Abstract
Focusing on Butler’s Kindred and short stories, Humann asks us to think of Butler as more than a science fiction writer. While Butler’s accolades for her contributions to the genre of science fiction are well deserved, Humann contends that Butler’s tendency to hybridize genres, and hybridize differently in different texts is what sets Butler’s fiction apart from traditional science fiction. As Humann sees it, Butler builds upon and subverts the science fiction genre by borrowing from other literary traditions as part of her storytelling.
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Notes
- 1.
Afrofuturism is an emergent literary and cultural aesthetics that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, Afrocentricity, fantasy, and magical realism with non-Western cosmologies in order both to critique present-day dilemmas and to re-examine and interrogate historical events of the past. Written by contemporary authors, neo-slave narratives are modern fictional works set in the slavery era which are primarily concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of enslavement in the New World. Ashraf Rushdy (1999) discusses the genre in detail in Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form.
- 2.
The short story “Bloodchild” won both the Nebula Award (1984) and the Hugo Award (1985). In her afterword to the story, Butler (2005, 30) specifically labels “Bloodchild” as her “pregnant man story” and admits that she “always wanted to explore what it might be like for a man to be put into that most unlikely of all positions.”
- 3.
In her afterword to “Bloodchild,” Butler (2005, 30) says, “It amazes me that some people have seen ‘Bloodchild’ as a story about slavery. It isn’t.”
- 4.
In her afterword to the story, Butler (2005, 214) explains, “ ‘The Book of Martha’ is my utopia story.” Although she says “it seems inevitable” that one person’s utopia would become “someone else’s hell,” in the story she has “God demand of poor Martha that she come up with a utopia that would work” (214).
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Humann, H.D. (2020). Beyond Science Fiction: Genre in Kindred and Butler’s Short Stories. In: Japtok, M., Jenkins, J.R. (eds) Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46625-1_6
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