Kindred, the most successful (and least overtly science fictional) novel by the late Octavia Butler, has a simple plot. In 1976, Dana, a black woman and writer, moves into her new Los Angeles home with her white husband. Before they settle in, however, Dana is transported through time and space to a Maryland riverbank in 1815, where she rescues a young boy from drowning. The boy, Rufus, is the son of a minor plantation owner who turns out to be one of Dana’s distant ancestors, and her fate is entangled with his; whenever Rufus’s life is in danger, she is pulled from her “home” time and into his milieu, where she ends up saving him—usually from himself. Rufus’s milieu is that of antebellum slavery in the southern states, and through Dana’s repeated timeslips we are shown not only the more immediate cruelties of slavery—the forced labour, the violence and murder, the sexual abuse—but its more subtle mechanics, the chains and hobbles of tradition, thought and language which, embedded in the deep structures of the social, are even harder to escape than physical bonds. Dana’s experience of another world—a world where things are better for black Americans than they were in 1815, but by no means perfect—opens up the antebellum context for a modern reader in a way that, perhaps, the more traditional slave narrative form might not; in sharing Dana’s sense of dislocation, the reader is obliged to see the past anew, just as Dana is forced to face the ugly realities beneath the whitewashing of history.

I will not attempt a critique of Kindred. For one thing, the world has no need of the thoughts of a middle-class English white man on what is deservedly a canonical novel of both the antebellum slavery and feminist canons. For another thing, many scholars of greater erudition than myself have written about it through a variety of critical lenses; there is little of value I can add to these conversations, other than my willingness to listen.

But the question of Kindred‘s genre is perhaps worth another look. Everyone’s favourite online encyclopedia cites various scholars arguing for Kindred‘s status as a (neo-)slave narrative, an initiation novel, an anthropological historical fiction, a science fiction, and a “grim fantasy”, as Butler herself labelled it in an interview. While I’m sure these arguments were all made in the spirit of seeking useful and illuminating readings of the text, one can’t help but be reminded of more recent (and fervid) discussions around genre and canonicity, and the factional divide between those who would constrain “science fiction”—whatever that might be—and those who would open it up.

Kindred’s use of the time-slip plot device provides a strong argument for it belonging to the domain of speculative fiction (or fantastika, if you’d rather not borrow terms from Uncle Bob) — but science fiction? There’s no technology involved, no chin-stroke wrestling with the Grandfather Paradox; never once do we discover how Dana time-slips, let alone why it is that she can take objects or other people along with her, or why the relationship between the duration of her absence from her “home” time and her presence in her “slave” time is non-linear; her ability is neither weaponised or productised, feted or fought over. Dana’s ability to time-slip simply is. To question the how is to miss the point… but questioning the how is one of those things that science fiction does, according to some definitions. So Kindred can’t be science fiction… but what could be more science fictional than time travel? So maybe it’s a fantasy… but there’s no secondary world, no irruption of the uncanny.

The point is that Kindred—like most fiction of quality—bears multiple readings, even conflicting readings. It is the grim fantasy that Butler said it was; it is also a slave narrative, an initiation novel, a work of science fiction, a historical critique of American attitudes to slavery. It is all of them, and more. It’s perhaps as many different types of book as it has had readers (and that’s a lot).

There are two ways to define a genre: as a binary (i.e. you’re either in or out) or as a tendency (i.e. a given text may partake in the tropes or techniques of a given genre to some greater or lesser degree); if this reminds you of gender studies rhetoric, then consider that genre and gender share their etymological root, as well as their determinist legacy. This tension, I think, is at the root of science fiction’s civil war du jour: the question as to whether it should be a public space, or the private fiefdom of those who nurtured it through the years of drought and plenty. Should it include, or exclude?

Butler never shied from including herself in the genre; it is assumed that my own allegiance to inclusion is clear. And regardless of which genre you might choose to situate it in, I feel safe in suggesting that Butler herself would have wanted us to take away from Kindred at least one hard-won wisdom: that the first casualty of exclusion is empathy, which is the best and highest of what it is to be human.