[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 2005
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 6.6.14, 2.7.26-3.7.26
Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling was the second of her novels that I read, back in 2014, and I’ve been pondering revisiting it for a while; I decided on a whim recently, because a friend has been working their way through Butler, that it was time.
Fledgling is, briefly, a science fiction vampire novel: a girl awakens alone in the dark in a cave with no memory of who she was before, and finds herself caught up in a web of political machinations she does not fully understand, because while she is Ina — a science-fictional parallel humanoid species of symbiotic vampires — she is also the product of genetic engineering, mixing her DNA with human DNA in order to produce a dark-skinned Ina able to be active during the day (both in the sense of “able to withstand sunlight for short periods” and in the sense of “literally able to stay awake during the day”). the plot is split roughly into two parts: first, the increasing tension as an amnesiac Shori gathers a new family of human symbionts only to find herself pursued by the people who murdered her and cost her her memory; second, the trial of the murderers.
as this summary suggests, in one respect this is a novel about miscegenation and racialization: Shori represents both Blackness and the specter of racial mixing, and conservative Ina revile her both for her visible phenotypical difference and for the “impurity” she represents. I found it particularly striking given the Xenogenesis trilogy how little attention there was here to the actual mechanics of the genetic engineering that produced Shori — despite the fact that there is a literal species boundary here, Butler mostly treats it as if it were equivalent to intra-human racial mixing. I think, on balance, that this is a good decision — to give it more weight would be to imply that intra-human mixing should also have that weight. still, it is Butler, and the eugenic comments from various people around Shori about how wonderful and special her abilities are and how much of an asset she will be to their species’s long-term survival pass without comment. I admit I found this a little perplexing given Shori’s characterization — it seems like something that would irk her. after all, is she valuable only for her genetic contribution to the Ina? or is she valuable because she’s a person in her own right?
because this is Butler, there is also some profound weirdness about age gaps and consent. the age gaps are the thing that most stuck with me: Shori both is a child (in Ina terms, though she’s in her fifties) and looks like a (human) child, but the book does nonetheless begin with her immediately having sex with the (more or less) first adult human man she meets. I’m still not sure what to do with this. even when we learn that Shori is in her fifties, the fact remains that even in Ina terms she is legally and socially a child, even if a precocious one who is on the verge of adulthood (read: sexual maturity), and also that Wright doesn’t know that she’s in her fifties.
the book justifies this with some world-building about how Ina saliva is addictive and wildly pleasurable for humans, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. there is, I think, a reading of this as being about the ways Black children are treated prematurely as adults and/or forced into adulthood; certainly it was hard to read Elizabeth Akhmatova’s closing statement at the trial as anything but a pointed vindication of Black girls’ intelligence and resourcefulness. but I think this is undermined by the extent to which the novel itself treats Shori as if she were an adult.
this is related to the broader question of consent here: Ina saliva is addictive, and human symbionts quickly become physically dependent on it, deriving (sexual, or sexual-adjacent) pleasure from having their Ina partner bite/feed on them. as with so many of Butler’s books, this one comes back to: what if there were a power dynamic that was rooted in objective, biological fact such that exploitation were inevitable? of course, symbionts all love their Ina partners, and they derive benefits from the partnership (improved health, a doubling-to-tripling of their lifespan, and more) — but of course, also, the symbiotic relationship is such that if an Ina gives a symbiont an order, up to and including an order that will lead to the symbiont’s death, the symbiont physically cannot disobey, or at least cannot do so without significant pain. particularly since early in the novel Shori does not understand what she’s doing it’s hard not to see this, still, as a form of exploitation, and a sexualized exploitation at that. what does it mean, then, to put your Black girl protagonist into the position of the exploiter in this way?
the novel, to its credit, doesn’t altogether evade this question, though it never offers a direct answer. it does, among other things, begin with Shori, amnesiac and crazed with the pain of her injuries, tearing out the throat of someone trying to help her and then eating him. but the gap here points towards broader gaps that the novel is, of necessity, constantly bringing up but with which it absolutely does not want to engage, namely land ownership, class, and colonialism.
the thing about Ina communities is that the fantasy of a tight-knit, self-sustaining multi-family compound in the woods is inextricably entangled with the politics of land ownership. this means that the novel, in discussing various Ina families, must repeatedly draw attention to their class position: Shori’s paternal ancestors were aristocratic landowners in Romania whose estates were seized and redistributed to peasants after World War I and who, of course, had to flee Europe when The Communists™ came to power. when the representatives of a bunch of Ina families gather for the trial, all of them whose livelihood is specifically described are not only direct beneficiaries of colonialism but basically all make their living primarily from land ownership, whether by “developing” “areas with potential” or by leading wilderness tours in rural British Columbia (entirely unceded land, we should remember) or raising livestock on enclosed ranches. notably, despite the affirmation that Ina evolved alongside humans, all of the Ina we meet in the novel are immigrants, mainly from Eastern Europe (Butler is not immune to Dracula, it seems). if there are any Indigenous Ina, we never see or hear of them.
this is so striking because despite the novel’s interest in Shori’s racialization it pays no attention whatsoever to the Ina’s class position. there is, perhaps, an extent to which the Ina’s ability to coerce humans into obeying them might be read as a metaphor for capitalist exploitation, but even if we want to pursue this reading, I think it falls apart in the end because the book isn’t actually interested in a critique of the Ina. it is interested in imagining a gentler form of exploitation where the exploiter — who, of course, “needs” the exploited — takes care of the exploited. if the Ina were truly a model for a different way of being/living — symbiosis rather than parasitism — I would need to see some evidence that that model had an effect on the Ina’s engagement with human political economy. in the end, though, they’re all either landlords, homesteaders, or both.
all of which is to say: this was, overall, an enjoyable read — as with all of Butler’s books (at least for me) I had a hard time putting it down. I ended up going to bed around 2am but I was sorely tempted to just power through and read the whole book in one sitting last night.
but it was also a frustrating read, because it wants me to be thinking about its treatment of race in political terms while simultaneously dancing around something else that is, in fact, a core, glaring political problem that structures every aspect of its narrative.
also, did you know this book was published less than a month before Twilight? if I had a nickel for every book about idiosyncratic vampires living in the Pacific Northwest that was published in late 2005 I might only have two nickels, but it’s weird that I’d have two nickels!
moods: dark, emotional, horny, tense