guess he did consider Lord of the Rings to be one book. It's just too physically large to publish.

JM:

Yeah, but it also ties in with the Hobbit and a whole bunch of other stuff. But yeah, I know it is it is different for us for sure because so far I don't think we've done any writers except maybe Williamson and Brackett, and I guess Lovecraft arguably, maybe, who like kind of wrote continuous kind of narratives that fit in several stories into one kind of scheme but so yeah, I mean and this is a first for us in so many ways. I think we are jumping the gun a little bit in terms of like the development of time travel narratives, but that's fine because we're going to go and cover several of them like after this episode, very soon.

Gretchen:

Yeah, go back in time.

JM:

Yeah Yeah So I don't mean like this. This is really even though none of them are mentioned and like it could be argued that Butler was not influenced by any of those things and I wouldn't necessarily disbelieve you, but by this point there have been many many stories about people traveling into the past and encountering ... whatever right ...  and usually they were not as much based on the slave narratives of people who were actually enslaved and treated as property and that makes it kind of an obvious thing to do in a way. It makes sense that you would want to tell a story like this from from perspective of somebody in the modern times and some of the critical work does talk about other examples. There are many narratives that are kind of of this type and telling some kind of historical like using history to kind of relate to the present and the future and and show how they're connected together because I do think there's definitely a tendency among I guess people of all classes and groups to kind of deny the impact of history or somehow like not really be able to acknowledge it in the way that perhaps it should be acknowledged.

Nate:

Or kind of romanticize it. And I think a lot of the time travel stories that are written up to this point of, you know Doctor Who is on like what season 14 by by this time or something like that so I mean even with like genre TV, you know, it's pretty well worn ground, but I think that one point that novel does raise is that the violence and horror of the period, experienced firsthand, it's nothing like we see on TV or read about in the novel.

JM:

And Dana points that out really early on.

Gretchen:

Yeah

Nate:

And like we're so desensitized to the modern media landscape of just people killing each other all the time in TV and movies and in literature and on the radio and stuff like that but when you see this kind of violence firsthand when it's directed against you firsthand it takes on a totally different meaning. And one of the papers remarked that the pain that the slaves experienced is is experienced by Dana, and thus kind of experienced by the reader who shares Dana's point of view, and an attempt to bring the reader back into that pain and it's a powerful statement and I think that she really is effective at conveying the horror of the situation and just how awful everything is.  It doesn't romanticize the violence at all even though we want to see the bad guy, I mean to the extent that there are bad guys in the story: people like Rufus and Tom, you know, kind of get what's coming to them when you see them act as horrible people. It just doesn't feel like a cheering moment or whatever when Dana stabs Rufus to death, it's just as horrible as anything else in the book.

Gretchen:

Yeah. And I thought, I... I can't remember. I think I might have read this in one of the reviews of the TV show, that someone made this comment where in the book Dana undergoes the kind of desensitization that readers of these kinds of narratives can go through because it takes much more as the book goes on for her to believe that she's going to die, like the first time that she's exposed, that she almost goes back when something runs across her foot during her second visit, because she thinks it's something dangerous, but as she grows more accustomed to the time as she kind of acclimates to the time and takes on some of its ideas and that she has to for survival, she becomes more aware of how much she can survive and that's a negative there where she wants to leave there are times when she really wants to think she's going to die so she can leave but she just can't believe it.

JM:

Yeah, I definitely I definitely know what you mean by that like it definitely seems like everything that's like a positive gain for her also has a negative almost like a negative side to it, and it really makes you question everything that you think about like the situation and how the characters are interacting with each other and stuff like that. And it's so poignant but like in a way that's not ... It's not overly emotional and it's not like really pushing anything at you but just telling you how things were and how things are and, I don't know I find it I find it all very admirable and I'm not really even sure. It's so unlike a lot of the things that we've done in the podcast until now, and I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of stuff going forward, where people really, really, really are trying to I mean also the fact that we're in the early 21st century and not like the early 1800s makes a big difference as well because the problems that people have that they write about are the problems that we have now and although some of the utopias and different things that we've read that are not like pulp adventure stories from the past, they have problems we can identify with they're not necessarily the same as our problems. So now we're getting to a point where it really feels like the material is getting kind of heavier in a way.

Nate:

Yeah, so I think that's all I had on the the non-spoiler novel. I don't I don't know if you guys had anything else before we get into the TV show?

JM:

Well, I mean I was just gonna you know kind of segue into that and the changes that we think they decided to make, I guess, to the story and why they might have done those things. So we didn't know that this show was coming when we did this we we planned to do this episode.

Nate:

Yeah, this seems to happen a lot to us like as soon as we are done reading or something like that like something just like totally comes out of left field that kind of makes us scramble and reevaluate...

JM:

One of those really weird coincidences that happens to you in life sometimes I guess.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

But yeah, I think we were all done reading the novel when we found out that this was like a TV show premiering soon.

JM:

Yeah, I can't remember where I saw it. I saw it posted somewhere or somebody brought it up on some I can't remember, and I'm like oh wow there's a "Kindred" TV show.

Nate:

Yeah, so this is on Hulu on FX or FX on Hulu or something like that. There's some relationship between the two networks, but I think you can watch it on Hulu. So it's there.

Gretchen:

I do leech off of my friend's Hulu and I did watch the ...  I only watched the first episode but I did watch it on there.

Nate:

Yeah so, I don't know, like I guess to compliment it off the bat the acting in the TV show is mostly really good And it generally looks fine though some of the outdoor scenes during the 1800s timeline look greenscreened and it does make it feel a bit off in places. I think the old Shaw Brothers soundstage approach looks a little better if you can't actually get people to like hang out in the woods.

JM:

Why do you think they they felt they had to use that?

Nate:

It just might be difficult shooting on location, especially like in the winter scene or something like that, you know, was just like difficult scouting out areas. I don't know how much time they had for filming I think they actually filmed the majority of this during the summer. I was reading a bit about the production details and it seemed to come together like pretty quickly. They had shot the pilot episode like late last year and, then I think shot the other seven episodes like in the summer this year sometime, so it seems like the filming was more...

JM:

We're in 2023 now, but yeah, I see...

Nate:

Yeah, okay, right. Yeah, I guess yeah, right. Yeah, so I think I guess the pilot was shot in late 2021 and then most of the other seven episodes were shot in mid 2022 ish, but yeah, they make a lot of changes to the material, and not, I don't think, in a good way. They add a whole bunch of plot lines. I should say I only watched up to episode three though. I did skim around the...

JM:

The first two episodes are fine.

Nate:

 yeah.

JM:

Gretchen you watched the first episode, right?

Gretchen:

I watched the first episode and then I got a bit discouraged and didn't feel like watching the rest, but I I did look up reviews for it, and some interviews with the creator of it, Brendan Jacobs Jenkins? Jenkins Jacobs?

Nate:

Yeah. That's the person that did the screenplay adaptation.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

 and I don't know. The the stuff they added just feels like totally unnecessary, and I think the reason they added all this stuff is to pad out the series so they could potentially have like seasons of it.

JM:

Yeah, that's what I thought too.

Nate:

Yeah It just feels like it muddles the plot way too much and as tight as the Butler novel was like I think it's that way for a reason.

JM:

 yeah, it's kind of exasperating because like you kind of want a television adaptation of a book to be tighter in a way.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Right, and this is like, I don't know this I think this is a maybe a problem endemic to modern streaming television entertainment. Like it's just they they want to adapt stories, but stretch them out as long as they possibly can so that people will keep watching everything.

Gretchen:

Milk it for everything it's worth.

Nate:

Yeah, and I guess the show did air the entire season at once so they are intending people to like binge it all episodes eight episodes at a time yeah, you know, I'm whatever. I guess that's the current business model. But even with that in mind like there are some changes to the material that I just really didn't like. I mean, it does not open up with Dana losing her arm, which I think is a major faulting of it. I mean, that's just such a good opener and just really sucks you right in I thought the way they opened up is kind of silly.

JM:

I feel like the people who made this wrote the script maybe had the same kind of feeling of dislocation that I did when I started the book and instead of like Just reading on and coming to terms with it where they were like, oh, we have to solve this problem and like make it so it's not like that for the audience. I don't know. It's just weird. I mean that doesn't necessarily even tie in with the arm thing because they could have still done that and made it work.

Gretchen:

I don't know why they decided to have a completely different hook when the hook from the book is already really well done, in my opinion. I don't know what the need was for something different.

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, so the hook in the show, right is that she's she's starting out, the first episode I didn't watch with audio description, so I kind of maybe missed a couple things, but I think that it started out with her having the bag that she was supposed to take with her like she was all getting set up to go or something like that and, is like, you know, what's she doing? What what what is happening with this woman, right? I think she had just woken up from it or something in the beginning?

Nate:

Yeah, the opening scene is an added thing of even earlier when she travels back. So Rufus is an infant and he's like sleeping on his stomach. I guess gonna suffocate or whatever so Dana flips him over and then she encounters somebody who like looks a lot like her mother and I just took that as like the show doing something like the novel does where you know Dana physically resembles Alice. So okay, this is one of her ancestors that physically resemble her because it's like her great great great great grandmother or whatever, but no it is actually her mother and her mother is a time traveler too. (collective groans)

Nate: Come on.

JM:

And she's throughout the show. Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah I that actually was, uh, because that's the very end of the first episode and that's what I decided not to keep going.

JM:

So I made it to past episode four and she becomes more and more like that is more and more of a thing as the story goes on.

Gretchen and Nate:

(sigh)

JM:

Yeah they really, really, they really start going to town with their changes in episode three. Episode two, I thought was fine.  It actually followed the opening like the part where Kevin, he first goes there with her right and and it's like a lot of the beats from the book are there. The ending of the episode was kind of nice and melancholy and I liked the way that they did that and then episode three happened and it was all like... oh.

Nate:

Yeah. So the plot of episode two is basically the plot line where Rufus falls out of the tree and breaks his leg, and episode two takes you almost to the point where Dana's busted giving Carrie books. Then episode three just like completely shifts directions, and we get this like weird party with like Tom Weylin's gay neighbor, who's like of course he's a sexual predator because he's gay. It's just...

JM:

Yeah, isn't he like a clergyman or something or is that somebody else?

Nate:

Something like that.

JM:

Yeah, so he's a predatory gay priest. He's a predatory gay priest.

Nate:

Yeah, it's... I don't know. It's a really dumb decision.

Gretchen:

Did they also I believe it was in one of the reviews, did they they villainize sarah, right?

Nate:

So I didn't actually get to that point, Sarah is just like kind of a very minor character that you see in like one or two scenes in episode three. I don't know if she plays a bigger role later on, but it's possible. The way they bring in some of like the plot points that Dana immediately knows is like as cliffhangers laying around, like something you don't see Alice until the end of episode three. I, again, poked around in the the last episode, episode eight, to see what the cliffhanger at the end of the season is, and the cliffhanger at the end of the season is: Dana figures out that it's Alice who's her ancestor and not Carrie and it's like, like why are you structuring it this way like... ugh...

JM:

Yeah, it's so much less good.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, I mean the stakes feel like way less for Dana like it almost feels like a moderate inconvenience rather than like some existential necessity that's like wrapped in this like personal horror. Like Dana feels like so much more detached from the situation than she is in the novel. It just feels like so more impersonal I guess by structuring these events this way even though like she sees her mother and stuff...

JM:

Yeah, and it's just so weird how they like focus in the beginning on how she's like an independent modern woman who's just bought her own house.

Nate:

From a wealthy family too like she has several million dollars.

JM:

Yeah It's it's really weird.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Now my friend who is the person I leach Hulu off of, she actually did watch the entire series.

JM:

Yeah, so did she have any other comments on it?

Gretchen:

She really did she was very disappointed in it, and she was also the person who read "Kindred" because I recommended it to her. So she was excited to see this and she thought it did, well first she was very surprised to find out that it's not a limited mini series that it was going to continue, which I also don't like at all. And I do want to say that I was looking at like I said, I was looking at some interviews with the creator, the screenwriter, and they asked about that and he gave this response that he wanted to give the characters more time to grow, and he wanted to develop the situation further. And I would like to believe that, if they didn't add all of these new plot lines, right? Which feels like it kind of defeats the purpose, and when thinking about this series, I saw a couple of comparisons to it, and I have to think of it too, because it's the other like big Hulu literary adaptation and that's Handmaid's Tale. And I think something that's very interesting is you know Handmaid's Tale, the first season is the book, and then the rest of the series after that is like, the world, but it's you know, not it's not the book. And I think they realize that they they can't do that with "Kindred" because the book is the story. There's no world after that to extrapolate from, so it's almost like in order to have a similar series to Handmaid's Tale.

JM:

So they just want to make it longer.

Gretchen:

Yeah, they want to make it longer and pad it out so that they can have I think something similar to Handmaid's Tale and have a longer, a full-length series from it.

JM:

Yeah, and I'm afraid I'm afraid that's just the way that a lot of modern like, these TV shows that are serialized now feel to me is that it just seems like they just keep introducing stuff so that they can make it go on longer. How entertaining is that stuff will determine how well you like the show. It's a lot of the stuff that they're introducing in "Kindred" feels a little bit goofy, compared to what the story needs like especially the stuff with the neighbor.

Nate:

Yeah, right?

Gretchen:

I feel like there it doesn't seem like there is a lot of respect for the source material. It doesn't sound like they get what Butler is trying to say, or at least they don't think the audience will understand what Butler is trying to say or something. They keep making these changes and adding more stuff that doesn't matter.

Nate:

Yeah, and I feel like it just obfuscates it more like it just makes it more confusing and muddled than it would be if they just like wrote it word for word. And they didn't even need to adapt Butler word for word, you know, they could have easily brought this into the present day and made, you know, minor changes here and there for television and still kept all the beats of the novel and done it in a satisfactory way. But I mean even changing the relationship between Dana and Kevin. Kevin is like not a person who shares Dana's interests and they both have like this shared connection with literature, He's just like some guy.  they met at a bar and they have sex and then like the next day they're going back in time together and it's like, really? Like...

JM:

I mean he seems all right, but yeah.

Nate:

I mean like it changes the nature of their relationship completely.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Nate:

 Like there's no reason why Kevin would stick around. I mean they, Kevin goes back in time with her and then like unlike the novel he doesn't get stuck there at least at this point anyway, he does like a little later on but Kevin comes back in the present, and if like they had just met for a casual hookup and he gets sent back into 1800s Maryland, wouldn't he just be like "all right, well like, you know, good luck with that one"? Like there's no motivation for him to stick around or do any of this. But I mean the fact that they're married in the novel and that they have this like connection with one another, it makes a lot more sense.

Gretchen:

When I was talking about Kevin earlier, I mentioned the links that Dana has to both Kevin and to Rufus, and how that relationship, you know, they they are supposed to be these foils to each other, and that just doesn't work if you know, Kevin is just some guy she met a couple days ago.

Nate:

Yeah, right.

JM:

Yeah I think that maybe part of the thing was they wanted to show their relationship growing and they wanted that to be a hook for the show, I think that that's probably a part of it. It does seem like the people that did not read the book and don't know the book, in general those people who reviewed the show like it better than the people that read it.

Nate:

Yeah, that is something I did notice.

JM:

I think that they wanted to show Kevin and Dana at the beginning, and they didn't want to show it in a way that was non-linear, and they didn't want to be like "Hey..."

Gretchen:

Didn't want to confuse the viewers.

JM:

Here's a bunch of other stuff, now We'll take you back and show you how they met and how they did all this. Yeah, you know, yeah I mean, I don't think it is essential necessarily that they be both writers who share similar interests. But it does help. I mean it helps in the book and it makes it make sense that they are together even though, yeah, like their families don't necessarily think they should be and you know, there's different things there that might make might it seem like maybe they shouldn't be together, but they are and that has to mean something in the book but the show seems to want to build on something else, and I think it's really just trying to be a drama of a person who passes back and forth between nowadays and the early 1800s. Like I think it's just trying to be this ongoing drama series that's going to present these family issues and connections over a very very long period of time if they have their way. Maybe maybe it'll go on for six or seven seasons. You know, It'll be the kind of the Weylin family chronicles, I don't know somehow I feel like yeah, that's missing the point of the book, I mean if, you the question is right, you're doing an adaptation: How do you want to treat the source material? There have been some things coming out lately about people that were writing for adaptations who did not respect the source material and I would not necessarily even say this or believe it if it wasn't true, but like apparently the creators of the Witcher TV show, like the people that actually wrote the scripts, some of them are actively on paper as saying that they do not like the source material and they don't respect it and so the changes they make obviously piss off the fans of the original source material a lot because they don't like they have very obvious scorn for it to begin with.

Nate:

I think Verhoven said something along the lines of that. He didn't read "Starship Troopers" and thought it was really boring.

JM:

Yeah, I mean that was kind of genius, but that movie is also kind of hard to watch. I don't know but yeah.

Gretchen:

That it satirizes the novel, doesn't it?

Nate:

It does. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah the novel is very like flirting with fascism and I think Verhoven is very much not. Yeah, a big difference. I guess one other nitpicky thing I want to mention about the "Kindred" TV show is it's not necessarily unique to "Kindred", or maybe more of a factor of modern TV, but production-wise everything feels like way too new in the show. So Kevin has this like old car, that's kind of like a visual gag that he's driving around, but it's like totally brand new condition. It's like waxed, it's all shiny and stuff. Likewise in the present, he's wearing this X-ray Spex t-shirt over the course of a few days that's like in brand new condition. It's not like the worn t-shirt you'd expect some...

JM:

I don't hear about any X-ray Spex reunion tour.

Nate:

Yeah. But it seems like the shirt was specifically selected for the show by like the wardrober or whatever and feels more like a deliberate set piece, and not something the character would naturally be wearing like the actor has to change into a Kevin costume or something like that. You know that's just kind of I don't know like the way some of that's put together, it feels ...

JM:

Artificial.

Nate:

Yeah, again, it's not unique to "Kindred., but yeah, it feels artificial. There's this British costume drama I was watching for a bit, "Victoria", that came out a couple years ago very much felt the same way.

JM:

Yeah, that's that's kind of interesting because I mean it's not that far in our past, right? We should be able to make people seem authentic, but yeah, yeah, I don't know Yeah, I don't know. I mean it's pretty much. Yeah, pretty much all I have to say about it. I mean the performances do seem good, but it's it's way too padded out. But I mean again, I guess it depends on how you see adaptations and how they should be done. I mean I I feel like a movie version of this would be fine, right? And you know that do a do a really tight awesome powerful film and you would do what you need to do. It doesn't have to be a 16 part, 24 part television series, but...

Nate:

No, I mean the novel's not super long. I mean you could probably read this in two or three sittings if if you really wanted to yeah, maybe even cover to cover if you got a afternoon to kill.

Gretchen:

I think when I first read it it was I think two or three days, I sat down and read it continuously during those days. So it's and again like we were saying it's very easy to read, it's very tight, which the adaptation doesn't seem to get, and yeah even like it's heavy in subject matter, but the prose you're able to really get into it.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean I feel like a High schooler or an intelligent middle schooler would have no trouble understanding the novel and what's going on. It's definitely not a difficult read in that sense, but the subject matter makes it much more so.

JM:

Yeah, I mean like I was you know, we were kind of indicating earlier I mean a lot of the stuff we've done on the podcast up to this point has been fun adventure things and this is definitely not that so I mean, but I think that people will know and should know about what they're getting into when you read something like this, and it is it's definitely beneficial, I feel, to like, I definitely feel like I've benefited from reading it.

Nate:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, this is a great novel and I can wholeheartedly recommend it And this was a great pick for the first host choice I think it fits in really well with the time frame of the podcast and what we're going to be doing next in 2023.

Gretchen:

I'm glad I chose well.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, a really good choice. I definitely wanted to read more Butler for a while I feel like I read one of the Pattern Master books when I was younger, but the thing is I can't remember for sure. I feel like I did. Because I I feel like I have a vague impression of a book that sounds like that plotline, and it's just one of those things where I think I listen to it on audio, and I just don't remember what it was, but I also read the story "Bloodchild", which I really, really, liked and now I've read "Kindred" which was amazing and I definitely want to read more of her science fiction, like more science fiction oriented work, as well as "Wild Seed", which is supposed to tie in with African mythology, as well as I think other aspects of African culture. So it sounds really good and interesting and yeah, like the Parable books and especially, what's the other series called exogenesis, or something like that?

Gretchen:

Yeah, Xenogenesis.

JM:

Yeah, that that sounds really really interesting and it sounds almost like "Bloodchild" like, like it sounds almost like a more long-form I guess exploration of the concepts of "Bloodchild" which are like essentially your species is biologically beholden to another race, and they've not only colonized you, but they've also actually colonized your bodies and use them for their own purposes and you have a relationship with them that's like not all negative, and that's kind of one of the things, you know that she she portrays a little bit in "Kindred": that somebody like Rufus can perfectly happily throw an awesome party for the slaves that everything will be great, you know, it's like it's not all brutality and degradation and that almost makes it more troubling, right, because you don't always know how to take things. Definitely, "Bloodchild" is one of those stories where part of the horror aspect of it is that there are certain aspects of the relationship that sound parasitic, but other parts that seem more positive. And you're, like, you don't quite always know how you're supposed to take things or how you should take things, and maybe how you will take things depends on how you are as a person. So perhaps that in its own way is a challenge and yeah, definitely one of the most powerful books that we've done on the podcast so far, I think.

Gretchen:

I also did want to mention, I almost forgot about this, that there is another adaptation of "Kindred". It's a graphic novel.

JM:

Oh, yeah, I was going to mention that.

Gretchen:

Ah, yeah, I was going to and I just remembered it when we were talking about the TV series. The authors and illustrators are Damien Duffy and John Jennings, and I did read this graphic novel a couple of years ago and I was looking through it. I didn't have time to sit down to read the whole thing. It is like pretty much word for word of the the novel but even though we see that what happens when the source material isn't respected that much. So that's probably preferred over the TV series, but the art style is really interesting and I think it does a good job. I believe it also won a couple of awards for like best adaptation. I think maybe a Hugo award? I can't remember for sure.

JM:

Yeah, okay. How would you say the graphic novel, like I imagine that it's most of the actual text is taken from the novel, but then there's pictorial stuff added?

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

Okay.

Gretchen:

It really is a graphic representation of the novel itself.

JM:

Okay, so they probably didn't include the entire text of the novel, did they?

Gretchen:

I think they do abridge some of the text from what I remember.

JM:

Right. Interesting. I'm trying to imagine like how an artist would even envision some of these scenes. I mean, I'm sure they like maybe show, they show things like the plantation and the maybe the like the cornfields and the characters obviously maybe have some kind of like this is made about them and stuff, I'm just having a hard time, like it seems like an interesting choice for something to make a graphic novel into I mean, why not right but just, uh, I'm definitely curious about that.

Gretchen:

I believe that the creators behind the "Kindred" adaptation have also recently done I think they did Parable of the Ser as well. But I haven't checked that one out yet.

JM:

Interesting. Yeah, I mean, it does seem like this is Butler's most recognized work now. Anyway, yeah. So how much of that do we think is due to again not to focus too much on the whole genre question, but how much is due to this book not necessarily being always identifiable with science fiction?

Nate:

I think it does play a factor the issues are I guess more tangible here, as she is directly talking about slavery that happened on earth and not like some weird parasite alien race from some other galaxy or whatever. Yeah, so that probably leads it to be taken more seriously, I guess even though I don't really like framing it that way but I guess more noticed by academics.

JM:

See what Butler does exactly what you just said she does it in a way that still makes it seem like it's connecting to us and to now, but I guess that's something that only a science fiction fan would say.

Nate:

Right. Yeah. Yeah so and it is kind of disappointing and annoying sometimes how the genre is looked down upon by some people in academia. We've certainly come across some of those attitudes before, I mean, I'm not saying that like everything published in Amazing Stories is a literary masterpiece on par with Proust or something like that, but I think there's really no reason to be dismissive of the entire form altogether or to ghettoize science fiction away from, you know, quote-unquote "serious literature".

Gretchen:

Yeah, I do feel like there is sort of I think a lessening of that tendency nowadays.

Nate:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Gretchen:

I feel, you know, I think that there is an opening up of science fiction and more serious discussions on it, perhaps because writers like Butler make it clear that there's importance in science fiction to talk about current issues and topics that do relate to us in the present.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean rightly or wrongly the genre got the reputation of being kids' stories about spacemen shooting aliens with ray guns.

JM:

Well, I mean if we're talking the 70s and 80s too, we can talk about Doris Lessing and her like not only embracing the fact that she wrote science fiction, but almost in her ineffably like, weirdly humorous way almost going so far the other way and being like oh, you don't think I wrote science fiction books I actually have a different name for them Space Fiction.

all:

(laughs)

JM:

And its like, take that. And you know, I mean Doris Lessing obviously considered a very literary writer, but she happened to write this, I think I can't remember if it's four or five books, in a like a very blatantly space-faring science fiction series is just something that she decided to do because she was one of the early fans of the genre magazines and stuff like that when she actually moved to Britain in the 30s. And so, you know, and it seemed to stick with her afterwards. And so even though she's more known for other output, you know, she just decided to do this and I mean, there's plenty of other examples and it is true that a lot of the examples of more so-called literary authors moving into science fiction territory are like, I don't know dystopias, I guess a lot of them.

Nate:

Yeah, right, right.

JM:

You know, I mean we're gonna be talking about "The Machine Stops" soon enough. I'm sure. There will be other examples too. In fact, possibly our next episode is a good example.

Nate:

Yeah, I think so.

JM:

Yes. Well. Yeah, so we want you to we want you to read this one. We we think that you should and we think everyone should, but for our next episode, we're also going to be talking about similar in a way narrative of time travel into the past, this time into the Dark Ages. Into Camelot. And we will be talking about, we will finally be bringing Mark Twain to the podcast. And you all knew that we were going to do this since we started the podcast, the  very, very first episode, I think. But the story will be "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", my very first exposure to the literature of science fiction, and so, in a way, I guess you could say this is a host choice for me, but I mean, I think we would have come to it. It's kind of to me it seems like a very, very obvious inclusion if you're going to talk about science fiction and it's going to be great pleasure to discuss exactly why.

Gretchen:

It's very fitting to do it after after "Kindred".

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Very fitting that our time travel subject is nonlinear.

JM:

Yeah. And this book has had so much of an impact on me, but also is a point of interest because, and I think I might have mentioned this back in our first episode, but every time I read this book, I have a slightly different view of it and I don't quite think about it the same way that I did the last time. So reading it when you're 12 and then reading it again when you're 22, and again when you're 30, and again when you're 42, all makes a difference. So I don't know, I'm definitely eager to see how this will go and how you guys will cope with it and it's definitely a book that raises a lot of interesting questions. It's funny. It's sad. I think we're gonna have a great time with it, guys. So I don't have any fun quip to end this episode with, I mean the book we just did was heavy and I don't really feel like making a fun quip. But, I think that the next episode is gonna be a really wonderful journey as well. So, I hope that you all enjoyed listening to this as much as we enjoyed reading it and talking about it and thinking about everything that's connected with it.  Very powerful work, "Kindred". Read it, watch the show if you want, compare them, leave us a comment if you feel like it. I think that this is probably a really important episode for us and our first glimpse at the 70s and so much more in terms of modern science fiction and what it has to offer.  So, Welcome to 2023. We are, have been, and will be, Chrononauts. Good night.

(main Chrononauts theme)

Bibliography:

Behrent, Megan -"The Personal is Historical: Slavery, Black Power, and Resistance in Octavia Butler's Kindred", College Literature, volume 46, issue 4 (2019)

Butler, Octavia E. - "Positive Obsession" in "Bloodchild and Other Stories" (1995)

Donaldson, Eileen - "A contested freedom: The fragile future of Octavia Butler's Kindred" English Academy Review, volume 31, issue 2 (2014)

Flagel, Nadine, “It's Almost Like Being There”: Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative, and the Crisis of Representation in Octavia Butler's Kindred, Canadian Review of American Studies, volume 42, issue 2 (2012)

Francis, Conseula (ed.) - "Conversations with Octavia Butler" (2010)

Guha-Majumdar, Jishnu - "The Dilemmas of Hope and History: Concrete Utopianism in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred" Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, volume 6, issue 1 (2017)

Hua, Linh U. - "Reproducing Time, Reproducing History: Love and Black Feminist Sentimentality in Octavia Butler’s Kindred", African American Review, volume 44, issue 3 (2011)

LaCroix, David - "To Touch Solid Evidence: The Implicity of Past and Present in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred", The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, volume 40, issue 1 (2007)

Levecq, Christine - "Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred", Contemporary Literature, volume 41, issue 3 (2000)

Long, Lisa A. - "A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata", College English, volume 64, issue 4 (2002)

Miletic, Philip - "Octavia E. Butler’s Response to Black Arts/Black Power Literature and Rhetoric in Kindred" African American Review, volume 49, issue 3 (2016)

Mitchell, A. - "Not Enough of the Past Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E. Butler's Kindred", MELUS, volume 26, issue 3 (2001)

Octavia E. Butler official website https://www.octaviabutler.com/

Parham, Marisa - "Saying “Yes”: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred", Callaloo, volume 32, issue 4 (2009)

Popescu, Irina - "Empathetic Trappings: Revisiting the Nineteenth Century in Octavia Butler's Kindred", Journal of Human Rights (2017)

Robertson, Benjamin - "Some Matching Strangeness: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's Kindred", Science Fiction Studies, volume 37, issue 3 (2010)

Rowell, Charles H. and Butler, Octavia E. - "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Callaloo (1997)

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. - "Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler's Kindred", College English, volume 55, issue 2 (1993)

West, C. S. Thembile - "The Competing Demands of Community Survival and Self-Preservation in Octavia Butler's Kindred", Femspec, volume 7, issue 2 (2006)