Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

One of my all time favourite sci-fi favorite writers Octavia Butler died unexpectedly in February this year so I have been holding off reading what was to become her last book. Not many writers have affected me like Butler has - I read her Xenogenesis trilogy when I was at the tender age of 17 or so and it has stayed with me ever since. Pretty much all of her books deal with very similar themes - questions about humanity, race, communities and sexuality. And so does her last novel, Fledgling.

Fledgling is a story about a young woman who wakes up badly injured and with an amnesia, remembering nothing of her past. She will quickly discover that she is a vampire, and forms a symbiotic relationship with a man who stops to pick her up on the road. While she discovers the extent of her powers, she also slowly starts to discover what in her past has been so horrible she can't bear to remember it anymore. I'm being deliberately vague - but so much of the book's fascination is about slowly discovering what Shori is and what has happened.

Butler has created a very clever alternative vampire mythos. There are no supernatural powers, but in a very Butler-esque way vampires are a separate species to humans, and live with them in symbiotic relationships forming small communities away from humans. Vampires need human blood to survive, and in return their companion humans get doubled or even tripled healthy life span. Butler picks and chooses from the established vampire rules to create something original, and her characters are always realistic and interesting. I won't say lovable, although love does motivate them - but because the situations they usually are in and choices they have to make mean that they have to be tough and somewhat calculative. Butler is without a doubt feminist and her female characters are strong and intelligent, but she doesn't preach and neither are her male characters evil or disgusting (like Sheri S. Tepper's, for example).

Another superb book from Butler, and I kind of got the impression she was planning to write another book in the series - it's absolutely tragic that she died before her time. She had apparently been suffering from poor health and a writer's block for the past few years, but this book was great comeback. I shall miss her.

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