Fledgling: Octavia E. Butler's extraordinary final novel

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Charlie Rose, "A Conversation with Octavia Butler", Charlie Rose. 2000. [Two videos on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.]

the birth symbols – the cave, the physical pain, the blindness, the total incapacitation, the starving need, the complete amnesia – seem to me to signify both sides of the birth couple. the girl is both baby and mother; she gives (re)birth to herself. This conclusion to the Xenogenesis series focuses on Jodahs, the child of a union between humans, alien Oankali, and the sexless ooloi. The Oankali and ooloi are part of an extraterrestrial species that saved humanity from nuclear oblivion, but many humans feel the price for their help is too high: the Oankali and ooloi intend to genetically merge with humanity, creating a new species at the expense of the old. Even though the Oankali have–against their better judgment–created a human colony on Mars so that humanity as a species can continue unaltered, many human “resisters” either have not heard of the Mars colony or don’t believe the Oankali will allow them to live there. Jodahs, who was thought to be a male but who is actually maturing into the first ooloi from a human/Oankali union, finds a pair of resisters who prove that some pure humans are still fertile. These humans may be his only hope to find successful mates, but they have been raised to revile and despise his species above all else. I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.” Ramirez, Catherine S. "Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia Butler and Gloria Anzaldua", in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002: 374–402.

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Rosalie G. Harrison, "Sci-Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler", Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine, February 8, 1980, pp.30–34. Shori is able to continue with the relentless questioning, accusations, and insults made against her and her ancestors, while coping with the overwhelming guilt, grief, and physical pain of losing a symbiont, after a council member tells her to “remember your dead. Keep them around you.” The trials uncover a prejudice certain Ina have not only against mixing their DNA with that of humans but also against ethnic diversity and scientific progress. Through Shori’s strength, she is able to counter the bigotry and vows “to stop them from hunting me. To stop them from killing anyone else.” As the trial is ending, Shori finally receives the answers she has searched for and the acceptance and belonging she has craved; she declares in front of the council: “I am Ina.” Octavia E. Butler Papers". oac.cdlib.org. Online Archives of California . Retrieved January 11, 2017.

the rapport between the vampires (or “Ina,” not just a different race but a different species entirely) and the humans they feed on is easily the most mesmerizing, enthralling, and, to me, frankly pleasurable aspect of the novel. in the narrative i can detect – feel? – butler’s easy (she’d been doing this for years, and her novels always tread on the dark edge of the forbidden, which is probably why she chose to write sci-fi or speculative fiction) dipping in her own unconscious, into a pool of profound woman/lesbian longing that is rarely represented in literature. the whole book seems to me an answer to freud’s famous question “what do women want?” it seems both the representation of deep-seated and (therefore) tabooed female desires and the luscious, unbridled fantasy of their fulfillment. butler needs to push the envelope of difference in the desiring subject as much as possible. Short-lived people, people who could die, did not know what enemieslonelinessandboredomcould be.” Clay’s Ark Donna Haraway (2006). "Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists". Configurations. 14 (1–2): 97–114. doi: 10.1353/con.0.0002. S2CID 144844182 . Retrieved May 19, 2016. Robyn McGee, "Octavia Butler: Soul Sister of Science Fiction", Fireweed 73. Fall 2001, pp.60 and following. Young, Hershini Bhana. "Performing the Abyss: Octavia Butler's Fledgling and the Law." Studies in the Novel 47.2 (2015): 210+.She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author to be able to write full-time. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public, and awards soon followed. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library in Southern California. [6] Early life [ edit ] Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life?” Wild Seed Butler's first work published was "Crossover" in the 1971 Clarion Workshop anthology. She also sold the short story "Childfinder" to Harlan Ellison for the anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. "I thought I was on my way as a writer", Butler recalled in her short fiction collection Bloodchild and Other Stories, which contains "Crossover". "In fact, I had five more years of rejection slips and horrible little jobs ahead of me before I sold another word." [27]

Sturgis, Susanna J. "Living the Undead Life." Rev. of Fledgling, by Octavia E. Butler. Women's Review of Books January 2006: 11. Solarin, Ayoola (April 24, 2020). "A Graphic Novel Adapts Octavia Butler's Science Fiction Classic". Hyperallergic. Randall Kenan, "An Interview with Octavia E. Butler", Callaloo 14.2. 1991, pp.495–505. JSTOR 2931654. doi: 10.2307/2931654. Asteroid 7052 Octaviabutler, discovered by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1988, was named in her memory. [85] The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on August 27, 2019 ( M.P.C. 115893). [86] We Ina don't handle loss as well as most humans do. It's a much rarer thing with us, and when it happens, the grief is ...almost unbearable."Crossley, Robert. "Critical Essay." In Kindred, by Octavia Butler. Boston: Beacon, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8070-8369-7 I admit that I wanted to like this more than I did simply because I am a big fan of Kindred. I was slightly ambivalent about another book on vampires, however, and while I tried not to take that into serious account when reading Butler, it still crept in. I wound up eating most of someone’s little nanny goat. I didn’t mean to take a domestic animal, but it was all I found after hours of searching. It must have escaped from some farm. Better the goat than its owner.” Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989), the second and the third books in the Xenogenesis trilogy, focus on the predatory and prideful tendencies that affect human evolution, as humans now revolt against Lilith's Oankali-engineered progeny. Set thirty years after humanity's return to Earth, Adulthood Rites centers on the kidnapping of Lilith's part-human, part alien child, Akin, by a human-only group who are against the Oankali. Akin learns about both aspects of his identity through his life with the humans as well as the Akjai. The Oankali-only group becomes their mediator, and ultimately creates a human-only colony in Mars. [23] In Imago, the Oankali create a third species more powerful than themselves: the shape-shifting healer Jodahs, a human-Oankali ooloi who must find suitable human male and female mates to survive its metamorphosis and finds them in the most unexpected of places, in a village of renegade humans. [7] [10] The Parable series: 1993–1998 [ edit ]