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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
The other thing that’s cool about her — well she’s written many books — but Kindred is my favorite. A little chat about that from last week. She wanted to talk about race and she wanted to figure out a way to do that. So she chose the time-travel story and she took a modern-day African-American woman who without explanation — sort of like Narnia where they stumble into a wardrobe and bam they’re in a kingdom — we don’t need to know the machinations of how the time travel works. We don’t need to put dials in a car and drive the DeLorean down the street. We just walk into a room and oh my god now we’re in pre Civil War south and she’s a woman of African descent and she’s got to deal with now I’m in a place where they’re slaves and now she ends up being on the plantation where her ancestors were held in slavery and she comes up with you know drama. You want the big choice, the big question. She discovers that the way she could get back to her own future is she has to save the life of the plantation owner who owns her family on time for him to rape her great-great grandmother or she won’t exist yeah. There’s there’s a moral decision you gotta make in your lives right? But that’s a really fascinating and of course it allows her to have a discussion about what we don’t talk about in classrooms about the reality of slavery right? So this is a really fascinating book. It’s a one-off book. That’s good. She’s got a lot of you know series books so you can get involved in her writing and be busy for a while. That’s a great book to start with though. So I think Octavia Butler is of good attention for us.
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