Moreover, Ina don’t just need humans for food, but need physical touch and companionship from their particular small family group. When an Ina bites a human, the human begins to be addicted to the exchange of blood and saliva, and eventually will die if cut off from their Ina’s bite. What Butler does, though, is make the deep, meaningful connection between Ina and the humans they gather in their family unit an absolute and lifelong necessity. There are other stories that challenge these tropes, such as how Buffy the Vampire Slayer the “hunter” image upside down in the hit TV series. Butler imagines not a master-slave or hunter-prey relationship, but one of intimate reciprocal need. Ina and humans are separate species, obviously evolutionary cousins, but not capable of reproducing naturally, and humans cannot become Ina through a bite.īutler’s deepest transformation of the genre, however, is not merely in creating a biofiction tale. They are longlivers, as the stories go, but most of the folklore around vampires is reduced to superstition grown out of historic contact between humans and Ino, or at best a kind of myth. Like classic vampire tales, in Butler’s speculative universe, the Ina have superhuman but not godlike strength and speed, the need to feed on human blood, rapid healing powers, and an allergy to light. Butler’s SciFi tale strips the supernatural elements from science fiction and recentres the story from the classical questions of alien otherness and hunter-prey to an image of “symbiosis”–the intimate relationship between the vampiric species, the Ina, and their living human partners, their Symbionts. Not since Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with the Vampire, however, have we seen such a deepening of the psychological intimacy of the vampiric experience as we do in Octavia Butler’s standalone novel, Fledgling.įledgling was published the same year as Stephanie Meyers’ bestselling book Twilight and the third installation of the Dracula 2000 film series. This generation has seen the reinterpretation of vampire fiction in significant ways as these punk figures went pop.
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