Kindred is really about a modern African-American woman forced to travel back in time to save the life of the white man who enslaved her ancestors. Perhaps the publisher advertises the novel’s plot teasingly, but a bit vaguely: “A modern African-American woman involuntarily travels back in time to the early 19th century, where she has to live among her enslaved ancestors.”īut the advanced readers begin to leak the novel’s true premise on Goodreads and Twitter. Then a science fiction press, banking on an excited reception for this relevant, suspenseful, original, and provocative narrative, releases advanced copies to online reviewers. Assume, because it’s so good, that the novel even finds an agent and a publisher. Imagine it, imagine Octavia Butler temporally jumped to the present and trying to put out Kindred in the current media climate. This 1979 classic novel of time travel and slavery could not be published today.
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