First published in 1979, sci-fi author Octavia Butler 's bestselling novel Kindred defies conventional genres, incorporating classic time-travel tropes, Antebellum South slave narratives, and historical fiction. Butler herself described it as "a kind of grim fantasy." More than 40 years later, Kindred is now an eight-episode TV miniseries, coming to Hulu next month, and we now have our first look via a 90-second teaser.

(Spoilers for the 1979 novel below.)

Butler's novel is told from the first-person perspective of a young Black writer named Dana, who moves to Los Angeles with her husband Kevin in 1976. On her 26th birthday, Dana suddenly becomes dizzy, and the walls of their LA home fade away. She finds herself at the edge of a wood near a river and promptly rescues a young, red-haired boy named Rufus Weylin. Another dizzy spell quickly brings her back to her present, but the attacks keep coming, and soon Dana is being transported back and forth on a regular basis, for varying lengths of time. (Time passes more swiftly in the past, further complicating matters.) She quickly learns there are certain compromises she must make, and cruelties she must endure, in order to navigate the Antebellum South. Eventually Kevin finds himself transported back to the same time period, too, and must learn to navigate the Antebellum South as a white man.