2005 vampire novel by Octavia E. Butler
Fledgling is a science fiction vampire novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in 2005. It was the author's final book published before her death in 2006. 
Plot.
The novel tells the story of Shori, a 53-year-old member of the Ina species, who appears to be a ten-year-old African-American girl. The Ina are nocturnal, long-lived, and derive sustenance by drinking human blood. Though they are physically superior to humans, both in strength and ability to heal from injury, the Ina depend on humans to survive. Their relationships are symbiotic: the Ina's venom provides a significant boost to their humans' immune systems and extends their lives up to 200 years. However, withdrawal from this venom will lead to the human's death.
The story opens as Shori awakens with no knowledge of who or where she is, in a cave and suffering from critical injuries. Although she is burned and has skull trauma, she kills and eats the first creature that approaches her. Eating this creature allows her to heal quickly enough to walk and explore on her own. She runs into the ruins where a construction worker named Wright picks her up on the side of the road; Shori bites Wright because she finds his scent irresistible, and they begin their relationship.
While staying at Wright's uncle's cabin, Shori realizes she's in need of more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to learn more about her past. They eventually meet Iosif, Shori's father, who tells her the burned-out town was once her home where she had lived with her mother and sisters. They also learn that Wright and Shori's mutually beneficial relationship makes Wright Shori's symbiont. Further, Shori's dark skin is the result of a genetic modification: the Ina were experimenting to make their kind resistant to daylight. All other Ina are white-skinned.
Later, before Shori is able to move in with Iosif, his settlement is burned down as Shori's home was. Shori and Wright meet the only two human symbionts who survived, Celia and Brook. Shori adopts Celia and Brook as her own symbionts to save their lives. Their bonding is initially uncomfortable for all of them, however, as symbionts become addicted to the venom of one particular Ina. The four flee to another house that Iosif owns. While at this new house during the day, they are attacked by several men with gasoline and guns. Because of the genetic enhancements made on Shori, she is awake and they are able to escape.
The group travels to the settlement of the Gordon family (old friends of Iosif), where they are welcomed and guarded by human symbionts during the day. The attackers also raid the settlement, but Shori and the human symbionts are able to fight back. They capture three attackers alive. The Gordon family interrogates the intruders and finds that they are the same attackers who killed Shori's parents and have been sent by the Silks, another Ina family. The Gordons suspect the attacks on Shori are motivated by disdain for the genetic experimentation that created her.
After failing to get a confession from the Silks, the Gordon family calls a Council of Judgment on Shori's behalf. Thirteen Ina families and their symbionts come to the Gordon settlement to discuss the Silks' attack on Shori. During the council, the Silk representative, Katharine Dahlman, sends one of her symbionts to kill Theodora, Shori's symbiont. This attack succeeds. Thus, in addition to issuing a punishment upon the Silks, the Council must also punish Katharine Dahlman. The Silks' sons are taken from them to be adopted by other Ina families, ensuring that the Silk line will die out. Katharine Dahlman is sentenced to have her legs amputated. She refuses this punishment and attempts to kill Shori, who fights back and fatally wounds her. Katharine is killed by being decapitated and burned. After regaining consciousness, Shori decides to join the Brathwaite family and learn the ways of the Ina to create her own family.
Main themes.
Vampire figure.
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"We Ina don't handle loss as well as most humans do. It's a much rarer thing with us, and when it happens, the grief is ... almost unbearable."
Butler, "Fledgling", 265.
One of the most commented aspects of "Fledgling" is its unusual type of vampire, the result of Butler's fusion of vampire fiction with science fiction. While the Ina are simply another species coexisting with humanity, the traditional vampire's monstrosity and abnormality routinely symbolizes deviant sexuality and decadence, serves as a foil for humanity, or is a projection of repressed sexual desire or fear of sexual or racial contamination.
Biological rather than supernatural, the Ina do not turn humans into vampires. They are not ruthless, threatening, predatory, intimidating, or generally antagonistic to humans. Instead, they create close-knit Ina-human communities where they cohabitate with selected humans in symbiotic relationships. In fact, as Pramrod Nayar notes, Butler creates an alternate history where humans and Ina have always coexisted in "non-hierarchic, interdependent and unified ecosystems".
Aside from their unusual relationships with humans, the Ina is quite ordinary. Steven Shaviro describes them as having "a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things—just as any group of human beings does". Butler even renders the Ina less than perfect in that they are prone to the intolerance and bigotry usually reserved for humans.
Race.
Some critics view Butler's decision to endow her protagonist with a larger dose of melanin than what is normal for the Ina as a metaphor for how the concept of race is created. Ali Brox, for example, points out that Shori is not just "made black" biologically, but also socially when Ina fixate on her difference. Thus, Shori's skin color forces her to defend herself from a hostile world before she has even learned about institutionalized hierarchies.
Ina bias against humans also serves as a comment on the history of human bigotry, specifically the prejudices of whites against blacks. As Sanchez-Taylor explains, "[t]he displacement of the notion of race into a species conflict allows Butler to have a black protagonist and have a discussion of intolerance without the need to partake in the history of human racism". In "Fledgling", this racial discussion takes on a hopeful tone when the majority of the Ina acknowledge Shori as one of their own.
Additionally, endowing Shori with a specific racial identity serves to deconstruct negative stereotypes of blackness. As a black protagonist, she becomes the vehicle through which Butler articulates the lack of Black in the vampire genre and challenges traditional notions of white males as heroes. Moreover, because her blackness was conceived as an evolutionary advantage, it inverts racist notions of blackness as a biological contaminant that leads to degeneracy.
The vampire protagonist of "Fledgling" is even more unusual, as she has been genetically enhanced. While the Ina are stereotypically white, as is traditional for vampires, Shori's genetic makeup includes human melanin, which renders her skin brown, a necessary trait for her kind to be able to survive exposure to the sun. Sanchez-Taylor suggests that Butler's choice in making Shori dark-skinned aligns "Fledgling"'s narrative with the Afrofuturist idea of defying the predominantly white vampire stereotype, such as those represented in Bram Stoker's or Anne Rice's novels. Such characters traditionally symbolize white masculinity; instead, Butler replaces them with a black, female main character.
Additionally, Shori is portrayed as less intimidating than stereotypical vampires. As Melissa Strong notes, Shori's diminutive size makes her seem non-threatening. Her treatment of symbionts is kind and understanding: instead of considering her symbionts as victims or pawns, Shori's relationship with them reflects mutuality and balance.
When Shori awakes at the beginning of the novel she discovers that she is covered in scars: "My skin was scarred, badly scarred over every part of my body that I could see. The scars were broad, creased, shiny patches of mottled red-brown skin." This description recalls the scars on the bodies of enslaved Africans in the Americas, due to the wounds inflicted by slave masters. LaMonda Horton-Stallings describes Shori's memory loss at the beginning of Fledgling as invoking the erasure of physical and collective memory through Transatlantic slavery. At the beginning of the novel we do not know the race of the narrator, and she has forgotten about the social concept of race, which is first raised in the book when Wright asks Shori: "Ordinary sun exposure burns your skin even though you're black?" (37) Shori responds: "'I'm...' I stopped. I had been about to protest that I was brown, not black, but before I could speak, I understood what he meant." (37) This immediately triggers another memory, and Shori tells Wright, "I think I'm an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than... others of my kind." In this sequence the concept of human racial categories is connected with the theme of genetic experimentation and racial difference among the Ina.
Speciesism as an allegory of racism.
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Milo Silk, to Shori at the Council of Judgment: "You're not Ina! ...You're not! And you have no more business at this Council than a clever dog!"
Butler, "Fledgling," 238.
Several scholars have noted how Ina discrimination against Shori doubles as commentary on human racist practices. According to Steven Shaviro, racism is the major factor in the conflict between Shori and Ina speciesists such as the Silk family, who view humans as enemies who have annihilated Ina throughout history. These Ina maintain that Ina and human must remain separate species with the Ina as the dominant partner. They consider Shori to be somehow biologically different to the rest of the Ina population, as not even belonging to the same species as them. They refuse to see the shared characteristics between Shori and the rest of the Ina; instead, they deride her because of her difference.
What rewrites these Ina's speciesism as racism, according to Shaviro, is that the genes that make Shori "part human" are also the genes that make her black, as opposed to their "almost grotesquely albino" skin tone. In fact, as Shari Evans notes, the racial insult Russell Silk hurls at Shori during the Council of Judgment ("murdering black mongrel bitch") negates the Ina's avowed difference from human prejudice and instead evoke white supremacy. These human-hating Ina, therefore, commit the equivalent of a hate-crime by destroying all of Shori's family, fueled by an ideology of racial purity and superiority that is not much different than that of Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan. As Ali Brox explains, Shori's hybridity becomes the focus of their hatred because it exposes the falsity of their claims to purity and reminds them of their past abject condition at the hands of humans.
Hybridity.
"Fledgling"'s protagonist is a genetically manipulated creature who combines Ina and human DNA. Her hybridity is perceived as a threat by Ina speciecists, who insist that the separation of Ina and human is essential to maintain the purity of the Ina species. As Ali Brox argues, Shori's existence "opens up a space of cultural uncertainty and instability" that forces Ina families such as the Silks, who suffer the delusion that there is a "pure" and "superior" Ina race, to admit they were once weak, oppressed, and killed by humans. These Ina are hostile towards Shori and interpret her hybridity as a sign of degeneracy. As Gates points out, because her body is a sign of Ina-human miscegenation "[s]he is called at various times a dog, a dirty little nigger bitch, a murdering black mongrel bitch, and more".
Butler's narrative, however, shows that Shori's hybridity is, in fact, an evolutionary advantage. First, it allows her to be awake during the day, which permits her to survive multiple attacks on herself and her symbionts. Second, it makes her venom very powerful, which makes her scent extremely attractive to male Ina and also allows her to collect symbionts easily, making her kind more adaptable than the average Ina. In addition, Shori's hybridity also symbolizes an enhanced or "correct" type of mutualistic symbiosis, as she literally embodies human and Ina DNA working together. Thus, Butler connects hybridity to the survival of not just the Ina, but also of humanity. As Pramrod