Dana and her husband are in the process of moving into their new home, when she unexpectedly finds herself feeling dizzy. Before she knows what is happening she finds herself in the wood, in the distance the cry of a child drowning reaches her. She immediately springs into action and saves Rufus Weylin, but not before his father arrives and points a rifle at her. In the next moment she is home. Her trips continue and on the second she discovers that she has travelled in both time and space, back to nineteenth century southern America. As a black woman this is both a dangerous place and time for her to find herself...

Kindred (1979 - 295 pages) was the penultimate book written by the late Octavia E Butler. Butler was that rare breed, both a science fiction writer and a consummate fan of the genre. During her lifetime she won many awards including the Nebula and the Hugo, both twice.

The central idea of the book, which is revealed quickly, is that Rufus, although a white man, is her great great grandfather, who seems to have the unconscious ability to drag her back in time when his life is in danger. When she travels from 1976 she is gone for longer periods, first a few second extending into hours or days, but her time away is considerably longer. The mechanism by which she is able to travel is never explained. Rufus is only able to pull her through time when he is in mortal peril and she soon discovers that she can only return is she feels like she is under the ultimate threat for her life.

On her second trip, her husband, who only half believes her story, grabs her and is pulled through with her. In the past she meets her ancestor, Alice, who at some time in the future will have a child with Rufus, allowing the future Dana to be born.

Butler said that she wanted her readers to feel what it meant to be a slave, I am not sure that she succeeded. Dana seems to accept the idea of time travel without batting an eye, fair enough, people had been writing books about it for nearly a hundred years before her first trip. Now, maybe Butler meant us to read into her reaction, or lack thereof, that Dana is, at heart, a strong person, able to survive, given her circumstances, but I felt that it lessoned the truth of slavery, rather than highlight the credulity and injustice, nor did it help that pretty much every white man she met bordered on a pantomime villain.

Strong Dana may be, but this does not explain why, if she felt knowledgeable enough to handle the idea of time travel, does she start to interfere with the past, by teaching slaves to read and helping then to escape. Of course, her actions may have been predetermine, in that she has always travelled back in time and so is part of her own history. If so you would think that someone would have written down the strange occurrence of a woman who keeps popping up at different time, seemingly the same age.

It was an interesting book, although it was not as skilful as The Time Travellers Wife, nor, despite her attempts was it as deep as it should have been.

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Charles Packer