As the genre writer for this book, I have to say that it was so refreshing to have such a fascinating hybrid of a book to work with. In many ways it was a historical fiction slave narrative, character-driven and emotional. In the sense that it has basic science-fiction elements, it can also be classified there, though I think in this case (despite Ms. Octavia Butler's many other works that are blatantly science fiction) it is science fiction purely by convenience; Butler needed a tool to get a character like Dana, a twentieth-century black woman who embraced her independence and worthiness in the world and saw nothing but equality between herself and others, in the nineteenth-century South, rife with racism, violence, and of course, slave life. Science fiction offered this medium.
This book is really about how beliefs evolve through generations. As the characters grow through the years in the book, while Dana stays the same age, she and the reader are able to witness their evolution as characters. Written in the 1970s, it's amazing to think of Butler writing this and showing Dana as a representative for where modern beliefs and mindsets were at the time--and only a decade out of the Jim Crow laws. Butler draws attention to the fact that, while of course racism can't be squashed quickly enough, it really has evolved drastically over the past century in many ways, yet in other ways it hasn't changed at all.
