1. Fledgling

2. Fledgling – a young bird, which is just about to fly or someone who is inexperienced. I can see an eagle nest with a big strong bird that is just about to fly from the treetop the very first time. The first fly can just be a little unsafe but still there is something strong and powerful from the beginning and as soon the eagle leaves the nest it is growing stronger and stronger every day and will become someone to admire and look up to. Octavia Butler´s novel Fledgling is about vampires or Ina´s, as the author likes to call them, but I believe that the story tells the reader more about feminism, racism and sexual identity than about the vampires. I wonder – Do we really need to know Butler´s intentions or meaning to appreciate what she has created, can it simply be meant to be a book about vampires? I think the author needed something strong and powerful, maybe something that the reader could be scared of or encouraged by and identifying oneself with as the main character in her story. Butler's heroine Shori is a black female who are powerful both mentally and physically. She exemplifies the traditional gender roles of nurturer, healer, and peacemaker and in the same time Shori is also courageous, independent, and ambitious.

3. The author – Octavia Butler (1947-2006) is one of the few African-American women who write science fiction novels. She grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in Pasadena, California. Her father died while she was very young, and her mother worked as a maid to support the two of them. Butler wrote memoirs of her mother's sacrifices: buying her a typewriter when she was ten years old, and to paying a large fee to a dishonest agent so Octavia´s stories could be read. As a teenager Butler entered a student contest and after attending workshops like the Writers Guild of America, West "open door" program during the late 1960s and the Clarion Science Fiction Writer's Workshop in 1970, she sold her first stories. This early training brought her into contact with well-known science fiction writers, including Joanna Russ and Harlan Ellison, who became Butler's mentor. In 1985 she won three of the field's top honors – the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award, for the novella "Bloodchild," the story of human males on another planet who bear the children of an alien race. Among Butler's strengths as a writer, according to some commentators, is her creation of believable, independent female characters. Butler's heroines are black women who are both mentally and physically powerful. Butler explores the possibilities for a society open to true sexual equality. In such a society Butler's female characters are powerful and purposeful in their own and do not need to rely upon eroticism to achieve their conclusions.

4. The story – Shori awakes in the darkness alone in a forest, badly burned and scarred, with no memory of what has happened to her. She is naked, hungry, starving and in great pain. She is approached by some large noisy creature. She waits until the creature is touching her, then she pounces. She kills and tears out its throat and feeds on its blood and eats the raw meat. Her healing body, the vampire body heals itself, causes her such great hunger, that she kills and eats a man looking to find and help her, an action which later shames her greatly. Possibly our narrator is not quite the helpless victim we first assumed. After that initial violent outburst, we follow Shori, the main character and our mysterious, desperate and sometimes in a way vulnerable narrator. Eaglestone explains this as :”the power of narrative” (Eaglestone, 2009 p 101). He also writes of “the desire to find out `what happens next´” (Eaglestone, 2009 p 102) and I can only agree with him, I want to continue reading.

5. Butler does a great work at descriptions and at describing supernatural strength. Shori has nowhere to go, and no idea who or what she is, because of her amnesia; the first person she come across is a local man, Wright. Through her meeting with Wright, we learn that Shori appears to be a young black girl, about 10 or 11 years old. (She is in fact a 53 years old female vampire). We learn that Shori is a type of vampire, Ina, (a matriarchal race whose culture predates humanity by several thousand years, the Ina live to be 500 years old and need human blood to survive) but that her vampirism involves very intimate contact with her "victims". Very much eroticized, definitely sexual, the mix of feeding and pleasure-giving between Shori and her humans are at the same time fascinating and absorbing throughout the book. We learn that the human who decides to stay with the Ina is called symbionts. Each Ina depends upon a group of seven or eight human symbionts for food. In exchange, these symbionts enjoy the erotic pleasure of being "eaten," while living much longer lives. (Ina saliva contains a powerful addictive narcotic and healing venom.)

6. The reader is right there all the time with Shori as she learns together with her symbionts about her own abilities. Wright takes Shori with him to his home. While there, Shori also feeds and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright decide to return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to try to learn more about what had happened to her. Shori and her family has been the target of mass-murder attacks. The burned out town was once her home, where she lived with her sisters and mothers. They meet her father Iosif and he does not know what happened to the village, but he believes that Shori is the only survivor. Iosif invites Shori and Wright to come and stay with him and Shori’s brothers in their settlement. They decide that they must go back to Wright’s house and talk about what to do next. Shori and Wright returns to the settlement and find it burned down like Shori’s home were. Shori and Wright meet Celia and Brook, the only two human symbionts who survived. Shori adopts them as her own symbionts, and the four go away and hide in another of Iosif´s houses. When they are in this new house, they are attacked again by several men with guns and gasoline. They manages to escape, killing the men in the process and decide to visit the Gordon family, an Ina family that Brook has met.

7. Shori's mothers and fathers have all been killed. She has been able to escape the attacks because, unlike other Ina, she has dark skin and can be attentive during the day and resistant to the daylight. Her family used a black woman's DNA to genetically manipulate Shori as part vampire and part human. While her family foresees advantages to a vampire/human hybrid, other Ina is against her mixed-blood status. It becomes obvious that her life is in danger because of these genetic experiments and her dark color of her skin. Shori and her symbionts arrive at the Gordon family settlement and the Gordon family offers to help Shori starting a family of her own. Shori arranges to have Theodora brought to the Gordon family. They set up human guards to protect them during the day because the Gordon family are aware of the danger of attackers. Soon several men approach the compound and they are going to burn it down. The human symbiont guards, under Shori’s direction, are successful at defending the farm and manage to capture three of the attackers alive. The Gordon family interrogates the intruders and finds that the attackers were sent by the prominent Silks, another Ina family. Shori finds out that she was the only one that survived and managed to escape when her entire female family was killed by another Ina family opposed to the mixing of human and Ina DNA.

8. On Shori’s behalf, the Gordon calls a Council of Judgment. This Council will meet to discuss what the Silk family has done and decide on a punishment. Eventually, her attackers are tried and convicted by the council. The Silks have their sons taken from them; they will be adopted by other Ina families that mean in the end that the Silk line will die out. Shori is in the end invited to live with a group of female Ina, the Braithwaite family, to whom she is distantly related there she can learn how to be an Ina.

9. Sexuality – The second chapter changes your thoughts about the story for a while, Shori this character, this hungry; suffering character suddenly has an age. “You’re a kid, for Godsake.” (p 8) We hear this from a casual masculine person that drives along the road that Shori walks on. He offers to take her home. He offers promises of shelter and safety and food. “You can’t be any more than ten or eleven,” (p 8) he says. The reader at this time thinks of the relation between a man and a sister, a niece, a friend or something like that. There is a brief dispute. Shori scratches this new male figure, only to lick this wound to calm the male. “You taste good,” she says. “Do I?” he says. (p 8). He lifts her and puts her on his lap. “Let me bite you again,” Shori whispers. (p 9). “If I do, what will you let me do?” he asks. A question with distinct sexual insinuations, this is essentially a total destruction of innocence. Shori follows Wright to his home she insists that she don´t know who she is and where she lives. He takes care of her. Her relationship with Wright turns sexual very quickly. On the surface, the episode is disturbing; an adult white man has sex with what seems to be a black little girl. But we understand quite soon that Shori is the dominant one in the relationship. She is never outside her own control and she is more powerful than Wright. Shori has a biological hold on him which, while not an unbreakable addiction at this early point, is almost impossible to resist.

10. She has sanctioned the act beforehand and is also older than him because vampires age much more slowly than humans; Shori is also faster and stronger than Wright is. This power relation is without exception combined with sexual pleasure, the Ina/human relationships exemplify various sexual likings: the Ina have no hesitations or prohibitions about interracial, homosexual, or pedophilic sex between Ina and their humans, and multiple sexual partners are encouraged for both the Ina and their symbionts. Shori engages in several lesbian relationships through her symbionts and feels for them like she feels for her male symbionts including Wright, her first. The Ina society as a whole does not seem to have any problems with same-sex symbiotic relationships. The relations between Ina and their symbionts are complicated indeed, but issues as sex and gender definitely do not present themselves as issues. If Shori were to be labeled with sexuality, she would be a bisexual, as she has fallen in love with both men and women. The relationship between an Ina and their symbionts is explicitly called ‘love.’ Shori refers to the sex she has with her symbionts as “making love” (p 281). Another Ina´s symbionts son Joel, actually seeks out Shori to join her family, because he liked her picture and wanted a female Ina because “There’s too much sexual feeling involved when you guys feed” (p 159).

11. Racism – The reason behind the attempts on Shori´s life has nothing to do with greed or Ina politics. It is all about racial prejudices. Shori is in a way not a typical Ina, she is black and do not have to sleep during the day, she can go out in the sun and she is part human. She is an successful experiment there Ina family is trying to breed a better race of Inas. She is a genetic mixing with different kind of blood. She is an outsider to the Ina, and also to the humans. She is called at various times a dog, a dirty little nigger bitch, a murdering black mongrel bitch, and so on. Shori's family who are the ones who mixed Ina and human genetic material were burned for their sin by racial purists. Despite the great and positive benefits that the mixing of Ina and human, in particular black human, have given to Shori, there are those who are disgusted at the concept of such a mixture. Interestingly, the prejudice seems to come only from the Ina and not at all from the humans. Because she is different, some Ina fears her and the future she might bring. “What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?” (p 300).

12. Feminism – Butler´s Fledgling is creating an incredible strong female, surviving trusting herself and trusts her inner feelings. The author is portraying, questioning, and complicating different notions of a person’s ability to choose and act upon their choice. Butler’s heroine is black, strong and surviving. She will breed with some mates and continue to make the Ina societies live forever. The novel offers a main plot which revolves around the protagonist’s struggle to increase by educating and gaining increased awareness of herself, and by defeating her enemies.

13. Butler has written a vampire story and is at the same time stuck with some of the old vampire legends, such as sunlight doing harm, having to sleep during the day, and the extremely pale skin and good looks. But she has also given them a different angle, putting them in interesting little communities and invented the story about a black vampire. The invention of the black vampire makes some of the Ina family be full blood racists. That is a little unexpected, all the Ina seams so liberal to everything else and suddenly there is something that is starting such a violent acting. Butler explores the breaking of barriers with bonding between young and old, Ina and human, black and white, and those of the same sex. The main character, Shori have to take blood from several people for feeding and for pleasure, she chooses men and women of different ethnic backgrounds and ages to be her symbionts. There are no taboos surrounding sexual relationships between races, adults and children or between people of the same sex. No one is hesitating when Shori ask the human to give them self up to be her symbionts. Her new family must learn to deal with each other and with the jealousy between them. She gives them in return both sexual pleasure and a feeling of belonging. The Ina society is a matriarchal society and the female are strong and powerful.

14. The breeding and deciding which the right male Ina to mate is are very important. There are a lot of themes in this novel. This will just lead you on to the interesting question; who decides what a text means: the author or the reader? (Eaglestone, 2009 p 79). Is it simply a vampire story? Eaglestone (2009, p 83) write: “part of the point of literature is that it encourages different ways of looking at texts, creating different results.” He continues; “could you really see a text in the same way as a nineteenth-century author? Or even how your classmates view it?” I agree that every reader will have their own idea about what the text is about, depending on what experience and life story the reader has. There is also the possibility that; “The author, in saying what she or he means by her or his work, can be seen as another reader, with an interpretation only as valid as that of any other person looking at the text. The author is no longer the all-important figure: The Author, as the saying goes, is Dead.” (Eaglestone, 2009 p 86). He also points out: “Perhaps most importantly, the ´dead of the author´” – or at least of their authority – leads to what Roland Barthes called ´the birth of the reader´. (Eaglestone, 2009 p 89).

15. Conclusion – Anyway, I cannot help but identify myself with Shori, the vampire or even the human enemy. I like the strong woman struggling to survive. It is empathy whether I want it or not! The author is telling me with this story, that there are horrible things in our society and that I can, and have to fight against it! When you are together with your family (community) or people that you trust and rely on, it will give you strength to do what you believe in, even if there is hard resistance. However, we all read differently and we bring our own ideas, expectations and experiences to the story. This story can mean something completely different to the other readers. The end of the book is also satisfying, the bad racist vampire have their punishment. Their sons are taken from them and their bloodline will not continue. Eaglestone write; “Nearly all texts use closure – it´s how all stories work after all!” (Eaglestone 2009, p 106). He also writes in the summary (p 108); “Closure is our ´sense of an ending´ and is part of all narrative. Some critics suggest that we seek closure to impose order on our lives or to come to terms with our own deaths”. Shori will start to make a new life together with her symbionts and another Ina family, starting again with all the evil gone. References – Butler, Octavia E. (2005). Fledgling Eaglestone, Robert (2009). Doing English: a guide for literature students