Written during a creatively fallow period in Butler’s life, Fledgling was the author’s attempt to “do something that was more lightweight,” as she said in a 2005 interview. Fledgling is, at heart, about an individual reconciling who she is with how she looks, and learning to use her considerable power responsibly. While Shori makes her way through the world-specifically the suburbs of Washington State and, later, California-she discovers more about herself and her apparent incongruities: As an Ina (a vampire species that lives relatively harmoniously alongside humans), she looks like a 10-year-old child, but she has the desires of a woman she needs human blood to survive, but feeding off humans can make them, in turn, physically stronger. And as the world plods through the third year of the pandemic, one of her most peculiar works might be the most resonant today.įledgling, the last novel Butler published before her death in 2006, is a propulsive story about Shori, an amnesiac 53-year-old Black vampire who must reconstruct her past after she wakes up shrouded in darkness, alone and with no memories. There is always, it seems, a Butler book for our times. She was obsessed with broad, gnarly themes: intimacy and sex, hierarchy and power, the link between ancestral knowledge and eventual survival. She wrote about a Black woman in 1970s Los Angeles repeatedly transported to the antebellum South about a teenage girl who establishes a religion to save her community from climate destruction and about the alien colonization of Earth. Butler spent most of her life excavating the past and observing the present to construct stories attuned to society’s woes and grim futures.
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