You’re an ant.
“I’m not an ant!”
Just . . . play along for a minute, all right? You’re an ant, a Lasius umbratus worker, an attractive golden colour with a glossy, eye-catching abdomen. Life is quite good these days; your queen invaded a colony of Lasius brunneus, the brown tree ant, some time ago, and after the dust settled, you’ve found your workload much reduced. Your new L. brunneus hosts are doing the grunt work, finding food and taking risks outside the nest; you’re cuddling babies, singing lullabies, and, at worst, holding a bottle or two. The hosts feed you and clean you, and they feed and clean your queen.
They are in thrall to the queen’s pheromones; and while they know you don’t smell like their original colony, the idea of their original colony is in disarray anyway. Eventually, the hosts will die off and the colony will be, for a while, a sea of gold, much enriched by its lazy days of conserving calories and workers.
Then you’ll all go and move into someone else’s colony.
This is social parasitism: parasites using the structures, instincts, and physiology of a social host to exploit them. There are so many parasites in nature, and so broad is the definition of parasite itself, that parasitologists (who admittedly may be biased) have theorized that every single extant animal species serves as a host for at least one, and generally more, species of parasites, no exceptions. We may be alone in the universe, but we’re not alone in our skin.
Parasites mooch; they make their living by diverting nutrients or other resources (mobility or fertility, for example) from a host. Parasitoids kill, which is the big difference between a parasite and a parasitoid (think the xenomorphs from the Alien series). Commensal organisms trade—they take from their host, but they also give, which is also known as symbiosis or mutualism. And it’s all rich fodder for writers, of course, even if it makes us squirm.
Even without studying the oddly weighty history of parasitology in Western culture (rife, as you might imagine, with eugenics, racial supremacy, anthropomorphism, xenophobia, ableism, and manifest destiny), we feel—as human beings—that parasites unbalance some of the things we prize about being human. We want agency and autonomy; it’s hard to believe we still have it when we know parasites are affecting our behaviour, brain chemicals, and genes. We want individualism and self-identity; it’s unpleasant to feel that the “I” might be tilting towards “we.”
In Mary Miseon Wu’s story “Closed Doors,” individuals literally become a collective—faces still recognizable, usually, but unable to move independently of the others. Blobs of humanity take in new members, leaving behind loved ones, like Kayla, who tries and fails to assimilate. The desire to join, conform, assimilate, can be very powerful. It raises questions about parasites and commensal organisms that we can’t answer with our current science: Do they know they’re parasites? That they’re obliged to live communally, that they cannot live on their own? What does that feel like? What is life like before finding a host?
Then, in Sharang Biswas’s “Toothpaste Feelings,” we see more directly what it’s like to lose the distinction between “being” a parasite or “being” a host, and realizing that you’re no longer really an individual but a system—“Assimilated” is Adam’s new category, but “assimilated” as a general descriptor was a long time coming after the discovery of the alien microbe. It’s clear that there was a societal shift, just as an ecosystem shifts when a new organism moves in: from a desire to eliminate the microbe, to studying it, to putting conditions and limits on its existence, to finally—now—official acceptance, which doesn’t do much to comfort the individual Assimilated as they come to grips with their new identity. Adam has some big questions to ask about human nature and the construction of the self: What makes us who we are? Our brain, our memories, the perceptions others have of us, our previous acts, our intentions, something else? How do we know when that’s been taken away? How do we know when that’s changing? It’s like trying to open a box with the crowbar inside the box (and this time, the crowbar is alive).
Meanwhile, in Sonia Focke’s “Island Getaway,” we find ourselves grappling somewhat stickily with our own terminology, the boxes we put things into. Biologists spend a lot of time wrestling over the terms local and invasive, as well as indigenous, naturalized, and weedy, among others. We can’t agree on what it means for a thing to move into a new habitat, how we should refer to it, what status it gets as a result. Seaman Pol discovers the little tree octopuses have invaded her ship, but have they become a part of its ecosystem? They learn to communicate, which seems to promote them over the mice and lizards that can be hunted by the cats. Some seem to decide to stay; some decide to return; or is it all random? How can we understand things that speak in ways we don’t understand yet?
Finally, in T. Chiu-Chu’s “Symbiote,” we find ourselves at the earliest stages of wondering about something living inside of us: will it help? We are acting on faith. Historically, many scientific discoveries have followed the same trajectory of determining whether something is harmful, neutral, beneficial, whether it can be monetized or weaponized, whether we can find a use for it—as we apparently cannot resist doing.
The problem, of course, is whether any of these organisms can be controlled. And in many cases, the only possibility of controlling them is via fiction; we’re not advanced enough in the real world to tell parasites or symbionts what to do and expect to be obeyed. (Except for telling them to die, which is sometimes possible.) Too many questions remain about parasites and hosts, their relationships, and their effects on ecosystems.
Is demonic possession a type of parasitism? Discuss. Bonus points if you’re a demon.
Is addiction analogous to being parasitized, as in brandon brown’s “The Moon’s Forests Burn All Your Life”? Discuss.
What would a novel written from the point of view of a Ceti eel (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, natch) sound like? Would humans be heroes, villains, or just another strange galumphing organism in the landscape?
Understandably, our stories tend to focus on the effects on individuals; it’s harder to zoom out and write about the effects of parasitism, mutualism, and “invading” organisms on an entire ecosystem, region, or planet, even in speculative fiction. Yet attempts abound—such as the brood parasitism in Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, leading to evolutionary changes in the hybrid human-alien society. In M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, a Cordyceps fungus causes the collapse of civilization after the infected seem to lose their humanity and become animal-like zombies.
In my novella The Annual Migration of Clouds, I invented a similar fungal disease called Cadastrulamyces—it manifests visibly under the skin and causes behavioural changes with the apparent end goal of keeping its host, human beings, safe from things that might harm the fungus. The narrator, Reid, is infected, as is her mother; she’s uneasy at the thought of her parasite trying to communicate with her, or at it thinking of itself as a symbiont. Which of her thoughts are really hers, belong wholly to her? Which are being influenced or subtly diverted by the infection? In terms of her own behaviour—which of those choices are her deciding to do something, which are her Cad, and how can the two be disentangled?
When we write about parasites and infection—things living inside us without our permission, doing who knows what for their own gain—we’re really writing about the world. We use our bodies as a microcosm for these miniaturized acts of conquest and revolt, incarceration, exile, gluttony, exploitation, war, and injustice. We’re generally not thinking of ourselves as the parasites, enriching ourselves at the expense of some unseen host; we’re always seeking to interrogate why some other organism is seeking to enrich itself at our expense. We’re demanding why our consent wasn’t given for this signing over of resources. As a source of narrative tension and conflict, it’s hard to beat.
Sci-fi and fantasy are already rife with parasites and symbionts serving allegorical roles, delving into deeper themes, and helping to construct narratives with parallels to human societies. For many early scientists, parasitism both satisfied their view of the world—an inevitable struggle for resources, the unfortunate predilection of humans to exploit and cheat one another, eternal conflict—and offended their sense of justice, as it does ours. We feel real anger when people seem to be taking without giving back; we hate it when there’s a parasite in our group project and the rest of us have to scramble to get the work done. In a fair world, everyone’s needs would be provided for and no one would have to extract what they needed at someone else’s expense. But fair worlds are few and far between in speculative fiction, and every utopia still squeezes the labour, time, and health out of some class of characters to support others.
Just as in nature, there’s a wide range of what you might call parasitic structures in narrative; you might also call them something else. Cyberpunk is a subgenre that has always raised big questions about parasitism: a lot of the antagonists tend to be explicitly parasitic, like corporations and governments, who take without giving much back, or take with the stated goal of weakening and controlling the body of the populace. Under those kinds of regimes, isn’t a little counter-parasitism called for? The single hacker stealing from the giant monopoly is no worse than a single mosquito feeding on a bison, surely. And yet this is a kind of utilitarian, transactional thinking that tips over very easily, and unsettlingly, into social and emotional realms. When is it okay to take a little sip? Who decides—the mosquito or the bison?
A parasite has to have a host; by definition, it will die without it. But hold on: people can’t be parasites. Can they? What are we classing as a parasite? I hope we are avoiding straying too close to that classical ugly, ableist, eugenicist worldview when we attempt to use parasites in our writing. Corporations should be hosts because they’re so large, and yet they are parasitic when they colonize and extract resources from a new planet or asteroid, or local populations like in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Of course, in nature, parasites also parasitize other parasites, so maybe it’s all right that small-scale hackers and thieves are diverting some of the resources from these larger bodies, especially if the amount taken is unnoticeable for the “host” and life-saving for the “parasite.”
Symbiosis is both better and worse understood than parasitism. We’re all pretty clear on the whole “insects pollinating flowers” thing—certainly it’s obvious that both parties benefit, they don’t need to have a similar currency for services provided to one another, and everything works. We understand that lichens are a bacteria and a fungus growing together to live in places where they could not live alone, and we know corals are animals who both feed on floating zooplankton and have an endemic population of photosynthetic or chemosynthetic bacteria to provide the coral directly with food while they shelter in the coral’s hard mineral skeleton. “I’ll buy food and cook for both of us if you let me live here” is a perfectly reasonable arrangement, and nobody is disadvantaged by shaking hands on it.
But in terms of bodily autonomy and identity, what do we consider wanted or unwanted? Perhaps we need to revise our definitions, especially when it comes to human and nonhuman characters. Our personal microbiomes are symbiotic with us—yet we don’t think of them separately, or we don’t think of ourselves, generally, as hosts. What’s “me,” where do I stop and “we” begin? Writers have been exploring these questions since the earliest days of speculative fiction, expanding the possibilities of natural parasites and symbionts and extrapolating to ask much harder questions about the “me” and the “we” and the “us.” We see examples of both that cause much more extreme physiological and mental changes; we see examples that can even cause beneficial changes (memorably spoofed in the Futurama episode “Parasites Lost”); we see aliens, genetically modified organisms, neural implants, control modules, other minds (think Kerstin Hall’s Asunder, among others).
Nature provides us with interesting examples of symbiosis and mutualism everywhere, as well as obligate mutualism—our mitochondria, for example, are thought to be the end result of a mutualistic relationship that started with free-living bacteria and has ended (so far) with cell organelles that can’t live on their own. If you take a mitochondrion out of its cell, it will die. In a speculative context, if you agree to a beneficial brain implant that’s (say) free so long as you let the company have your data, what happens if the company decides to start charging—or to shut down your implant? What if you need it to live? What if it’s a prosthetic—or a synthetic organ, like a heart or a liver? What if our characters find themselves trying to trade services to (for example) aliens or gods or creatures or artificial intelligences who have decided they don’t want to be mutuals any more? In the real world, we are constantly doing these symbiotic trust falls with the people around us; that’s how society works. But there is much more to explore, and many more complex types of relationships to model.
In the end, looking at the transactions, vocabulary, history, and context of parasitism and symbiosis can provide rich thematic fodder for our speculative narratives. It gives us a new angle to look at the fundamental worldviews of our stories: are they based on conflict, cooperation, both, neither, something else? Is the story being driven by extraction and colonization, trade and negotiation, something else? Do people treat each other as hosts or as partners? It’s often said that the goal of speculative fiction is to generate awe, wonder, and curiosity; it also often brings up difficult and uncomfortable questions, like the role of humans as parasites and what we have taken from the real world around us and what the world takes from us in return. There is a world outside of us; there is also a world deep down inside.
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Recommended reading:
- Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War, Jeffrey A. Lockwood
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, Ed Yong
- Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, Carl Zimmer
- Planet of the Ants: The Hidden Worlds and Extraordinary Lives of Earth’s Tiny Conquerors, Susanne Foitzik and Olaf Fritsche
- “Endless Forms Most Horrible: Parasites and SF,” Julie Nováková
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