Breaking color and gender barriers in science fiction

BY DANIEL BURTON-ROSE

SHIORI MATTHEWS, the protagonist of Octavia Butler's new novel, Fledgling, is an African American vampire. Melanin protects her from the sun's rays, allowing her to walk freely in daylight. Though she is "Ina" – the word the sophisticated vampire community uses to describe itself – she was stripped of her cultural memory by assailants who murdered her family and damaged her brain. Shiori must regain her heritage in order to survive continued attempts on her life.

Butler once quipped that she began writing science fiction when she noticed that "there were no black people in the future." An incorrigible genre-buster, she's a perfect person to bring us the first black vampire. For more than 25 years, Butler has been penning tales that disturb and empower. Her stories – be they set in the antebellum South, near-future coastal California, or an alien-run nature preserve for humans – are propelled by women of color who exhibit an unflappable determination to survive impossible situations. Despite the difficulties, these struggles are not all doom and gloom. Fledgling, in particular, is candy-coated with glimpses into the polygamous networks that sustain the bloodsuckers.

Butler spoke with the Bay Guardian from her Seattle home just before she launched a speaking tour to promote Fledging and an expanded edition of her prizewinning collection of short fiction, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Bay Guardian: Are you a longtime devotee of the vampire novel, or are you a recent convert?

Octavia Butler: It's not something I paid a lot of attention to. I read Bram Stoker's Dracula ages ago. It was on my mother's bookshelf. It was nice: I read whatever was on her bookshelf, grazing and finding what I could. Later on I heard about Anne Rice. I read her first book and found it interesting, but I didn't pay that much attention.

Then I hit a writer's block after my most recent book, Parable of the Talents, and I didn't know how to get out of it. I kept writing, but the writing was bad, not anything I would want to sell. I'm a member of a book club – of several, actually. Unfortunately, they're not the good kind of book club, where you get together with your friends and discuss your favorite book. They are the bad kind of book club, where, unless you return that card in time, they're going to send you a book you don't want. I don't know whether I failed to return the card on time or wrote the wrong number, but I wound up with this vampire novel. My choice was to send it back or read it. I wound up reading it. It was fun. It wasn't very good, it wasn't very well written, but it was fun. So I went to the store and bought a bunch of other vampire novels, and I had fun reading them. Finally it occurred to me that I might want to write one.

What caught my attention is that you can write a vampire novel as a historical novel, as a mystery, as a romance, as science fiction. The variety amazed me. I thought, "There are all these different kinds of vampires. I'm going to make my own."

BG: I've seen Fledgling classified in bookstores under "Horror," but it could just as easily be under "Erotica."

OB: I am surprised. I didn't realize that there was this division. I thought it was all just fantasy. I realize now that the division exists, but I didn't know before.

BG: You've always caused difficulties for people who would like to pin you in one genre.

OB: I don't worry about it, because it's not something that I can control.

BG: In our imaginations, vampires represent our uncontrollable desires. Usually these are understood as injuring others, but the Ina community anticipates and channels its members' desires in a mutually satisfying way.

OB: This is what a culture is for: looking after its members in one way or another. It's a matriarchal culture. Chemically, people get along together reasonably well most of the time. Unfortunately, every now and then, something goes wrong, just like in any culture.

BG: In your previous work – particularly The Patternist and the Xenogenesis series – there was a disturbing power dynamic in the genetic selection process between immortals and mortals, and aliens and humans, respectively. In Fledgling, it's the progressive female elders who experiment with genetic engineering, and the irrational conservatives who attack them.

OB: There's going to be a power dynamic no matter what. The position of Wright [one of Shiori's "symbionts," or human lovers] is an interesting one. He's not that unhappy about where he ends up, but it's not something he chose. It's a group marriage.

BG: Can you unpack the racial dynamics of Fledgling? There's an apparent parallel between the way in which the African American protagonist suffered a violence-induced cultural amnesia at the hands of European Americans and the African American experience in the United States as a whole.

OB: If Shiori did not have amnesia, she would probably have more in common with the people who raised her than with, say, just an ordinary African American. But because she has the amnesia, she doesn't have that much in common with anybody.

BG: You've referred to most of your previous work as your "world-saving" novels and Fledgling as your "fun" one. Is there any fun way to save the world?

OB: "The Book of Martha" was a fun way to save the world. "The Book of Martha" is a short story that appears in the second edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories. Martha is going along with her life when suddenly she is practically kidnapped by God. God tells her that she is to figure out a way to make the human species less suicidal. What she comes up with, she will live at the bottom of; she has to come up with something where, even if you're at the bottom, you're still OK. It's like: "Here's the pie. You cut it and your brother gets first pick."

BG: God offers constructive criticism on her proposals.

OB: She doesn't want to make a mistake and accidentally wipe out the species!

BG: Martha decides to make people's dreams more powerful and satisfying.

OB: Their dreams are utopian for them in particular. They get to live in their own utopia for the period of their dreaming.

BG: Can you discuss the genesis of "Amnesty," the other new inclusion in Bloodchild?

OB: "Amnesty" is a story in which aliens arrive and they're not that interested in us. They're not even interested in taking anything from us that we value all that much; they like nice, hot deserts, like Death Valley. They run some of us through mazes as lab rats, but mostly they ignore us.

They take a few people in, then make them do things to find out what the heck we are. Then they let them go. My character is one of the first people let go, but she's been a prisoner for years. The human police agency that picks her up when she's released decides that she must know secrets and that if she's not telling the secrets that she knows, it must be because she's siding with the aliens. They arrest her and lock her up and treat her rather badly.

This whole thing was inspired by what happened to Dr. Wen Ho Lee in the late 1990s. He is a Chinese American who worked at Los Alamos [National Laboratory] and was suddenly accused of spying for Red China – which was interesting because he was actually from Taiwan!

His career was pretty much ruined because of the accusation, and he was locked up for a while. He didn't know when he would get out again, whether he would get out again, what might happen to him while he was inside. That's truly the terrifying part: If you're innocent and you're locked up and you have no information to trade for your freedom. I had no idea how popular this behavior was about to become.

BG: There's already speculation that Fledgling is the beginning of a series. Can you comment?

OB: I have bits that would relate to another book, but that always happens when I finish a book. I've wanted so much, for so long, to write the Trickster book, which follows Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. In those two books a new religion is created. One of the verses describes God this way: "God is trickster, teacher, chaos, clay ..." I would like to write the story of the people who leave Earth following the mandate of their new religion, Earthseed, which says, "The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars." I don't know if it's going to happen. I don't dare tell anybody I am definitely doing it!

Daniel Burton-Rose is the author of the forthcoming book Guerrillas in Our Midst: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anti-Capitalist Underground of the 1970s.