Originally written 09 Jun 2008.

fledgling by Octavia Butler

...... I just finished a book - thats what I was thinking of writing about when I started. Heh, this is how things go, you get more to read because my mind wanders. Aren't you lucky.

The book is the last novel written by Octavia Butler before per died. In some ways it is unusual for Ocatavia Butler and yet so similar. Don't get me wrong, although all pers books deal with the one big issue, the other and how we humans deal with it, they are not boringly same at all. The characters are real wonderful people, both aliens and humans, and the storylines are so amazingly interesting, grabbing your attention from the first word. I am so sad that Octavia Butler died so young as we lost such a wonderful storyteller in per.

This book I read, fledgling, is about a vampire, or an ina as they call themselves, whose eldermothers had been scientist and had managed to give fledgling DNA from a human making it possible for fledgling to stay awake daytime and not burn totally in sunlight. These vampires are not like the folklore vampires we know. Our folklore is explained in the book as human stories trying to deal with some aspects of the ina they came to contact with as they lived together on this world. Octavia Butler makes it all so plausible. Like with all pers wonderful creations, the most unusual and even repellant sometimes, it is still possible to see them as people, aliens or otherwise, and live with them through their struggles and tribulations.

Ina are in many ways like us humans. Some of them are bigots and racists and afraid of anything new. The new in this novel is the DNA experiment which produced the fledgling of the story and pers brothers and sisters. This aspect of the story made me think of the DNA experiments some scientists want to do now, mixing different animals' DNA with our human animal DNA. One difference here is that the non-human animals have not given their consent. In the novel the person who gave pers DNA was a woman who was considered as the fledgling's human mother, who had loved the fledgling as pers child, as had done the ina mother who had actually given birth to the fledgling. This aspect I think is very important and really brings us to face one of the unappealing aspects of our human nature: our arrogance. Some have it to a greater extent than the others, but I believe, we are all prone to it and we have to learn to temper it with real proper humility, not with Uriah Heep kind of humility. And perhaps we can then learn to accept others as our fellow humans and can learn to build a society which is all inclusive.