Octavia butler vampire6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She is also, when we encounter her, an amnesiac, and through the novel's opening chapters we piece together the fate of her family and the challenge that now faces her to re-establish her own safety and right to exist against uncertain forces determined to wipe her out. As part of this genetic enhancement, Shori is Black - a fact we find out relatively far into the novel's own text, although like Kindred before it, the marketing is likely to have given this away before the reader encounters it in the story. The protagonist of Fledgling is Shori, a juvenile (though still super old in human terms) Ina who is the result of genetic experimentation by her mothers: unlike the rest of her species, Shori is able to control her sleep cycle and move around relatively freely during the day, rather than going to sleep or being severely burned by sunlight. It reimagines the vampire myth in a way that plays upon the psychological appeal vampires can exert on their prey, creating the Ina, a symbiont species which gathers a group of humans and forms a mutual bond with them, feeding on them in exchange for increased longevity and healing and a whole lot of mutual pleasure. ![]() Fledgling is Butler's last completed novel, a story which stands well alone but in another world could have been the start of something much longer. ![]()
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