Kindred, written by American writer Octavia E. Butler,

Kindred, written by American writer Octavia E. Butler, is a science fiction/fantasy novel. This book was first published in 1979, and is still widely popular because of its part time-travel and part slave narrative characteristics.
 
The book is in the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who find herself between her home in California in 1976, and a pre-Civil War plantation in Maryland in 1815. The adventures begin when Dana and her husband Kevin are moving into their new home. Dana noticed something was wrong with her. “The house, the books, everything vanished. Suddenly, [she] was outdoors kneeling on the ground beneath trees…” (Butler 13). Here, Dana risks her life to save a little red haired, white boy from drowning in a river. After facing a few hard blows from the boy’s mother, saving the boy, and having a gun pointed at her by the boy’s father, Dana “was back home – wet and muddy, but intact” (Butler 14). After Kevin told Dana that she had “vanished” and “reappeared wet, muddy, and scared to death” (Butler 16) Dana realizes that she has been time traveling to the past. It is during her adventures Dana realizes that she is meeting her ancestors: the spoiled, self-destructive red-haired, white slave owner, and the proud black freewoman he has forced into slavery. As her stays become tangled with the plantation community, Dana realizes she must make compromises to survive slavery and ensure her own time in the future.
 
I believe that Octavia Butler wrote her novel in a sci-fi/fantasy way to give a modernized perspective to the slave narrative of the United States. I also believe Butler utilized this tool to underscore the courageous endurance of people Kindred examines. Kindred examines the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery as well as its legacy present in American society. Because Dana is torn between her world and the one she travels to, the reader is taken on a journey through a brutal time of oppression and slavery, forced to witness its everyday violence and terror, and its bits of hope. The modern sci-fi/fantasy twist allows a new way for a novel to explore race, gender, and power dynamics – a similar structure to one of fairytales.
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