Kindred – Octavia E. Butler

I had just given up on time travel.
 
I’d been reading Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” and his irrefutable exposition of how nudging just a single atom can impact nearby air molecules, producing a knock-on reaction that extends far and wide, going on to affect the weather and ultimately, with that, people’s decisions and actions. Any retroactive micro-change would thus alter the course of the world, creating another, divergent timeline.
 
So adiós, I thought, to any lingering fictional flirtation of mine with that idea.
 
But then Octavia Butler comes along and does it effortlessly. The trick—if you can call it that—is to have your time-travelled character far too caught up in the danger and drama of what they land in to begin to worry about the physics. And it actually helps that Dana, her protagonist, doesn’t seek to explain it herself. It’s a damnable thing she’d rather be rid of.
 
The real interest is how Dana, a black woman from 1976 Los Angeles, can deal with and survive a 19th century Maryland slave plantation.
 
There are some people whose company you simply enjoy and it doesn’t matter what the hell you talk about. I feel that way reading certain writers, albeit only a very few, and Octavia Butler is becoming one of them. I admire and like the natural storyteller in her that makes the outlandish perfectly believable.
 
What gives the story depth is that Dana is not a one-dimensional black-female-victim cipher, but a complex character whose outrage is susceptible to being tempered by contradictory feelings and understanding — and the fact that she has a vested interest.
 
I imagined while reading—I don’t know—that Butler’s depiction of life on the American plantation has reliable verisimilitude, and seeing that world through the eyes of her time-shifted heroine was that much clearer for not being didactic.
 
Reviving that period in fiction certainly makes for a cautionary tale. Don’t jump back there in time and space if you can avoid it.