233. Fledgling
Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler - for some reason, Vox refuses to put the picture in unless it's this size, which is bizarre.
Anyway, Fledgling was Octavia E. Butler's last book, ending a career where she pretty much won every science fiction accolade going. In it, she takes a hard look at the whole vampire mythos and creates an alternative take on it, one where vampires and humans can choose to live in a symbiotic relationship rather than as predator and prey.
The main character, the eponymous Fledgling, is Shori - in appearance a pre-pubescent black girl but who is in reality in her fifties and the result of experiments among part of the vampire clans to try and produce children who can walk in sunlight. Because of these plans, many of Shori's relatives are killed and she is left with a serious head injury, losing a significant part of her memories.
Butler takes the traditional bite=sex metaphor and runs with it as far as it can go - in her mythos, vampires can pair off with either men or women (or both) although there's a debatable amount of free will involved with the whole business of pairing off. It's clear from Fledgling that while in theory humans can choose, the chemical reaction set off by a vampire bite makes it extremely unlikely they will do other than agree to what's being proposed. That, along with the sex scenes involving Shori, make for uncomfortable reading at times.
Anyway, Fledgling was Octavia E. Butler's last book, ending a career where she pretty much won every science fiction accolade going. In it, she takes a hard look at the whole vampire mythos and creates an alternative take on it, one where vampires and humans can choose to live in a symbiotic relationship rather than as predator and prey.
The main character, the eponymous Fledgling, is Shori - in appearance a pre-pubescent black girl but who is in reality in her fifties and the result of experiments among part of the vampire clans to try and produce children who can walk in sunlight. Because of these plans, many of Shori's relatives are killed and she is left with a serious head injury, losing a significant part of her memories.
Butler takes the traditional bite=sex metaphor and runs with it as far as it can go - in her mythos, vampires can pair off with either men or women (or both) although there's a debatable amount of free will involved with the whole business of pairing off. It's clear from Fledgling that while in theory humans can choose, the chemical reaction set off by a vampire bite makes it extremely unlikely they will do other than agree to what's being proposed. That, along with the sex scenes involving Shori, make for uncomfortable reading at times.
