“I didn’t want to stop talking to him,” she thinks during their first encounter. The intensity of Shori’s desire for connection becomes clearer when she, within days of waking up, meets and moves in with Wright Hamlin, a white construction worker.

It felt like something I would want-living together with other people instead of wandering alone.” “I thought the place must once have provided comfortable homes for several people,” Shori thinks. The cluster of houses, charred to a crisp in a fire, offers no shelter, but it does activate an embryonic desire for community. She emerges from a cave and wanders aimlessly, eventually stumbling upon an abandoned village. The novel’s opening pages follow a badly burned Shori slowly coming to her senses. Shori’s arc feels especially prescient in this moment, as society continues reeducating itself about boundaries, agency, and the true stakes of living together. The early days of the pandemic revealed the depths of our mutual dependence: Not only did the coronavirus require unprecedented levels of global cooperation to temper its spread it also forced people, at a basic level, to recognize their linked fates. Ironically, the resulting novel, now being reissued, might be one of her most profound and emotionally acute. 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.

Octavia e. butler biography