Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005.Charles, Ron. "Love at First Bite." The Washington Post. Washingtonpost.com. 30 Oct. 2005.Doctorow, Cory. "Octavia Butler's Fledgling: subtle, thrilling vampire novel."BoingBoing. 17 January 2006.Gates, Rob. "Fledgling by Octavia Butler." Rev. of Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler. Strange Horizons. 6 March 2006.Cheuse, Alan. "Posthumous Sci-Fi: Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling." NPR 23 February 2007. It was the author's final book published before her death in 2006.
Plot The novel tells the story of Shori, a 53-year-old member of the Ina species, who appears to be a ten-year-old African-American girl. The Ina are nocturnal, long-lived, and derive sustenance by drinking human blood. Though they are physically superior to humans, both in strength and ability to heal from injury, the Ina depend on humans to survive. Their relationships are mutualistic: the Ina's venom provides a significant boost to their humans' immune systems and extends their lives up to 200 years. However, withdrawal from this venom will lead to the human's death.
The story opens as Shori awakens with no knowledge of who or where she is, in a cave and suffering from critical injuries. Although she is burned and has skull trauma, she kills and eats the first creature that approaches her. Eating this creature allows her to heal quickly enough to walk and explore on her own. She runs into the ruins where a construction worker named Wright picks her up on the side of the road; Shori bites Wright because she finds his scent irresistible, and they begin their relationship.
While staying at Wright's uncle's cabin, Shori realizes she's in need of more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to learn more about her past. They eventually meet Iosif, Shori's father, who tells her the burned-out town was once her home where she had lived with her mother and sisters. They also learn that Wright and Shori's mutually beneficial relationship makes Wright Shori's symbiont. Further, Shori's dark skin is the result of a genetic modification: the Ina were experimenting to make their kind resistant to daylight. All other Ina are white-skinned.
Later, before Shori is able to move in with Iosif, his settlement is burned down as Shori's home was. Shori and Wright meet the only two human symbionts who survived, Celia and Brook. Shori adopts Celia and Brook as her own symbionts to save their lives. Their bonding is initially uncomfortable for all of them, however, as symbionts become addicted to the venom of one particular Ina. The four flee to another house that Iosif owns. While at this new house during the day, they are attacked by several men with gasoline and guns. Because of the genetic enhancements made on Shori, she is awake and they are able to escape.
The group travels to the settlement of the Gordon family (old friends of Iosif), where they are welcomed and guarded by human symbionts during the day. The attackers also raid the settlement, but Shori and the human symbionts are able to fight back. They capture three attackers alive. The Gordon family interrogates the intruders and finds that they are the same attackers who killed Shori's parents and have been sent by the Silks, another Ina family. The Gordons suspect the attacks on Shori are motivated by disdain for the genetic experimentation that created her.
After failing to get a confession from the Silks, the Gordon family calls a Council of Judgment on Shori's behalf. Thirteen Ina families and their symbionts come to the Gordon settlement to discuss the Silks' attack on Shori. During the council, the Silk representative, Katharine Dahlman, sends one of her symbionts to kill Theodora, Shori's symbiont. This attack succeeds. Thus, in addition to issuing a punishment upon the Silks, the Council must also punish Katharine Dahlman. The Silks' sons are taken from them to be adopted by other Ina families, ensuring that the Silk line will die out. Katharine Dahlman is sentenced to have her legs amputated. She refuses this punishment and attempts to kill Shori, who fights back and fatally wounds her. Katharine is killed by being decapitated and burned. After regaining consciousness, Shori decides to join the Brathwaite family and learn the ways of the Ina to create her own family.
Main themes
Vampire figure
One of the most commented aspects of Fledgling is its unusual type of vampire, the result of Butler's fusion of vampire fiction with science fiction. While the Ina are simply another species coexisting with humanity, the traditional vampire's monstrosity and abnormality routinely symbolizes deviant sexuality and decadence, serves as a foil for humanity, or is a projection of repressed sexual desire or fear of sexual or racial contamination.Sanchez-Taylor, Joy-Ann. "Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Daniel Jose Older's "Phantom Overload": The Ethnic Undead." Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Representation of Ethnic Futurity. Dissertation. University of South Florida. Tampa: USF Scholar Commons, 2014.
Biological rather than supernatural, the Ina do not turn humans into vampires.Crow, Charles L. "Fledgling." Rev. of Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler. Gothic Studies 8.2. (Nov. 2006): 142-143.Morris, Susana M. "Black Girls Are From The Future: Afrofuturist Feminism In Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling." Women's Studies Quarterly 40.3/4 (2012): 146-166. They are not ruthless, threatening, predatory, intimidating, or generally antagonistic to humans.Strong, Melissa J. "The Limits of Newness: Hybridity in Octavia E. Butler's Fledgling." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres 11.1 (2011): 27-43. Instead, they create close-knit Ina-human communities where they cohabitate with selected humans in symbiotic relationships. In fact, as Pramrod Nayar notes, Butler creates an alternate history where humans and Ina have always coexisted in "non-hierarchic, interdependent and unified ecosystems".Nayar, Pramod K. "Vampirism and Posthumanism in Octavia Butler's Fledgling." Notes on Contemporary Literature 41.2 (2011).
Aside from their unusual relationships with humans, the Ina are quite ordinary. Steven Shaviro describes them as having "a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things—just as any group of human beings does".Shaviro, Steven. "Exceeding the Human: Power and Vulnerability in Octavia Butler's Fiction." In Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl. Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Seattle, WA: Aqueduct Press, 2013. Butler even renders the Ina less than perfect in that they are prone to the intolerance and bigotry usually reserved for humans.
Race
Some critics view Butler's decision to endow her protagonist with a larger dose of melanin than what is normal for the Ina as a metaphor for how the concept of race is created. Ali Brox, for example, points out that Shori is not just "made black" biologically, but also socially when Ina fixate on her difference.Brox, Ali. "Every age has the vampire it needs": Octavia Butler's Vampiric Vision in Fledgling." Utopian Studies 19.3 (2008): 391-409. Thus, Shori's skin color forces her to defend herself from a hostile world before she has even learned about institutionalized hierarchies.
Ina bias against humans also serves as a comment on the history of human bigotry, specifically the prejudices of whites against blacks. As Sanchez-Taylor explains, "[t]he displacement of the notion of race into a species conflict allows Butler to have a black protagonist and have a discussion of intolerance without the need to partake in the history of human racism". In Fledgling, this racial discussion takes on a hopeful tone when the majority of the Ina acknowledge Shori as one of their own.
Additionally, endowing Shori with a specific racial identity serves to deconstruct negative stereotypes of blackness. As a black protagonist, she becomes the vehicle through which Butler articulates the lack of Black in the vampire genre and challenges traditional notions of white males as heroes. Moreover, because her blackness was conceived as an evolutionary advantage, it inverts racist notions of blackness as a biological contaminant that leads to degeneracy.
The vampire protagonist of Fledgling is even more unusual, as she has been genetically enhanced. While the Ina are stereotypically white, as is traditional for vampires, Shori's genetic makeup includes human melanin, which renders her skin brown, a necessary trait for her kind to be able to survive exposure to the sun. Sanchez-Taylor suggests that Butler's choice in making Shori dark-skinned aligns Fledglings narrative with the Afrofuturist idea of defying the predominantly white vampire stereotype, such as those represented in Bram Stoker's or Anne Rice's novels. Such characters traditionally symbolize white masculinity; instead, Butler replaces them with a black, female main character.
Additionally, Shori is portrayed as less intimidating than stereotypical vampires. As Melissa Strong notes, Shori's diminutive size makes her seem non-threatening. Her treatment of symbionts is kind and understanding: instead of considering her symbionts as victims or pawns, Shori's relationship with them reflects mutuality and balance.
When Shori awakes at the beginning of the novel she discovers that she is covered in scars: "My skin was scarred, badly scarred over every part of my body that I could see. The scars were broad, creased, shiny patches of mottled red-brown skin." This description recalls the scars on the bodies of enslaved Africans in the Americas, due to the wounds inflicted by slave masters. LaMonda Horton-Stallings describes Shori's memory loss at the beginning of Fledgling as invoking the erasure of physical and collective memory through Transatlantic slavery. At the beginning of the novel we do not know the race of the narrator, and she has forgotten about the social concept of race, which is first raised in the book when Wright asks Shori: "Ordinary sun exposure burns your skin even though you're black?" (37) Shori responds: "'I'm...' I stopped. I had been about to protest that I was brown, not black, but before I could speak, I understood what he meant." (37) This immediately triggers another memory, and Shori tells Wright, "I think I'm an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than... others of my kind." In this sequence the concept of human racial categories is connected with the theme of genetic experimentation and racial difference among the Ina.
Speciesism as an allegory of racism
Several scholars have noted how Ina discrimination against Shori doubles as commentary on human racist practices. According to Steven Shaviro, racism is the major factor in the conflict between Shori and Ina speciesists such as the Silk family, who view humans as enemies who have annihilated Ina throughout history. These Ina maintain that Ina and human must remain separate species with the Ina as the dominant partner. They consider Shori to be somehow biologically different to the rest of the Ina population, as not even belonging to the same species as them. They refuse to see the shared characteristics between Shori and the rest of the Ina; instead, they deride her because of her difference.