Rather than forcing its entire narrative into eight episodes, he lingers on key, early elements of the story. This is the kind of story that Butler might have been told never to write, and its enduring success proves she was correct to write it anyway.īranden Jacobs-Jenkins, the award-winning playwright who serves as the show’s executive producer, adapts the novel by slowing it down. There, she must save and protect Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), her white, slavemaster ancestor. The story follows Dana (Mallori Johnson), a modern-day Black woman who finds herself traveling back in time to a pre-Civil War plantation in Maryland. In 1979, Butler published Kindred, a novel that has now been adapted into an FX series. Within a field that was male-dominated and overwhelmingly white, her science fiction opened new worlds that embraced the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexual identity.
He suggested using extraterrestrials as a substitute when dealing with themes of race.īutler constantly challenged these ideas throughout her career as one of the most renowned writers in her genre. She heard a similar argument years later at a 1979 science fiction writers convention, when an author decided not to use Black characters because he believed their presence would change the story. In her essay “The Lost Races of Science Fiction,” Octavia Butler recalls how, in her first year of college, she took a creative writing class in which a professor instructed another student not to use Black characters unless their race was central to the plotline.
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