PoC Author: Octavia E. Butler, Kindred

[rsadelle]

As you probably know, I like sci fi. Octavia Butler is pretty much the classic PoC sci fi author. Aside from this, all I knew about her was that she writes vampire books and she wrote Kindred. I did not read anything about Kindred before I requested it from the library. I kept waiting for the vampires to show up, and only realized 35 pages in that

Comments

[norwich36]

My best friend from college adores Octavia Butler, but I've always resisted reading her because I had the sense (like you) that she dealt with serious issues and that she wrote the kind of books that probably wouldn't have happy endings. [I will confess to being a literary wimp when it comes to my pleasure reading]. Is the second part of that true? Because I would really like to read her stuff.

[rsadelle]

Yeah, I think I've avoided her for so long (I once owned one of her books that I got rid of when I realized I was never going to read it) because she writes about Serious Issues, which I prefer to avoid. As for a happy ending: hmm. It's realistic, which means it's not hugely happy, but it's not too unhappy, I don't think.

More on Octavia Butler

[anonymous]

I've read Kindred and liked it, although it was a little didactic for my tastes. The Ocatavia Butler books that I really love are her science fiction books written much earlier. I'm blanking out on their names, but there is a whole series about what happens when earth is taken over by aliens who need to breed with humans to survive. She does a fascinating job of exploring the dilemma of what it means to "submit" for survival, are the heroes those who adapt and change or those who ferocioiusly cling to their own cultures and at what cost and how people are transformed and the sex between the humans and aliens is really fun in a squirmy kind of way too. Annette

Re: More on Octavia Butler

[rsadelle]

Huh. Strange human/alien sex sounds right up my alley. I'll have to look it up!