Both of them are about the horrors of slavery to black women and feature fantastical elements
In Beloved a ghost and in Kindred a women from modern day time traveling into the past. But one is considered literary fiction and filed under it while the other is considered genre fiction.
It seems mostly because Toni Morrison is considered to be a literary writer and Octavia Butler a science fiction writer then the content of the novels.
by Konradleijon
4 Comments
Marketing.
Seriously. Genre is just a marketing category to position a book in a store / online catalog.
Potayto, potahto.
I would say because a lot Octavia’s works were science fiction it’s easier to just categorize her works as science fiction as a whole. Makes life easier for the employees at Barnes and Noble
Possibly because the time travel element in Kindred is explicitly a sci-fi trope. That said, those genres aren’t mutually exclusive— I consider Butler’s work to be both sci-fi *and* literary fiction.