An unusual appearance entirely
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The idea that the hero of Dengue boy Would be a mosquito appeared in 2020, under the top of the Covid-19 pandemic when a dengue outbreak exploded in my homotown, Buenos Aires. Dengue -fever spreads through Aedes aegypti Mosquito. This insect thrives in tropical and subtropical climate and is common in many warm and humid regions of northern Argentina.
In recent decades, however, 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’s so hard that one of my best friends was infected with Dengue in 2020, but as all media attention was focused on Covid-19, the public hospital in the city had limited testing and there was no way to get a proper diagnosis or treatment. Furthermore, there are no effective vaccines or medicines against dengue at that time.
During this insecure time for my friend and for the people with Dengue in Argentina, the American company Moderna announced its vaccine against Covid-19, just days after the genetic sequence of SARS-COV-2 was published. This made me think of the horrible business voltage in scientific research as mosquito diseases (Dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, Yellow Fever, among others) have killed the hunter of thousands of people for centuries. The mosquito is actually considering the deadliest animal for humans, and according to historian Timothy Winegard, it has killed more people than anything else in history.
However, these diseases affect people in countries with lower income, there were never sufficient investments in vaccines or treatment. Meanwhile, biotechnology companies only needed months to develop, patent and sell products that tackle Covid-19 that secured them a significant monetary profit.
So the idea cam for 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 read a little ironal into the most commercially popular Ghent in Latin America, Autofion, I was convinced that my story’s imaginary subtitle should be “the self -fiction of a moss flit”. At the same time, one of the themes of my writing is the non-human, and I was interested in the challenge of inserting the protagonist into a novel (a genre historically designed to tell human times, psychologies and stories). How to mimic and achieve empathy with a being as stranger to the human experience as an insect, especially onenoying as the mosquito?
I had to become mosquito, adopt its perspective. I granted the famous Flaubertian motto ”Madame Bovary, that’s me“And did it to my own: The mosquito is me.
Ursula K. Le Guin once said that the basic feature of science fiction is to act as a transport bag, allowing migration of ideas from fiction to other scientific and technical discourse. In this way the genus becomes a mutant transition (which Dengue boy is) between literature and non-literary knowledge.
I have always been very much appreciated this idea because nothing needs me more in my assignment as a writer than examining topics that I would never even have noticed before.
For this book, I consulted dozens of papers and manuals about entomology, and I became a “mygologist” overnight. It was crucial to know the details of the mosquito’s anatomy to describe it and understand how its body works and feels. Although the protagonist is inspired by my friend, who is a man, I discovered that the mosquito transmitting dissase is female who forced me to transform my plot on the spot.
The female perspective also led me to investigate how a non-mammal, oviparian animal engagement in material care-if so does, and I was captivated by ovology and representation of eggs. The eggs designed by hr giggers for the movie AlienThose drawn and classified by Naturalist Ernst Haeckel in his illustrated treat, and Georges Bataill’s History of the eye also burned this ovophilic occupation.
In this novel, I tried to tell a story about climate change from a perspective that got more human life, and I jump the reader empathy with my hero when I also became a mosquito while I imagined and imagined it.
Dengue boy by Michel nieva, translated From Spanish by Rahul Berry and released by Serpent’s Tailis the latest election for the new Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read with us here
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