Fledgling: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Octavia E. Butler (Author) "I awoke to darkness..." (more)
Key Phrases: Katharine Dahlman, Council of Judgment, Punta Nublada (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The much-lauded Butler creates vampires in her 12th novel (her first in seven years) that have about as much to do with Bram Stoker's Dracula as HBO's Deadwood does with High Noon. They need human blood to survive, but they don't kill unless they have to, and (given several hundred years) they'll eventually die peacefully of old age. They are Ina, and they've coexisted with humans for millennia, imparting robust health and narcotic bliss with every bite to their devoted human blood donors, aka "symbionts." Shori is a 53-year-old Ina (a juvenile) who wakes up in a cave, amnesiac and seriously wounded. As is later revealed, her family and their symbionts were murdered because they genetically engineered a generation of part-Ina, part-human children. Shori was their most successful experiment: she can stay conscious during daylight hours, and her black skin helps protect her from the sun. The lone survivor, Shori must rely on a few friendly (and tasty) people to help her warn other Ina families and rediscover herself. Butler, keeping tension high, reveals the mysteries of the Ina universe bit by tantalizing bit. Just as the Ina's collective honor and dignity starts to get a little dull, a gang of bigoted, black sheep Ina rolls into town for a species-wide confab-cum-smackdown. In the feisty Shori, Butler has created a new vampire paradigm—one that's more prone to sci-fi social commentary than gothic romance—and given a tired genre a much-needed shot in the arm. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post
If vampires rose up as frequently as stories about them, we'd have to wear garlic necklaces every night. Tales about these suckers have been around for hundreds of years, of course, but in 1897 Bram Stoker's Dracula sunk its teeth deep into the collective imagination and spawned a thousand descendants. At this late date can anyone draw more blood from the story? "Buffy" gave up the ghost in 2003. The WB drove a stake through the heart of her spinoff, "Angel," the next year. "Dracula: The Musical" closed on Broadway in January. Anne Rice now writes about Jesus, for Christ's sake.

How strange to find Octavia E. Butler digging up the old bones of this legend. As the first African American woman to make a name for herself in science fiction and the winner of a MacArthur genius grant, she seems an unlikely victim of Dracula's allure. But, as we might expect, her new novel, Fledgling, doesn't just resurrect the pale trappings of vampire lore, it completely transforms them in a startlingly original story about race, family and free will.

"I awoke to darkness," the narrator begins. She's naked, badly burned, starving and without any idea where or who she is. She comes upon a group of homes destroyed by fire, but nothing looks familiar amid the cloud of pain and confusion. She can remember basic concepts only by trying to articulate what's missing: a bed, shoes, food. As a narrator, she couldn't seem more helpless, more vulnerable, more innocent. Then she chases down a deer and eats it. We're not in Kansas anymore.

Welcome to the creepy story of Shori Matthews, a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl. Suffering from amnesia, she makes a desperate narrator as we follow her on a dangerous journey of self-discovery and survival. She must somehow divine everything about herself from the clues provided by her strange body, the ashes of those burned homes and -- almost immediately -- a group of men trying to kill her. There's not a drop of Bela Lugosi in these pages, but Fledgling exercises the same hypnotic power the old Count projected onto his victims. Squirming in my chair, I was totally hooked, sometimes nauseated, anxious to put it down, but unable to look away. Go back, go back!

The story's energy comes from the plight of a woman on the run, but its real fascination is generated by the sociology of human-vampire relations that Butler develops. We learn that the beings commonly called vampires are actually Ina, a matriarchal race whose culture predates humanity by several thousand years. Most of the legends involving crucifixes, crypts and bats are just silly superstitions about a shy, peaceful people who live among us in small, single-sex communes. Yes, Ina are nocturnal, but that's only because their pale skin lacks melanin to protect them from the sun. Otherwise, they're just like you and me.

Except that they live to be 500 years old and need human blood to survive. This is where Butler is at her most unnerving. Each Ina depends upon a group of seven or eight human "symbionts" for food. In exchange, these "syms" -- all willing volunteers, they insist -- enjoy the erotic pleasure of being "eaten," while living much longer lives. (Ina saliva contains a powerfully addictive narcotic and healing agent.) Shori and her first victim/volunteer, a young contractor named Wright, must discover this ancient arrangement largely on their own, working out the dimensions of their relationship amid Shori's visceral needs and Wright's understandable confusion. (He's never had sex with a 10-year-old girl before. The orgasmic feeding scenes are mercifully brief but still persistently repulsive.)

As Shori and Wright flee from the assassins, she discovers she's the product of a controversial genetic experiment to provide the Ina with black human skin so that they can endure sunlight. But Butler has no interest in crowding in on Michael Crichton's turf; she doesn't devote more than a paragraph to the mechanics of this science. What interests her are the challenges posed by scrambling races and the nature of power between masters and servants. Fledgling lies closer to the moral paradoxes of Edward P. Jones's The Known World than to the gothic themes of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Ina are confident about the benefits they bestow on the humans who "volunteer" to feed them, and as Shori finds more of her kind, we see Ina/human families that seem to live in perfect peace. But despite his affection for Shori, Wright persists in asking awkward questions about the nature of her devotion and the extent to which he's really free to resist her. "Do you love me, Shori, or do I just taste good?" Yes, like much of Fledgling, that line has a high eww-factor, but in the context of this story, it's a deeply perplexing question. "I think the scariest thing about all this so far," Wright adds, "is that all . . . of those symbionts seem genuinely happy."

How many of our happy relationships involve a degree of dominance or dependence that we can't acknowledge? This is Butler's typically insidious method: to create an alternative social world that seems, at first, alien and then to force us to consider the nature of our own lives with a new, anxious eye. It's a pain in the neck, but impossible to resist.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press; First Edition edition (September 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583226907
• ISBN-13: 978-1583226902
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #355,645 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fledgling is good vampire fiction and great Butler fiction!, September 27, 2005

By	J. Gray (Carbondale, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am a fan of both vampire fiction and Octavia Butler, so learning last spring that her new novel would be about vampires was truly exciting. I have waited with great anticipation. I will say up front that the novel does not disappoint on either front. Indeed, while the novel is self-contained and reaches satisfying closure, the world she creates is interesting enough to warrant sequels and prequels. And I, for one, would welcome them.

In Butler's other fiction, she has often concerned herself with themes of prejudice and power and, just as often, transformation. In taking on the vampire theme, she certainly allows these interests full development. Obviously, she also takes some unexpected twists in her vampires, drawing on familiar images of the (sub) genre, but taking them in fresh and interesting directions.

Take, for example, themes of transformation. Typically, the vampire narrative concerns a protagonist going through "the change," embracing a new (un)life and letting go of his or her former humanity/mortality. Butler has certainly explored the theme of bodily transformation in other novels (e.g. Clay's Ark or the Xenogenesis series, to name a few). The vampires in Butler's novel, however, are a separate species on earth, co-evolved with humanity and full of their own laws and culture. Collectively, they call themselves "Ina."

While they live in a mutually symbiotic relationship with (some) humans, they cannot transform humans into Ina. The Ina have their own careful and intricate systems of reproduction, which shape and guide their culture. Transformation in this novel has more to do with the Ina's interest in genetics, a study some of them have been pursuing long before it interested humans. One group of Ina has successfully engineered a vampire who can stay awake during daylight hours and can endure measured amounts of sunshine. They do this by splicing some African genetic material to their own, creating Shori, a black Ina alone in a world of very pale and mostly blonde Ina. This genetic innovation is, of course, causing a difficult (and unwelcome to some) transformation to millenia of Ina traditions.

We meet Shori first as a nameless narrator coming to consciousness in a cave and discovering, as she heals, the burned out ruins of what she learns was recently her community. Shori suffers from a selective amnesia that allows her to recover language skills and the ability to recognize everyday objects as well as an innate understanding of her Ina abilities, but memories of her family and her past are lost to her. Her amnesia is a clever device that allows Butler to work through a structural necessity of nearly all vampire fiction: sorting through the various folklore of vampires to settle on her explanation of them, winnowing away "myth" from "truth." As Shori moves into other Ina communities, her transformation into vampire is more about rediscovery than the slow turning of human flesh into superhuman creature. However, to Butler's credit, Shori's amnesia plays essential roles in the plot in addition to serving as a device to do some bargain shopping at the vampire mythology store.

One point of criticism in an otherwise fascinating reworking of the vampire: The norm for the Ina is to be catatonic during the day and to burn in daylight. However, in her journey of self discovery, Shori offers little explanation for why vampires of folklore often appeared during the day. The image of sunlight physically destroying a vampire (a staple of the genre today) is actually an invention of early cinema that has been picked up in many subsequent vampire fictions. As most vampire officianados know, Dracula appears no less than three (actually more!) times during the day in Stoker's novel. Other Eastern European and Middle Eastern vampires of folklore often have frequent daylight appearances. If (in Shori's world) our vampire myths are based on Ina, it seems odd that the burn-in-sunlight aspect of the myth didn't develop until the early 20th century. A minor point, but worth mentioning given how much fun Butler has dismissing aspects of the folklore/pop culture in early chapters and generally demonstrating that she has done her homework about vampires.

Another theme that is very familiar from Butler's other works is the image of secret, minority communities living alongside the unknowing masses of humanity, usually in self-contained communes and family groups. I track this theme across the "Patternist" novels, including Clay's Ark. It is also central to the "Parable" novels, beginning with Lauren Olamina's ill-fated gated community in L.A. to the equally ill-fated refuge of Acorn. Arguably, this theme of communes also applies to the plantation in Kindred, although a different sort of commune for a different genre of fiction. One gets the feeling after reading several of Butler's novels that she either has lived on or wants to live on a commune.

Finally, Shori herself is a very familiar Butler heroine. She is a strong-willed diminuative female narrator who is black. She is a literary sister of Lauren Olamina of the Parable novels or even Dana of Kindred, narrating her experiences and perceptions with poetic bluntness. Shifting to third-person narrative, there also seems something similar here to heroines like Lilith Iapo of the Xenogenesis series and Anyanwu of Wild Seed. There is also something of Mary from the mixed point of view novel, Mind of My Mind. Certainly, these narrators' race and gender matter. But other commonalities are also striking. These are strong, practical women who may falter in their faith in themselves but always pick themselves up from the dust and fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) for themselves and their loved ones. Many of them are somehow burdened with a flaw - amnesia
in Shori's case, a birth defect causing extreme empathy in Olamina's, cancer in Lilith's, etc. - but almost always a flaw that also has advantages. And, again, Butler has written another strong female protagonist who comes into her own before reaching adulthood - the twist here being that Shori is a juvenile vampire of 53 who appears to be an 11 year old human girl. A wise child; A child forced into adulthood. Sound familiar?

In the hands of a less talented writer, these similarities might seem hackish. But Butler makes them feel like important elements of her thought experiments, getting a fresh reworking in a different scene. As she would be first to point out, it's not as if too many other authors of science fiction or even the vampire (sub) genre are exhausting representations of this sort of character. I welcome Shori into Butler's pantheon of strong and interesting black heroines and eagerly hope there is more to come about her in the future.

I truly enjoyed this novel and recommend it to fans of vampire fiction. I need not recommend it to fans of Butler because they will, doubtless, consume it as happily as I have. Without giving too much away, the last third of the novel turns to a kind of courtroom drama, albeit a vampire court. In the process, we learn that the elder Inas' claims to be above such human concerns as racism turn out to not be exactly accurate. Similarly, claims that the Ina's Council of Judgement is nothing like "the silly sports of human law courts" also turn out not to be true, and the findings of the Council seem to drip with Butler's cynical critique of contemporary high-profile legal judgements. But then, Butler rarely uses the SF genre to propose better worlds or happier ways of being together. If anything, she seems to remind us that all life is struggle and no being (human or otherwise) is free of corruption...or far from grace.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story That, Sadly, Will Likely Never Have A Sequel, April 27, 2006

By	Gregory Bernard Banks - 2012: Seeking Closure... (Atlanta area) - See all my reviews

The sad thing about reading this book was knowing that there will never be another one written by Ms. Butler, who died tragically earlier this year.

Since the plot is well covered in the description and by other reviewers, I will simply give my own brief impressions of the book.

Ms. Butler has always excelled at telling great stories while making significant social commentaries about our world, and "Fledgling" in no exception. Issues of race and genetic engineering are at the forefront of this tale, and the unique way Butler deals with these issues here is handled skillfully, albeit not so subtly, as some readers might prefer. But then Octavia Butler was always an author who tackled such social commentaries within her writings head on, while stil creating a compelling read.

For me, the story is at its best the first half to two-thirds of the book, when Shori and her symbiots are on the run from the mysterious assailants who are on her trail. But the story seems to flatten out once she finds a safe haven and begins to learn who may be responsible for the murder of her families.

The story becomes more about revealing the ins and outs of the Ina culture, the vampire like race to which Shori belongs. Even the death of someone close to Shori, and the eventual "showdown" between Shori and the guilty party, lack (for want of a less punny word) bite. I just felt more like an observer to the events and not emotionally involved in them. I believe this is due to the lead character's memory loss, which has left her far less emotionally affected by the tragic events around her. And what strain she does feel are more told than shown in any empathetic fashion.

I wish I could say that this book, apparently the last ever written by a widely respected author, was her best. But I think there was much that was left unsaid, and much more story to tell.

Knowing that Shori's tale, along with that of Ms. Butler's, has come to a far too early end makes this book one I will always keep, not as a greatly treasured addition to my personal library, but as a remembrance of a writer I greatly admired, respected, and will sorely miss.

- Gregory Bernard Banks, author of "Phoenix Tales: Stories of Death & Life"

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves To Be Remembered As Among Butler's Finest Works of Fiction, January 26, 2007

By	John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

It is indeed bittersweet that "Fledgling: A Novel" brings to a close the brilliant career of science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose engrossing fiction made her a noted writer not only of science fiction, but truly, among our most compelling fictional commentators of American race relations and elegant literary stylists (She was one of my favorite science fiction writers, and her untimely death last year is truly a great loss to literary science fiction, contemporary Afro-American literature, and indeed, all of contemporary English language literature.). Her final novel can be regarded as a triumphant coda to that career, truly encapsulating all of her sociological and anthropological concerns, and acting as a mesmerizing, profound fictional commentary on the state of race relations here in the United States. She has done the impossible, reviving the time-worn vampire novel genre, and instilling in it, a breath of fresh air, by writing a most memorable tale on the nature of individuality, free will and prejudice. In Shori Matthews, she has sprung forth a most compelling literary creation, telling her tale in a fascinating combination of fast-paced, truly "blood-and-guts" thriller and legal drama that ranks alongside the best from the likes of John Grisham, for example, in her compelling description of Ina society and culture. This splendid novel is destined to become a literary classic, favored not only by Octavia Butler's fans, but more importantly, those interested in reading the finest fantasy and science fiction literature.