Book review: Fledgling by Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler is an author I’ve been meaning to read for some time now, but didn’t know quite where to begin with her work. Then I saw a retweet expressing displeasure with Fledgling, and as has become a habit for me, I decided to make it my first effort. (How do you get me to bump a book up in my TBR list? Complain that you hate it. I’ll come running to see what all the fuss is about far faster than I would if you told me to read it because you loved it. Yeah, I know, I’m weird like that.)

There was only one complication in that the Kindle edition I wanted wasn’t available yet. I paid for the preorder, and the book was delivered to my phone at the end of March. (Isn’t technology grand?) I still had to clear out my other current reads, but as soon as that was done, I began the book curious to see what had displeased the other reader.

Well, I found it, and this is the first caveat I must warn other readers about. The main character, first called Renee, and then by her true name Shori, is a child despite being fifty-three years old. She is a child by the standards of her people, the Ina, who humans would call vampires, and she has severe amnesia after almost being killed at the start of the story. To my mind, this makes her even more of a child. Almost as soon as the story starts, Shori finds a human named Wright, and she feeds from him. Her venom compels him to follow her orders, and soon after traveling with him to his home, they have sex.

Now, the thing about this scene that makes it so troubling is Shori herself, and how the scene plays out. She has amnesia so severe that at first, even the appliances and features of Wright’s home are alien to her. So the scene goes something like this (I’m paraphrasing): “Yes, I remember these things now. This is a stove, and this is refrigerator…let’s go to bed and have sex.”

Wright’s reaction to Shori may be explained by her venom, which acts as a hypnotic agent and as an aphrodisiac. His enchantment with her is not necessarily some latent pedophile tendencies, but Shori’s shift in mental directions is a shock as strong as a bucket of ice water. There’s no questions in her about having sex with a man she just met hours before, no confusion about having this sudden urge when she was only seconds before cataloging the contents of a complete stranger’s home. The scene is not graphic or explicit, but it is definitely going to shove some people violently out of their comfort zone even before the deed is described. I found I had problems with it too, being so out of nowhere, and I had to put the book down for a day to process that.

In the chapters that follow, Shori is able to locate her father, who has been searching for her since the destruction of her mother’s community. Ina males and females do not live together because their pheromone attraction to each other is distracting to the point of making them unfit to raise their kids. While male children under a certain age live with their mothers and sisters until they near adolescence, as soon as their mating tendencies begin to develop, they are moved in with their fathers.

Again, some what’s revealed is going to push people out of their comfort zone. These young children are paired with adult human symbionts for feeding, and because of the aphrodisiac nature of their venom, those relationships quickly become sexual. There’s an interesting point here about the moral views of humans being applied to sentient creatures who are not humans, but who have an almost similar appearance. Yes, it is likely that an outside observer of these relationships would instantly equate them to being a pedophile cult grooming their children for multiple lovers. I think for a lot of readers, this is going to stop them from ever getting past the earliest parts of the book. It’s a gut check that many readers will fail because it’s an understandably uncomfortable topic.

Setting that aside and returning to the story, Shori begins prowling to find other symbionts to avoid weakening Wright, and her father Iosif invites her and her symbionts to live temporarily with his community until he can make arrangements for her to live on her own. Only, before any such plans can be made, his community is also destroyed, leaving only two symbionts alive who had been out of town during the attack.

What follows should be a mystery of sorts, as Shori must find out why humans keep attacking people close to her. But with the mystery element just introduced, I made a written prediction of who the culprits were, and why these attacks were made, and I was not wrong. Which brings me to my third and final caveat about this story. It’s very predictable. There’s not one event that I couldn’t see coming, and while that’s not quite a problem, I much rather prefer stories that make me think I know what’s going on and veer off in a direction that shocks me. If I can see everything coming, it kind of takes the fun out of discovering the plot.

Having said that, I ended up enjoying most of the book. The Ina people are not humans, and they’re not at all like the vampires of our legends. This is a world that is culturally aware of vampires as we understand them, so from the moment that Shori bites Wright and then Theodora, there’s none of that stereotypical “What are you?” trope. They know her as a vampire, and they understand something about Shori even when she does not.

With help from the surviving symbionts from her father’s family, Shori seeks out another Ina community, and it too is attacked. But Shori is able to organize a defense, and in questioning the surviving attackers, she begins to piece together why these massacres have happened.

Throughout these chapters, Shori learns more about the Ina and their culture, about the many functions of Ina venom and its effects on humans and on other Ina, and about her past connections to these other Ina communities. Her amnesia has some quirky conveniences that service the plot. She can’t remember much about her people or her culture, and yet she retains the ability to read and speak Ina. The amnesia serves to make Shori the reader’s “new guy” so that all this information is given without “as you know” cliches, but for someone almost killed by severe head injuries, it’s curious how she still retains knowledge of at least two written and spoken languages. Curiouser still, looking at human appliances or devices instantly returns parts of her memory about their function, but all mentions of her family or Ina connections revives nothing. It’s…mighty convenient, wouldn’t you say? I know I would.

Yet, I’m willing to forgive this convenient head injury because it allows the other Ina to describe their culture and their relationships with the humans in a convincing and fascinating way. There’s several ideas in this story that I’ve used in vampire stories, including the concept that vampires are a separate race with a culture and language all their own, and that their bite cannot turn humans into similar blood drinkers. Where we diverge lies in the complexity of Ina venom. In addition to being a hypnotic drug and an aphrodisiac, is also has healing and immunity-boosting properties. Humans taken as symbionts can live much, much longer, provided they are bitten and fed from regularly by the same Ina. The venom of each Ina is unique, so there’s no swapping symbionts, either. If it wouldn’t spoil many of the discoveries, I could actually spend whole pages gushing about how fascinating this one facet of the Ina is all by itself, and it’s something I kind of wish I’d thought of before I started writing my own stories.

I can’t talk about the last quarter of the book without massive spoilers, but I will say that the action peaks and then dips down to a more sedate conclusion. This is not a complaint, and I liked how the story played out. I like the Ina and their alien culture and morals. It’s the kind of world that makes me hope for a sequel, or failing that, a spin off following some other Ina besides Shori.

With the earlier caveats and quirks listed, it might be confusing why I’m giving this 5 stars, but I feel like it’s is a story that will stick with me in much the same way that Let the Right One In has, another story with a child vampire, and that shares some of the same issues of pushing people out of their comfort zone. Fledgling certainly did make me feel a bit squicked out at the start, but I liken this to a kind of culture shock, like a person from America moving to another country and finding the local age of consent is thirteen. Once I could get over that sense of shock, I found the book intensely fascinating. If I had read something like this before I’d fully formed my own vampire mythos, I believe this would have inspired and influenced my writing decisions. Even so, I think it’s food for thought should I ever start writing a new vampire series.

So yes, I’m giving Fledgling 5 stars and would recommend it to vampire fans with warnings that it’s got a nasty gut check right at the start. The book WILL push you out of your comfort zone, and if you aren’t prepared to do that, I can’t suggest starting it in the first place. But I survived the gut check, and while this was my first read of Octavia Butler’s work, I can say with certainty it won’t be my last. And now I shall stop here, because any further praise will get into the land of spoilers, and I think you should have a chance to explore this alien world on your own.