Reading: Fledgling by Octavia E Butler

     Octavia E Butler really is one of those authors whose work is impossible to put down once you pick it up. I read Fledgling as part of my book club (a special benefit for those supporting the excellent Girls Guts Giallo Patreon) and it was almost impossible to not zoom through the book in a couple evenings. World building and exposition in sci fi and fantasy stories can really be make or break with how they're handled, and even quite skilled authors can lose me a little when they get lost in the reeds dumping a ton of info about the politics, culture, etc about a fictional world or people. A lot of the brilliance of Fledgling is how effortlessly Butler leads us into the world of vampires and making things like their customs, their biology (and even court proceedings) unfold in a way that's natural and riveting for the reader. Her style is sharp, precise and highly digestible while dealing with difficult concepts that have multiple interconnecting layers.

  Fledgling is about vampires but it is also about blackness and about race. Vampires serve here as a vehicle for exploring ingrained issues of racism, what it means to be black, what it means to be a person, as well as multiple facets of other socially constructed concepts (our ideas of age, family, relationships, sexual identity, gender roles, etc). It's quite clever to use a society of vampires- who in a lot of ways view themselves as separate from humans and human cultural norms- to explore how pervasive racism is. In a way it's really the ultimate take-down of those who "don't see race", which vampires supposedly don't until push comes to shove and they feel threatened by blackness.

    Some spoilers ahead. If this book sounds enticing and you want to be surprised- go pick up a copy before reading my review.

 

My hardcover copy of Fledgling

 

    Shori awakes alone, blind and severely injured in a cave. Something catastrophic has happened, but we don't learn what until later. She kills and eats what she thinks is an animal in order to heal, though later, to her horror, she understands that she's killed and eaten a person. She has no memory of what happened to her or of who she is. We learn and know as much as she does, as we get the story directly from her point of view- which works wonderfully to give us exposition once Shori does reconnect with her people and has to relearn everything about them. Some of her needs and knowledge at least is instinctual, as we learn when she encounters Wright, a young white man who thinks she's a runaway child.

    We learn right away that Shori is black and that she looks very young- perhaps about 10 or 11, but don't learn until much later that she's been alive for 53 years. Still a child by her species' standards, but not as helpless as one might imagine- and apparently it's not a social taboo for her to have relationships with humans. Shori bites Wright and he becomes attracted to her- something that to the reader is definitely quite disturbing. Here Butler plays with our expectations about consent and about power, while also making us think about the way that black children are often sexualized and perceived as "older". I hadn't picked up on this initially on my own, but it clicked while discussing it in book club, where black readers pointed out this concept and how it applies to the book. It's a blessing to be able to discuss fiction with a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and experiences- I couldn't imagine reading Butler's work with only white people in a discussion group.

     As a vampire, Shori can control and bond to the people she bites and feeds from, and this is also a necessary function of her survival. She's also extremely strong and fast and resilient. It's a total flip of the power dynamics you'd expect when Shori has a relationship with Wright, but it's still quite uncomfortable when the book delves into sex between the two. Butler definitely wants you to think about power and about consent and is not shy about reminding you of the physical differences between the two characters. Until we learn more about Shori's species and how they function, it's honestly very shocking.

     Shori learns that she belonged to a community of people and that said community was attacked and burned to the ground. Eventually she's able to locate her father and she learns that she is in part a genetic experiment- a mix of vampire and human DNA. Vampires are not black, but the melanin granted to her by human DNA means that she does not die in sunlight. She can also stay awake during the day and sleep at night if she chooses to, unlike her kin, who become immobile and vulnerable during the day.  We learn also that the motivations behind the attack on her and her family were racially motivated- stemming from a desire to keep vampires "white" and free from human DNA, despite the obvious advantage granted by it.

     What's also interesting is that we learn that vampires by necessity form polycules with human beings- groups of at least 7 bonded partners that love and feed their vampire. These partners can be male or female and are also free to have their own separate relationships with each other or with other humans outside of their family group. Being bonded to a vampire means a freedom from disease, an extended lifespan, and faster healing- but it also means death if anything happens to your vampire. The way this relationship functions raises a lot of questions about free will and about consent. Early on, you can still decide to leave your vampire partner before you're dependent on their bite and venom, but you are at that point already craving and obsessed with them. A vampire's bite is a bit like drug addiction- with a grace period before you're totally dependent and could become very ill without it.

    We also learn that bitten humans will do the unquestioned bidding of any vampire who bites them, and this comes into play when we learn about who attacked Shori's family and is continuing to pursue her and her allies. Are human beings really equal and free-willed in their relationships with vampires? A complicated question. The book doesn't provide answers one way or another, it merely wants you to think about all these social workings, human and otherwise, and ponder the implications. 

    Vampires also have completely different relationships structured around parenting, reproduction, and partnerships between adults of their own species. Their society is matriarchal and adults live with members of their own species sex exclusively (whereas their human families can be anyone of any gender). I'm always very interested in stories that restructure society and imagine something beyond contemporary cultural norms. There's a lot of questions too that I found myself asking about this structure- do vampires ever experience same-sex attraction with their own species? Do intersex vampires exist? While reading Fledgling I thought a lot about Ursula K LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness with its world of hermaphroditic* humans who only presented sexual characteristics during hormonal cycles and how that flipped everything upside down for the cishet endosex man visiting their world. We get a bit of those human reactions from Shori's partners, some of whom are learning about vampires and others who have already lived in vampire communities. For humans, being bitten by a vampire totally overrides one's own sense of sexual identity. Straight men and straight women end up in homosexual (in their mind) relationships with vampires who do not have the same cultural baggage around those relationships, at least not with humans.

     Shori is a wonderful and compelling character and it's so fun to discover along with her as she learns about her people, her family, and the enemies that seek to destroy her. I think her memory loss is such a clever way to make the process of learning and questioning feel natural, and for the information about the vampires- or Ina as they're called in the book- come to us in a way that doesn't feel like the author is dumping a wall of text at us and expecting us to digest it.

    Along with the mystery of this story, there's a lot of excitement, danger, and drama involved. I loved reading about Shori's relationships as she and Wright learn about what they're involved in, as well as her relationships with others as she builds her family of partners- called Symbionts in the book. Symbiosis is an important aspect of the book, where humans and Ina exist in a complicated relationship- they need each other, and the Ina especially cannot survive without intimate bonds with several humans, but not all Ina view humans as equals or even as partners with their own needs and autonomy, despite having intense romantic relationships with their bonded humans.

    What's also quite interesting in the book is its ideas about justice, revenge, and punishment. Ina justice doesn't involve incarceration or jails, rather the splitting up of families and the adoption out of living children, but physical punishment and capitol punishment are definitely part of how they serve justice as well. This dissolution of families feels like a commentary or contrast to existing human systems- the way poor families and families of color often have their children taken away by the state for any number of reasons. In this case, it's the respected and storied families (almost akin to royalty) facing this kind of punishment instead of underprivileged families. The Ina justice system looks very different from human ones, but there is still a lot of room for prejudice, personal bias, and scheming among the families that hold council.

    If you're looking for a vampire story that's anything but typical, I highly recommend this novel. Fiction from an author who isn't a cishet white man is already a breath of fresh air, and that counts double when the book is as thought-provoking, subversive, and unconventional as this one. I really didn't want this book to end, I was so invested in this world and its characters. 

Fledgling was published in 2005 and Octavia Butler sadly passed away in 2006 at the age of 58. One wonders what kind of stories she would have written if she was still with us today.

*I use the term hermaphroditic instead of intersex here because the systems of the characters in Left Hand of Darkness are biologically distinct and do not have the same cultural implications as intersex conditions for people in real life. In that book, all people on that planet possess two sets of reproductive organs which become functional only during hormonal cycles, with a possibility for either set to express at a given time.