Fledgling

"Yes, very light—her idea of ‘light and frothy’ is dealing with things like race, murder, and entitlement! I picked this one because it’s my favourite. And I really regret that she did not go on to write more and more about Shori. There are people who have a tough time with this, which is also why it’s the final book that I recommend. Shori is a vampire. She’s not human. She’s a vampire who has been genetically modified to have additional melanin, which was taken from people of Black heritage. This allows her to withstand daylight. And that is a big thing for vampires. It gets rid of one really crucial weakness. So the book opens with Shori recovering from a raid by white supremacist vampires who have destroyed her home and her family. And it ends with her proving in a court of vampires that she is a pure vampire, despite this addition of melanin from Black humans. And there are quite a few adventures in between. She acquires what you could call a ‘harem’ of food sources—she feeds off of humans and they get pleasure from that, and so does she. She starts out with a white man. “There are these questions that you can look at more objectively when they’re couched in terms of another time period, another place” And the problem for many readers is that Shori appears to be 12 years old. She appears to be a pre-adolescent human. Very early in the book, she’s engaging in sexual activity. Shori is actually 53, I believe—in her fifties. So, no problem there. But, again, there’s this sort of moral tension around whether this is really about a precocious child, or is this about pedophilia, or is this about a 50-year-old? Because the other thing is that at 53 a vampire is not yet an adult? It’s kind of fraught. Yes. And it’s not for everyone. I have good friends who will not read it. But what’s happening in this is a discovery of identity that I find just incredibly moving. And I identify with it as someone who went through the same process as a teenager—the process of discovering myself, discovering that I was not like everybody else. Because Shori isn’t just a vampire. She’s a really different kind of vampire. I think she’s always going to be relevant. I trip up a little on the idea of why we should read her now. I mean, we should be reading her far into the future. Why should we be reading her now? Because now is when you can start. There is a movement in science fiction and fantasy, just a real burgeoning, a blossoming of marginalised voices coming to the fore. And so if you want a sense of what that’s like, then you need to read some Octavia Butler. There are people winning Hugos and, and Nebulas, people whose work is now being adapted to comics, to TV series, to films, that would never have been published before. So in order to get a context for that flowering you should be reading some Octavia because she started that. Since Octavia’s death there has been a debate as to who is ‘the next Octavia.’ And I find that incredibly disgusting as an idea. It boils down to a kind of tokenism. You will find people saying that Nisi Shawl is the next Octavia, or that N. K. Jemisin is the next Octavia, or maybe Nnedi Okorafor. I just want to say: No! Unless we’re all Octavias, there’s no new Octavia."