Fledgling

Octavia Butler’s final novel is a variation of the vampire myth, but in this case the vampire kind are a distinct race. They cannot make humans into vampires, but instead live with humans in a symbiosis that makes them mutually interdependent.

Shori is a young vampire who has survived an attack that has killed her family and taken her memory. She wakes in pain, injured, blind, and in need of red meat to heal herself. She survives, begins to heal, but she has lost all memory of who and what she is, and has forgotten everything she knew about her family and her kind.

However, she is drawn to a young man who is human, and links him to her by feeding on his blood. The feeding forms a bond that is pleasurable for the human, and essential for the vampire.

Shori is driven to find out what happened to her that left her nearly dead, and when other vampires come looking for survivors of the attack, she connects with them to discover that they are the male line of her family. The compound where she found herself was the home of the female line of the vampire family to which she belongs, but now all the females are gone except for her.

She soon discovers that a war has broken out between two ancient vampire families, sparked by the experimental breeding plan her own family had begun to create vampires that could stay awake and walk in the sunlight. Shori is the one living survivor of these experiments. Other vampire families believe that she is a danger to them, or that she is “unnatural” in her abilities, and thus planned to destroy the new breed of vampire.

Shori learns of the traditions of the vampire society, and brings the killers of her family to trial in the vampire tradition, but finds her own motives questioned and herself as much on trial as those who killed her family.

Octavia Butler was one of the rare science fiction authors to deal with race in her work, and is startlingly innovative. Most of her work deals with rogue talents, genetic manipulation, and other ways in which her characters are “born different”. Relationships are highlighted – Butler’s methodology is to give a character a gift that is also a burden, then see how she or he deals with it, both internally and in interactions with other people.

I am sorry, also, that this may be the last book I will see from Butler – she obviously wrote Fledgling as the first of a series on the vampire kind and I would have enjoyed seeing where she was planning to go with it.

Bottom line: Sharply written, it gets into your blood.