Time travel hurts: reading Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Some books don’t let you stay at a distance. They pull you in, fast and hard, and by the time you realise what’s happening, it’s too late. You’re there. You feel it. And it's agonising.

That’s what Kindred did to me.

I’d heard of it, of course. It’s one of those titles that hovers on reading lists and in conversations, mentioned with a certain weight. But I didn’t expect it to hit this hard. I didn’t expect to be thinking about it days after I finished. Or to feel, genuinely, like I’d been somewhere else for a while.

The premise sounds like classic sci-fi: a woman gets pulled back in time, again and again, to save a distant ancestor. But it doesn’t read like sci-fi. There’s no setup, no explanation, no comfort. One minute Dana is standing in her flat. The next, she’s kneeling in the dirt, surrounded by people who see her as property. It happens without warning, which somehow makes it feel more real. Like trauma. Like history.

What got under my skin wasn’t just the setting or the violence, though those are intense, but the way the book keeps asking what it means to survive. Not to win, not to fight back in some grand dramatic way, but to stay alive. To keep going when nothing makes sense and every option is awful. Dana doesn’t get to be a hero. She just survives. And somehow that’s more powerful.

Then there’s Rufus. Oh, Rufus. I could write an entire post just about him. He starts out fragile, scared, almost sympathetic. You want to believe he’ll turn out okay. And sometimes he does. Then he doesn’t. Grrrr. Watching him change is one of the most disturbing parts of the book. Sometimes I felt sorry for him. Other times I wanted to jump into the pages and kill him myself. He’s not a villain in the cartoon sense. He’s worse. He’s believable.

I kept thinking about how complicated it is to care about someone who’s hurting you. How survival can mean compromise. And how trauma doesn’t cleanly sit in the past. It follows you. It warps things. Sometimes it looks like love.

I won’t lie. This book made me uncomfortable. I had to put it down more than once, just to breathe. But I kept coming back to it. Not because I wanted to feel better, but because I needed to see where it went. Butler’s writing is so spare, so clear, that you don’t always realise how deeply it’s cutting until it’s too late. She doesn’t lean into drama. She just tells the truth and lets it sit.

When I finished Kindred, I didn’t feel closure. I felt raw. Like I’d touched something real and old and still alive. Which, honestly, might be the point.

If you haven’t read it yet, don’t expect answers. Don’t expect resolution. Just be ready to feel something.

And maybe keep the lights on.