Folio Society: Two New Sci-Fi Titles

Where Science Fiction Meets History The Folio Society Create a Striking Edition of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred – A Novel of Time Travel and Slavery

Octavia E. Butler is one of the most important figures in speculative fiction history; a pioneering African American author who won multiple awards and changed the very foundations of the genre. Kindred is her ground-breaking novel, a time travel thriller that plunges its heroine into pre-Civil War America, challenging the reader to witness the horrors of slavery.

In 1976 Dana Franklin is an aspiring writer, living with her white husband in Los Angeles. In 1815, Dana is a slave, her life as brutal and precarious as any black woman in the antebellum South… Again and again Dana is ripped back through time to save the life of Rufus Weylin, the son of a wealthy slave owner in Maryland. For reasons neither of them can understand, their lives are inexplicably bound to each other in blood and pain, and Dana’s decisions, trapped in a past where she is considered little more than property, will have far-reaching consequences for her and her own ancestors.

For The Folio Society edition, celebrated artist James E. Ransome was commissioned to create a series of emotive illustrations and a beautifully simple binding design. In her exclusive introduction for this edition, author and journalist Tananarive Due draws on interviews with Butler to take a deeper look at this essential novel, and the questions it raises about history, guilt and survival.

Kindred is at its heart a gripping thriller, one that uses the uniquely agonising dilemmas of Dana’s situation to ask the bigger questions: how much history do we carry with us into the future? What do we owe the past? And what are the consequences of the worst acts of human barbarity? With elegant prose and an unflinching lack of sentimentality, Butler peels back the borders of science fiction to reveal new, uncomfortable horizons.

In her introduction to The Folio Society edition, Tananarive Due writes:

Butler’s ability to capture the feeling of being enslaved is precisely what Kindred does so well—while Roots and Beloved ask readers to empathize with historical characters far removed from their own experiences, Kindred’s contemporary protagonist flings readers into history with immediacy. I recommend Kindred first to any reader who asks me, Which Octavia Butler novel should I read? Because it is anchored in both contemporary and historical reality, it feels more like truth than fiction.

Kindred

The Folio Society edition of Octavia e. Butler’s Kindred, introduced by Tananarive Due and illustrated by James E. Ransome is available exclusively from www.FolioSociety.com

Production Details:

Bound in blocked paper. Set in Columbus. 296 pages. Printed slipcase. 7 colour illustrations, including one double-page spread. 9½˝ x 6¼˝.

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Margaret Atwood Writes Exclusive Introduction for The Folio Society’s New Publication of Her Oryx and Crake

 Award-winning Artist Harriet Lee-Merrion Provides Illustrations For This Speculative Future Novel – A Novel So Relevant For This Time It Makes You Grimace

Never has a plague-ravaged world been so brilliantly depicted. Dark, edgy and eerily prophetic, Oryx and Crake is a blistering page-turner from Margaret Atwood that is making its stunning Folio Society debut. Shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange prizes, the novel brings dark humour to the prophetic tale of a human race all but wiped out by plague.

 

Jimmy shields his skin from the scorching post-apocalyptic sun by spending much of the day wrapped in a filthy sheet in his makeshift treehouse. Born before the world imploded, his body and mind are ill-equipped for this extreme environment, unlike the Crakers who have been bioengineered to cope. As Jimmy reflects on his all-consuming love for the elusive Oyrx and his fateful friendship with megalomaniac Crake, we begin to piece together the chain of events that led to this catastrophic state.

In an introduction specially commissioned for this edition, Atwood returns to the questions raised by the novel that remain equally pertinent today: ‘How slippery is the slope? … Who’s got the will the stop us?’ There are no answers, she concludes, but her prescient tale creeps dangerously closer to reality as the years pass.

Following the Folio Society’s gorgeous and much-admired edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, this new edition sizzles with the dangerous heat and underlying menace of a ravaged America. Using a carefully selected pastel palette, award-winning illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion has created a series of quietly unsettling artworks that convey societal collapse with an eerie sense of detachment, while the binding design reflects the scientific foundation of Atwood’s narrative with glow-in-the-dark typography.

Oryx and Crake

The Folio Society edition of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake with a new introduction by Margaret Atwood and illustrated by Harriet Lee-Merrion is available exclusively from www.FolioSociety.com

Production Details:

Three-quarter bound in blocked cloth with a printed and blocked Modigliani paper front-board. Set in Freight Text and Neutraface as display. 296 pages. 7 colour illustrations. Plain slipcase. 9.˝ x 6.˝.