The Folio Society is releasing a gorgeous edition of Octavia Butler's "Kindred"

Octavia Butler (), the brilliant Afrofuturist, McArthur Genius Grant-winning science fiction writer, died , leaving behind a corpus of incredible, voraciously readable novels, and who were inspired by her example.

Recent years have seen new editions of Butler's work, including a graphic novel of Kindred, her novel of slavery, time-travel, race and identity.

Now, the Folio Society (previously) has announced their own edition of Kindred, which will be characteristic of the Folio Society's gorgeous books, slipcased, illustrated, with an introduction by Tananarive Due, who uses interviews with Butler to explore the themes of the novel.

The book is $60, and ships this autumn.

Update: Thanks to numbertwopencil for that there's a slipcased edition of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents coming in October. Those books are like woke, postapocalyptic Heinlein juvies. So. So. SO. GOOOOOOD.

While at college, Butler reportedly overhead another AfricanAmerican student angrily criticising previous generations of black men and women for being subservient to the whites who claimed to own them. This became the seed of an idea that would lead to Kindred an attempt to understand the unthinkable, to place supposed subservience in the context of desperate survival.

Butler takes care to immerse the reader in the details of the past until pre-Civil War Maryland feels more vivid and real than the potentially more familiar Los Angeles of the late 1970s. But this is much more than an immersive historical novel.