Her origin story, as she relayed it, was realizing that she could tell a better story than a remarkably mediocre film she had watched as a tween in 1959, Devil Girl from Mars, and deciding to become a writer to do just that-but she had been told, time and time again, that her race would prevent her from becoming a writer.

From a young age, Butler yearned to write science fiction. Beal, the editor of Black Scholar, in 1985-a statement she would repeat almost verbatim to many others-and, ergo, Kindred “obviously was not science fiction.” Instead, Butler would famously note, the novel might better be thought of as a kind of “grim fantasy.”īutler’s insistence that the novel-which has recently been adapted by FX into an eight-episode series, streaming on Hulu-was not science fiction was more than a gripe about genre. “There’s absolutely no science in it,” she told Frances M. For years after writing Kindred, her seminal novel about a modern-day Black woman who finds herself thrust back into the slavery-era past at unpredictable moments, Octavia Butler would be asked the same question by interviewers and curious readers alike: was her novel science fiction? To Butler, the answer was simple.

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