Rather than wanton predators, Butler’s vampires develop a symbiotic relationship with those they feed on. Her journey to discover who she is and who attacked her makes up the rest of the novel, and it is mind-blowingly subversive and incredibly good.
Far from the 11-year-old girl she appears to be, she’s actually a 50-something vampire and someone wants her dead and gone.
Then Fledgling blew my mind wide open.īutler drops you into the middle of the story along with her protagonist Shori, who wakes up alone, injured, and suffering from amnesia in a cave. Pale, want your blood, possibly glamorous/broodingly attractive but not to be trusted. Bunnicula! I was pretty sure I knew what vampires were about. I was very familiar with vampires Anne Rice, Buffy, Dracula, the original Vampire Diaries novels, Sunshine by Robin McKinley. By signing up you agree to our terms of use Thank you for signing up! Keep an eye on your inbox. Because that’s how I took home Fledgling by Octavia Butler. I could grab the books that reminded me of my childhood reading, and no one would know.Īnyway, I only made it into the Cs before I finally found a job (at a bookstore! Hello staff discount!!), but that was far enough. What do you read when no one is telling you and no one is monitoring you? It’s funny now to think how embarrassed I was, as I have since completely embraced all genres in all their beautiful glory, but at that point I was incredibly grateful for the invention of self check-out machines. But once I had graduated and wasn’t reading off a syllabus anymore and didn’t have any papers to write, I was at a complete loss. Le Guin, and realistic literature was fine too it turned out, and then I was buried deep in primary source material for my History degree, so I put away science fiction and fantasy for those years. Which was fine, Literature was great! Literature included Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and - if you had a very progressive professor - Ursula K. I happily read my way through genre fiction right up until college, where I was made to understand that I was supposed to be reading Literature. Clarke Do not pass Go, do not stop anywhere else in between. As a kid I went straight from Nancy Drew and The Boxcar Children to Anne McCaffrey and Arthur C. Which was also a big deal for me I mentioned my “nerd origin story” in Episode 0 of the SFF Yeah podcast, and since it’s relevant here I’ll sum up a bit.
What I did do was pull out each and every book in the library’s meager fiction section to see if it had anything to do with fantasy or science fiction, and if it did I took it home.
I didn’t actually - I tried to, but it turned out there were a lot of super boring books?, and my willpower was not that strong.
0 kommentar(er)
