How 'Kindred' Subverts the Time Travel Narrative

Science fiction, as a genre, is defined by its interest in the potential developments in science and technology, and the effect this might have on human society. As a general rule, then, this makes sci fi a forward looking genre.

What will the future look like?

How will it feel to live in that future?

And what will all this mean for humanity?

The answers to these questions can be optimistic or pessimistic, but a lot of the time, they will be a little of both, with stories in this genre speculating that, in the future, we might make massive strides forward in the fields of medicine, transport and energy production… while our environment withers, human rights take massive hits from corrupt dictatorships, and warfare becomes an ever more dangerous and prominent reality.

But sci fi does not always speculate on future science, technology and society from the perspective of that future’s own residents. Occasionally, it reflects this future onto the reader, taking a character from the present day, and flinging them forward a hundred, a thousand, or even more years than that into the future.

This is the approach taken by one of science fiction’s biggest narrative tropes – time travel.

The idea of exploring distant realms of time has been a part of speculative fiction as far back as the ancient tales of mythology, and has always been a distinctly philosophical theme for a story to explore. While it is somewhat common for a time traveller – and their usual means of accomplishing this, the time machine – to journey into the past, it is their journeys into possible futures that dominates the subgenre. After all, we know the past, at least to some degree, whereas the future is a complete mystery. The idea of visiting that future, then? This is described with wonder, fascination, excitement.

For this reason, the time machine as hypothetical invention has taken on a mythical role, an artifact that symbolises the peak of scientific and technological advancement.

In the same way, the time traveller attains a mythological status bringing with it respect and admiration in the extreme. If a society can, through nothing but their own intelligence, determination and skill, progress enough to cross this last boundary, they are akin to gods.

But maybe none of this is a guarantee – maybe we are wrong to hold time travel to this level of virtue and accomplishment. And maybe the future is not the greatest expectation of such an ability. Maybe another author has a different idea for time travel, which subverts every aspect of the theme into something entirely different, but no less evocative.

This is the basis behind Octavia E. Butler’s time travel masterpiece – Kindred.

There are numerous levels to this story that make it as brilliant as it truly is, all of which I kind of want to mention at the same time. Unfortunately, I don’t have any ability to control the laws of time myself, so I’ll have to talk about these elements one after the other.

First of all, Kindred takes that time travel core of reflecting the reader in its protagonist, a modern day resident who shall be transported to this alien time period, but this is arguably even more prominent a part of the story thanks to the author rejecting the typical ‘heroic’ high class inventor in favour of a much more relatable character.

Dana is not an inventor from the 1800s, she does not possess vast funds or a workshop full of enigmatic mechanisms. She is not rich, high class, or eccentric. Instead, she is a normal woman from 1976 – the present, at time of publication, and a present developed in small scale, intimate ways that make the period feel just as contemporary reading today as it did 50 years ago. She wants only to pursue her own more personal interests in the new home she has moved into with her husband, Kevin – the two of them possessing a library of books they are passionate about, and both dreaming of being successful writers themselves.

This is all very relatable stuff for most readers to get attached to, and Butler knows this, which is why it is so effective when it all gets stripped away, and Dana ‘disappears’ right in front of Kevin.

This is the second way Kindred differentiates itself from its genre peers.

Unlike other time travel stories where crossing this boundary is a choice that gives a character power, here, Dana travels through time via methods completely outside of her control, making her powerless.

Her freedom is denied in much more visceral, horrific ways than this mere premise, though.

See, Dana is a black woman living in – mostly – progressive times with her white husband. And she does not travel forward to brighter futures. Instead, she travels back in time to a plantation in the centre of the American slave trade.

In this way the lack of control she has over this ability to travel through time is much more thematically resonant than a simple switch up from genre conventions.

It also means that in a complete juxtaposition to Butler’s genre contemporaries, this story’s time travelling does not come paired with wonder or fascination, but with anxiety and dread.

Which is where our third main character comes into play – Rufus, the young white son of the plantation’s hateful, abusive owner.

Rufus is the key to Dana’s time travelling – at first. See, she is transported back into this dreadful past whenever Rufus is in life-threatening danger. The way it works is that she is torn from her own time period and thrust into Rufus’s time period in order to save him. This could be as simple as pulling the infant child out of a river and performing CPR, or as complex as treating the young adult for a disease Dana’s own time has eradicated, but Rufus’s time cannot even begin to understand.

It's the same core element of sci fi focusing on the scientific developments of the future, but from the other side, Dana possessing advanced knowledge from the present – now future – and not having the equipment to apply that knowledge much of the time. Worse, she also does not have the trust of the people from this past – now present – especially when those in power have decided, in their hatred and bigotry, someone like Dana should not have knowledge at all, and that they certainly would not allow her to interfere with their son – if not for her enigmatic relationship with said son.

The first time Dana saves Rufus’s life, she returns home immediately. What she only realises later on, however, is that it wasn’t saving Rufus that brought her home – it was the gun pointed in her face.

This is the first of two major ways Octavia E. Butler deepens this story.

While it is the need to save Rufus’s life that transports Dana into the past, if merely doing so would bring her home again this would grant her some control over the ability much like her fictional predecessors. Instead, Butler smartly decides to double down on Dana’s powerlessness – she can only return to the present if she truly believes her life is in danger.

Naturally, this means two significant things. One, she is thrust into harrowing encounters left, right and centre as the book’s narrative progresses. And two, she can potentially be stuck in this awful past for extended periods of time – assumed, and therefore treated, as a slave.

This brings me to the second major way the story is deepened, which does grant Dana some level of control and active involvement, making her a more engaging character to read about, but as a result, filling the story with additional tension. This being that she wishes to save Rufus in a more interesting, more philosophical way.

See, while the horrors surrounding Dana are perpetuated by hateful white adults, their white children are not born with this hatred. And while certain prejudices have been imbued in Rufus’s psyche from a very young age, as well as the overuse of racial slurs, he does not hold the values of his parents. He is friends with many of the slave children, he doesn’t really understand the things transpiring on the plantation he lives in, and most of all, he begins to build a connection, even a friendship, with Dana.

All of this creates a desire in Dana that she should save Rufus not only in the sense of his physical wellbeing, but also in a moral and spiritual sense, adding layers upon layers to this time travel story.

Unlike the future, which can be speculated on until the end of time – pun only partially intended – we know the present and its comfort, and we know the past and its pain.

But by utilising the narrative device of time travel, Octavia E. Butler is able to craft a more raw, visceral and engaging story about what this past really means to real people. This is the benefit of using the speculative fiction space to explore difficult subject matter. It is a genre more capable of doing so than a purely realistic story can – for example, taking a character from our time, and throwing them into the cruellest aspects of a past we have become divorced from. Thanks to the first person perspective allowing us to follow Dana’s experience more closely, we as the readers are given an intimate, evocative glimpse into the past we have complacently decided we know so well – exactly as someone from outside of this past would engage with it.

All of this is true and brilliant enough from these earliest of chapters, but the author escalates things with each new visit. Because the past is in the past, Dana does not need to wait X amount of years in her own time before things can develop in Rufus’s time. What this means is that each new time she is transported to save Rufus, he has grown older. Physically, yes, but also having developed psychologically under the influence of his parents and peers, and more importantly, away from Dana’s more positive influence.

In this way, we get to see exactly how the bigotry, hate, and hostility of the white population of the time period is actually fostered, since even a somewhat sympathetic boy like Rufus, can become more like his father with the passing of time.

Dana becomes committed to stopping this from happening – our character from the present desperate to make the past she knows to be so awful even the smallest bit brighter. She knows, coming from his future, how much hatred is bred into someone like Rufus during this time, yet there is a sense of whiplash as the boy she cares for and considers a hesitant friend becomes a man she despises and considers her greatest threat. He can be the former for months only to snap into the latter after a day or two, thanks to Dana’s abnormal experience with the passage of time.

All this complicates Dana’s character and her experience with time travel brilliantly, and yet – and yet! – Butler adds even more complications on top of that.

I mentioned how the speculative fiction core of this story can add a level of relatability, a level of closeness, to the narrative that we don’t quite so effortlessly get from pure historical fiction. But just like us, Dana is divorced from much of this true history thanks to the developments of her own present day society – imperfect as it may be – and this means that she, like us, cannot truly understand the bleak reality of the past as strongly as the other victims she meets. The moments she shares with characters like Sarah, Nigel and Alice add so much emotional weight to every scene, knowing she cannot save them, but still trying to have any amount of impact. Biggest of all is the distance between Dana and her friends in this past, a divide that is further fractured by the amount of time and sway she has with the powerful slave owners. As Dana herself is told at one point, she gets it hard, but sometimes she gets to leave, and the others have to stay there forever.

In a strange way, this makes Kindred both like and unlike other time travel stories. Dana’s experiences of abuse might be more visceral and heartwrenching than the threats faced by other time travellers, and she may be unable to climb on a time machine and escape at her own whim, but her experience of this hostile time period is still arguably transient and fragile.

What really sets this book apart from other time travel stories, then, is the manner in which its author ensures how permanent, scarring, and definitely not-transient the effects of time travel are for Dana, a decision bolstered even further by ensuring she is not the only one affected.

*There will be spoilers ahead*

While Dana fervently hopes she can save Rufus, even if only to indirectly save the victims suffering under him and his family, there is a bitter sense of inevitability with one of the biggest gut punches of this narrative.

Rufus was always going to be the main antagonist.

And while this resolution offers plenty of its own emotional weight to the story, its implication is more interesting – it is not some physical or superficial genre component that influences society, it is the nature of time travel itself, and the psychological element of the genre that influences our characters.

We got to see first hand how someone better than most – the young Rufus – holds the potential to become just another hateful monster. Despite Dana’s attempts, Rufus could not be saved in any meaningful way – he still became just like his father.

This lends itself to an even more personal conflict for Dana, when at a certain point she travels into the past… and brings Kevin with her. Worse, when she is transported into her own time again, Kevin is nowhere nearby, and she inadvertently leaves him behind.

There are so many layers of tension and grief from this decision. We know how easily Kevin could change under the right – or the wrong – influences in this time period. We know that however short a time passes for Dana in the present, when she is next summoned to Rufus, any number of years could have passed for her stranded-in-time husband. And we know how capricious Rufus is – whether close to, or far from, Dana.

Dana now has both a desire to go back to the past to be reunited with Kevin, all while still dreading what violence and abuse could crash onto her when she does return to that past.

On top of this, though, she now also needs to worry about what has happened to Kevin, how this time period has affected him, if she can lose him… which all gives Rufus more power over her, knowing that whether or not Kevin finds Dana, whether he knows she is here at all, is in his hands.

As it happens, Kevin is not transformed into another iteration of Rufus’s father by spending all this time in the past, and he and Dana are eventually reunited, returning to their time in the present with no more danger of Dana ever being time travelled again.

But it can never be a completely happy ending for them.

In Butler’s own words, Dana was never going to come out of this experience whole. Such a horrific time period was she sent to, being a part of it for even the relatively short time that it was, scars her, traumatises her, and Kevin too is mentally wounded by the ordeal. Being subjected to this kind of time travel changes both of them irrevocably.

I knew Kindred was a masterpiece before I finished reading it. And the biggest compliment I can pay to any masterpiece is that it has changed the way I think about a certain literary space. There are three key ways Kindred has done this for time travel.

1. Time travel is usually focused on the future, imagining its possibilities with wonder, fascination and awe. Kindred changes the game by focusing on the past, viewing its too often forgotten realities with dread, horror and frustration.

2. Rather than framing a rich, high class inventor as a figure of myth in the pantheon of scientists and heroes, choosing to embark on enviable adventures, Kindred's protagonist is a passionate yet relatable figure placed in the role of victim and forced against her own will to a tragic ordeal.

3. Kindred proves the superior creative potential of speculative fiction in exploring difficult subject matter by combining science fictional and historical components into one vivid story deep with evocative scenes, impactful messaging, and complicated characters.

One of this novel’s most crushing revelations is the idea of how easily a person can become acclimatised to the norms and standards of a period in history – no matter how full of malice and injustice those times might be.

And I don’t think that’s a point that could be made as effectively as Kindred made it, if this were not a story about time travel.

There is so much potential in even the most familiar of science fiction tropes, that can be fascinating and visceral and emotive even after all these years. An inspired author can take those original, innovative ideas and create something fresh, different – brilliant. Kindred is definitely one of those stories.