An unusual-looking hero
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The idea that the hero of Dengue Boy would be a mosquito emerged in 2020, during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic, when a dengue outbreak exploded in my hometown, Buenos Aires. Dengue fever spreads through the Aedes aegypti mosquito. This insect thrives in tropical and subtropical climates and is common in many warm and humid regions of northern Argentina.
However, in recent decades, due to global warming, it has spread to regions where the climate has traditionally been cold or temperate, such as Buenos Aires and even Patagonia. It so happened that one of my best friends became infected with dengue in 2020, but since all the media attention was focused on covid-19, public hospitals in the city had restricted tests and there was no way to get a proper diagnosis or treatment. Furthermore, there were no effective vaccines or medications for dengue at the time.
During this precarious time for my friend and for the people with dengue in Argentina, the US company Moderna announced its vaccine against covid-19, just a few days after the genetic sequence of SARS-Cov-2 was published. This made me think about the terrible corporate bias in scientific research, as mosquito-borne diseases (dengue, zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, among others) have been killing hundreds of thousands of people for centuries. The mosquito, in fact, is considered the deadliest animal to humans, and according to historian Timothy Winegard, it has killed more humans than anything else in history.
However, because these diseases affect people in lower-income countries, there was never adequate investment in vaccines or treatments. Meanwhile, biotechnology companies only needed months to develop, patent and sell products tackling covid-19, which ensured them substantial monetary profit.
So, the idea came to me to tell the story of a Global South pandemic, through the lens of the mosquito itself.
Partly inspired by artists I admire (Franz Kafka, David Cronenberg, Hideshi Hino) and leaning a little ironically into the most commercially popular genre in Latin America, autofiction, I became convinced that my story’s imaginary subtitle should be “the autofiction of a mosquito”. At the same time, one of the themes in my writing is the non-human, and I was interested in the challenge of making an insect the protagonist of a novel (a genre historically designed to narrate human times, psychologies and stories). How to mimic and achieve empathy with a creature so alien to the human experience as an insect, particularly one as annoying as the mosquito?
I had to become a mosquito, adopt its perspective. I appropriated the famous Flaubertian motto “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” and turned it into my own: le moustique, c’est moi.
Ursula K. Le Guin once said the fundamental property of science fiction is to function as a carrier bag, allowing the migration of ideas from fiction to other scientific and technical discourses. In this way, the genre becomes a mutant transition (as Dengue Boy is) between literature and non-literary knowledge.
I have always greatly appreciated this idea, because nothing pleases me more in my task as a writer than researching topics I would never have even noticed before.
For this book, I consulted dozens of papers and manuals on entomology and I became a “mosquitologist” overnight. It was crucial to know the details of the mosquito’s anatomy in order to describe it and understand how its body works and feels. Thus, although the protagonist is inspired by my friend, who is a man, I discovered that the mosquitoes that transmit disease are female, which forced me to transform my plot on the spot.
The female perspective also led me to investigate how a non-mammalian, oviparous animal engages in maternal care – if it does at all – and I became captivated by ovology and the representation of eggs. The eggs designed by H.R. Giger for the movie Alien, those drawn and classified by naturalist Ernst Haeckel in his illustrated treatises, and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye also fuelled this ovophilic obsession.
In this novel, I tried to tell a story about climate change from a perspective that recovered more-than-human lives, and I hope the reader empathises with my hero – just as I also became a mosquito while conceiving and imagining it.
Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery and published by Serpent’s Tail, is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here
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