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TIME What Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’ Can Teach Us About Human Behavior
“Back in 2001, I was an aspiring writer attending the Clarion West Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in Seattle. Butler had attended a Clarion workshop 30 years prior as a student, but now she was back to teach eager pupils like me. I, like many others, became a fan long before the T-shirts and the Butler-tried-to-tell-us social media posts. Having grown up with a healthy diet of science-fiction movies and TV shows as a child of the ‘80s, reading about Black girls and women in the future was validating. While Butler’s novels are certainly cautionary tales, she was not a fortune teller. She was a lover of science, an inquisitive writer, and a keen observer of society. Butler simply paid close attention to human behavior.”
