![]() ![]() There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other feelings. I was hungry - starving! - and I was in pain. ![]() In its first sentences, the novel makes Shori’s initial ignorance literal, as she returns to consciousness severed from a social world: The book also returns to some of Butler’s perennial questions: how to assert power without weaponizing it, how to act with incomplete knowledge, and how to rebuild belonging in defiance of violent and destructive acts of exclusion.įledgling follows Shori, the vampire with no memory, as she slowly returns to an understanding of what she can do, who she is, and what she lost. ![]() Butler’s final novel traverses an expansive terrain: otherness, violence, the construction of belonging, and the complexity of grief. ![]() Balanced against its sparse, simple delivery, this moment is threaded with an unnamed, not yet understood craving for connection that sets the course of Fledgling. She adds, “I don’t know who I should be with, though, because I can’t remember ever having been with anyone.” He’s the first human she speaks to - and bites - after reawakening alone, in pain, with no memory, and, though she doesn’t yet know it, living in the wake of catastrophic loss. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be alone,” the 53-year-old vampire of Octavia Butler’s Fledgling says to the man who she’s just bitten, sitting on his lap in the driver’s seat of his car, periodically lapping at the blood on his neck. ![]()
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