英语论文网

Obsidian III Literature in the African Diaspora
Sandra Y. Govan
Fledgling. Octavia E. Butler. New York: Seven Stories
Press, 2005. 320 pp. $24.95
Strong. Resilient. Formidable. Vulnerable. Sexy. Determined.
Black. A caretaker. A child. A crime solver and a “damn good ally” (316).
代写英语论文Vengeful. A vampire. These descriptions fit the profile for the heroine of
Fledgling, Octavia E. Butler’s first novel since Parable of the Talents (1998).
With her newest heroine, the vampire child Shori Matthews, Butler would
seem, at first glance, to be taking the road less traveled by writers of her
status. Fans who cling to and treasure her every novel, each one of her
short stories, know Butler as an award-winning writer of powerful science
fiction (Talents won the Nebula Award), with an occasional nod toward
fantasy. Readers of popular genre fiction tend to think of vampire stories as
re-workings of myth and legend, as gory indulgences in the horror tale, the
supernatural story, or the dark gothic romance. We don’t usually connect
Octavia E. Butler to horror fiction or gothic romance. Yet while the two
popular fiction forms may appear at first to be entirely different genres and
worlds apart, they are in fact related; vampire tales are recognized as a
subset of science fiction. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, are not uncommon
in science fiction; some of the best names in the game, among them
Theodore Sturgeon and James Blish, have contributed tales to the genre.
Where Butler’s Fledgling differs from the norm in vampire lore is
that it does not depend upon horror, the supernatural, or the gothic for
effect. Fledgling, to borrow from the O’Jays, “gives the people what they
want.” Both the general reader and Butler’s tripartite fan base—the science
fiction folk, the women’s contingent, the African American center—
can all reap the benefits of time invested in this taut, tense tale. Set in our
present and not the dim past, Fledgling is an engrossing, contemporary
page-turner. It features the Butler hallmark, a strong black female protagoVol.
6, No. 2/Vol. 7, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2005–Spring/Summer 2006 Page 41
Sandra Y. Govan
nist, albeit one cut from somewhat different cloth, as she is a vampire child.
An extremely well-crafted science fiction story, the novel engages us and is
exciting because it invokes and riffs upon vampire myth and legend while
wearing a number of masks—murder mystery, crime novel, coming-ofage,
innocence-to-experience, initiation, quest tale, and outsider/survivor
novel. Noticing Butler’s book in my lap and reading her carefully-chosen
title, the lab technician who recently drew my blood for testing (a vampire
in his own right!) immediately offered, “That’s got to have some symbolism.”
Of course, he was right; the title succinctly, aptly, conveys the condition
of Renee become Shori, Butler’s main character, a young person unable
to fly, as yet uninitiated into the ways of her kind.
Defining her, identifying her kind, who they are and what they do,
is part of the novel’s ability to hold our attention. While Shori Matthews is
definitely a vampire, with a distinctive vampire family and attached human
symbionts interspersed in that family, her birth is the result of a genetic feat
engineered by her “eldermothers.” She is an experiment. The first of her
kind. Genetically engineered to be “less vuln