Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read

From KCRW, Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm happy to have as my guest, Octavia Butler,

and this is a special occasion.

It's the 25th anniversary of the publication of her book that first came out in, is it, 1979,

Kindred.

It's a remarkable book, really a breathtaking book.

It was recently adopted in that program to have cities adopt books.

Rochester read Kindred, as I understand it, just as Los Angeles read Fahrenheit 451, I believe.

And first of all, it interested me in citing that fact that both of these books adopted by cities are considered to be science

fiction, although their writers have some amount of, what would you say? Well, Kindred really

isn't science fiction just because there's no science in it.

I don't know how people feel about Fahrenheit 451, but it kind of fits into science fiction,

I guess, in the same way that my book Parable of the Sower does.

It's not so much the science.

It's the future, looking into the future.

But Kindred is definitely not, just because I was called a science fiction writer.

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