'Fledgling' is Octavia Butler's unfinished but fundamental legacy. Book Club check-in

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we’re wrapping up "Fledgling" by Octavia Butler. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell.

I

cannot emphasize enough what a shame it is that we lost Octavia Butler, an author who transformed the science fiction genre, in 2006. She was just 58 years old when she passed away at her home in Lake Forest Park.

In those 58 years, she introduced the world to Afrofuturism, a version of sci-fi dedicated to the Black experience, a cultural and sociopolitical lens that has long been left out of mainstream sci-fi (and still is to some extent today). Imagine what she may have written today, inspired by — and driven to critique in her way — the current political and social climate.

I had the opportunity to talk about what Butler might have thought about 2024 with her longtime friend and fellow award-winning author Nisi Shawl.

"I don't think she would be very happy with the current election cycle. To tell you the truth, I think it would be her worst fears," Shawl said. "I honestly don't know if she would have been able to keep writing, because she was already doing her utmost to put an optimistic spin on what she wrote 40 years ago."

Dr. Daniel Krashin, a psychiatrist and pain specialist who also described himself as a "wannabe science fiction writer," was lucky enough to learn from Butler at a Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. Personally, I think that makes him a good bit more legit than a "wannabe." He recalled Butler's response to another white student's story one day in class, a story Krashin felt may have been intended to provoke Butler.

"He'd written a story about a white guy getting kidnapped by Black revolutionaries," Krashin said. "And I think as everybody was going around giving our commentary, there was a little bit of a bated breath — everyone wanted to see what Octavia was going to say. ... And she just kind of quietly said, at the beginning, that she known people like the Black woman who was leading this revolutionary cell, she'd known people like that, and she said, 'They're a lot smarter and savvier than you're giving them credit for.'

"She just kind of let that sink in. And then from there, rather than saying more about the racial politics, she went into the story as a story, like, what worked about it, what didn't."

That was her way as a teacher, Krashin recalled: pithy but direct, much like her prose.

We'll never really know what Butler would have thought or written today, but we do know what she never got to finish writing — the rest of the "Fledgling" storyline.

RELATED: Octavia Butler's final novel delivers in every way

A

s Shawl revealed in their introduction to "Fledgling," this book was not meant to be a standalone piece.

In fact, Shawl told me they actually got to read a draft of what would have been the second book — "and, yep, it was good," Shawl quipped.

"Shori does not have it easy. That's all I'm going to say," they said, referring to the main character, a young vampire, or Ina. "She does become more of an urban dweller. She does come into Seattle proper, rather than the outskirts and the rural Pacific Northwest. But that's, that's all I can say. And [Butler] might have changed it again!"

That made me wonder about my theory, which I explained in my first analysis halfway through the book: that Shori's father, Iosif, wasn't really dead as we were led to believe and was behind the murders of Shori's female and male families. As far as we know, based on the ending of "Fledgling" and the story as we mere mortals know it, I was wrong — Iosif seems to be exonerated (his death was never questioned in the book, that was all me) when another Ina family, the Silks, are found guilty of the crimes.

(Side note: As the trial, or Council of Judgment, is carried out, Butler seems to take another of her pithy jabs at our reality. Her target, at least as I read it, was the criminal justice system:

Funny, then, how the Council of Judgment cannot seem to agree on the truth in the end. It's almost like bias has poisoned their system. But I digress...)

Still, I put my theory to Shawl and Krashin, who agreed there seemed to be a "bigger conspiracy against Shri and her family."

"I thought that [Iosif] died," Shawl said, bursting my paranoid bubble, "but that there was some way that he would still influence things."

We'll never know, though, and that drains me.

RELATED: Sign up for the KUOW Book Club newsletter

D

espite the permanently loose threads of "Fledgling," it remains a stellar example of the thoughtfulness and fun Butler brought to science fiction.

The tension mounts as another Ina elder, Katharine Dahlman, not only has one of her human symbionts murder one of Shori's (poor Theodora!) but also tries to murder Shori again. There's the kind of action-packed vampire battle sci-fi readers yearn for.

And within that action, Butler delivers a powerful, albeit allegorical repudiation of racism, both directly and indirectly, using speciesism as a stand-in. Remember, in Butler's universe, the Ina are a separate species from humans, so there is no "turning into" a vampire here.

Dahlman proclaims the death of a human is a "minor crime" and doesn't recognize Shori as an Ina because she is mixed, part-human. "You are nothing!" Dahlman says to Shori, then this to Preston Gordon, whose sons Shori seems destined to partner with:

Dahlman's comments as well as the aggressively racist speeches by Milo and Russell Silk (that family's elders) could have easily been modern white supremacist diatribes with a few minor tweaks.

In that poignant way, Butler reminds us that, as Krashin put it, "there's something dreadfully wrong" in a world where there are people who can cause others to be hurt or killed. This book is nearly 20 years old, yet that message — carried by what is, on the surface, a vampire book — resonates today.

Before you go: I have a very exciting announcement about our October read (that's right, I'm revealing it early to those of you who read this far)! We'll be reading Timothy Egan's Pacific Northwest classic "The Good Rain" next month. And we'll be doing a live event at KUOW with Egan. Register here to join the live conversation on Thursday, Oct. 24. See you there!