Editing Octavia E. Butler (section)

===Late stories and ''Fledgling'': 2003–2005===
{{further|Symbiosis in fiction}}

After several years of [[writer's block]], Butler published the short stories "Amnesty" (2003) and "The Book of Martha" (2003), and her second standalone novel, ''Fledgling'' (2005). Both short stories focus on how impossible conditions force an ordinary woman to make a distressing choice.<ref name="Curtis">Curtis, Claire P. "Theorizing Fear: Octavia Butler and the Realist Utopia." ''Utopian Studies'' 19.3 (2008): 411–431. {{JSTOR|20719919}}.</ref> In "Amnesty", an alien abductee recounts her painful abuse at the hand of the unwitting aliens and upon her release, by humans, and explains why she chose to work as a translator for the aliens now that the Earth's economy is in a deep depression. In "The Book of Martha", God asks a middle-aged African-American novelist to make one important change to fix humanity's destructive ways. Martha's choice—to make humans have vivid and satisfying dreams—means that she will no longer be able to do what she loves in writing fiction.<ref name="Holden" /> These two stories were added to the 2005 edition of ''Bloodchild and Other Stories''.<ref name="Holden" />

Butler's last publication during her lifetime was ''[[Fledgling (Butler novel)|Fledgling]]'', a novel exploring the culture of a [[vampire]] community living in [[symbiosis]] with humans.<ref name="EAAW" /> Set on the [[West Coast of the United States|West Coast]], it tells of the [[Bildungsroman|coming-of-age]] of a young female hybrid vampire named Shori, whose species is called Ina. The only survivor of a vicious attack on her families that left her an amnesiac, she must seek justice for her dead, build a new family, and relearn how to be an Ina.<ref name="Holden" /> Scholars like Susana M. Morris read ''Fledgling'' as a powerful disruption of the vampire genre—a genre which tends to feature pale vampire heroes with paternalist tendencies that privilege whiteness. Butler disrupts this narrative by centering Shori, the protagonist of ''Fledgling'', a petite Black female Ina.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Morris|first=Susana M.|date=2013|title=Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's ''Fledgling''|journal=WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly|volume=40|issue=3–4|pages=146–166|doi=10.1353/wsq.2013.0034|s2cid=85289747|issn=1934-1520}}</ref>