Sixteen years after her premature death, Octavia Butler is having a moment. As one of the first Black women to write science fiction, Butler has been celebrated and studied for a long time, but she has lately come into wider view. Her 1993 novel "Parable of the Sower" jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list in 2020, and in the Hollywood spirit of "Get me one of those," several of her works have been optioned for development. The first of these to appear is "Kindred," whose eight-episode first season premiered in its entirety Tuesday on Hulu.
Published in 1979 and set by turns in the bicentennial year and the early to mid-1800s, the novel is not science fiction per se; although it involves time travel, it is inexplicable in any but metaphysical terms. (Butler described it as a "grim fantasy.") Developed by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, the series, relocated from 1976 to the present day — 2016 is the pre-pandemic named year — adopts Butler's main mechanism and her main characters and incidents, with some alterations. It remains a story about a Black woman from the 21st century who finds herself on a plantation in the 19th.
But in order to turn a fairly compact book into a series — not a limited series, either, but one that will require at least a second season to encompass its events — it has been built out with additional characters, events and subplots that feel crafted to provide drama and sensation and to make its heroine more actively and conventionally heroic. (With the upshot that she is also less contemplative.) So while "Kindred" works fairly well as a righteous historical melodrama, much of what makes the novel interesting — its psychological insights, its thoughtfulness — is dissipated or obscured by the adaptation's length and busyness. (If you're interested in the series and haven't read the book, you'll be better off watching first, reading later.) Whatever its merits, it runs too far afield of the original text to qualify as a successful translation.
