What Do I Read Next?
- The five novels in Octavia Butler's "Patternmaster" series explore the history of the Patternists, human mutants with telepathic powers. In the first novel of the series, Patternmaster (1976), the Patternists battle the "Clayarks" and each other for control of the world.
- Butler's "Xenogenesis" trilogy, like Kindred, is a complex exploration of the relationship between rulers and subjugated. After a nuclear holocaust, Earth's few surviving humans are offered rescue by a race of alien traders in exchange for their genetic material. The moral questions that are faced by both humans and first-and second-generation hybrids are related in Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989).
- Butler's recent "Earthseed" series is set in a violent America of the early twenty-first century. Lauren Oya Olamina is a young African-American teen with the ability to feel other people's pain. She "discovers" her own religion, called Earthseed, and begins to gather followers. Lauren's story begins in Parable of the Sower (1993) and continued in Parable of the Talents (1998).
- Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) is another tale of the psychological effects of slavery on a modern woman. Blues singer Ursa Corregidora comes from a line of women sexually abused by a Portuguese slaveholder named Corregidora—the father of both Ursa's mother and grandmother. The novel relates her efforts to reconcile her heritage with her present life.
- Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) uses the device of time travel to provide a view of a utopian future. During her stay in a mental hospital, a woman makes periodic trips into the future, where she finds a cooperative society.
- Slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) supplied Butler with essential background details for her novel.
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