Pests are where fantasy worlds fail
Why our imagination just can't see beyond rats.
I’m a big sci-fi and fantasy nerd. Star Wars, Marvel, Wheel of Time, the Cosmere, Lord of the Rings. I love a good escape, particularly to magical worlds. But as I’ve read, I’ve noticed something very particular.
It’s amazing how many of our fantasy worlds have rats. The world may have dragons, magic, mind-reading and faster than light travel. But the pests are oddly grounded in the “real” world. In most fantastical worlds I’ve come across, when they have pests, they are described as rat-like. They might have hair in different places, or maybe even scales, but they all scuttle, they all have pointy teeth, and they’re usually something you can replace in your mind with a rat.
It goes both for what the pests are—often rats, crows, or beetles—and what they stand for. In Star Wars, insects look like beetles or millipedes. Coruscant has rats, though they’re hairless and tusked (gotta make the puppetry department earn their keep). Harry Potter is based in the real world and has rats and rat-like people. Wheel of Time is intensely magical…but also has not only rats, but mice and crows and weevils.
The pests all are almost always evil, too! In The Wheel of Time (which I’m reading, almost done with it, I blame Rosamund Pike for being brilliant), rats, crows and ravens are messengers and spies for the Dark One. In Star Wars, the insects are often things that burrow into and steal your life force (yikes). In ACOTAR (IYKYK), Feyre’s cell has rats. Even in the children’s book Redwall, mice might be good. But rats? Rats are EVIL.
And that’s what makes me curious. In a worst with dragons and magic and mind-reading and lord knows what else, our imaginations take flight. We imagine new clothes and new flying machines and new buildings with magical energies. We imagine new aliens and beings with bodies that don’t even have substance, or are just bigger people with wings.
We can’t imagine new rats. And we can’t imagine that pests as we see them don’t have to be “pests” in every world!
I do get it. Pests are a very convenient shortcut to take when you’re trying to build a fantasy realm. You want something dark and dank? Add rats! Blanket the sky with crows and ravens! Add bugs.*
I can also see why it’s easier to just have rats, rather than having to pause as an author to say, “she could hear scratchings and scuttlings in the walls, the activities of qu’a’a’e’i’lar** with their 13.5 stubby appendages, each ending in a glittering poisoned spike, their three tiny, beady eyes, glistening against dingy brown feathers, and a wickedly strong, hooked beak. The clever nasties lived off excrement—and fresh meat, if they could get it.” For a one-off mention (for our heroine will not rot away in prison for a whole book that would not advance the plot), that’s probably more detail than anyone needs, and might well jolt them out of a world the author has carefully built. Similarly, if you just want to indicate evil, it’s an easy shortcut to say someone looks like a rat, or their dark tower is surrounded by ravens, rather than trying to come up with new ways for evil to look different in your world.
But these shortcuts are so easy because pests are where our imaginations fail. We have deep and very strong cultural ideas of what “bad” animals look like. They are dark. They live in the shadows. They are fast. They scuttle. When we picture evil animals, we picture animals we’ve always been told are evil. Rats, crows, sometimes wolves or coyotes or snakes. With such a firm idea of what an evil animal should look like, why not just exploit it instead of trying to teach your reader something else? Rats in literature are a trope, a theme standing in for something else. In this case, bad vibes.
The next time you see a rat in fantasy, though, ask why. What is the rat standing in for? Is it upholding a “pest” trope? What would it look like if some other animal did the work? We can imagine dragons. I bet we can imagine some different pests, too.
Where have you been?
Is it reading about how ticks get attracted to their hosts through the power of static electricity?! Ticks are small enough to be yanked through the air by electrostatic forces…like the ones you have on your skin. Since ticks can’t jump, this is a pretty zippy zappy way to find a host.
Maybe it’s reading about how helping wild animals can actually hurt (I see you, do NOT PUT that deer fawn/buffalo calf/baby moose in your car. Don’t do it). We love animals and we are often emotionally drawn to help them. But the animal’s needs should come first, and we shouldn’t assume they want the same things we do.
Where have I been?
Well I’ve been on CSPAN! Yes! They have a book channel and they also air discussions with authors! Like me! Check out my awesome conversation with Mike Cove and Roland Kays at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
I also had a lovely conversation with Rebecca Heisman about her new book Flight Paths, all about bird migration, and how scientists study it. Hummingbirds are officially the greatest most boss athletes ever.
Scientists are people, and people interpret the natural world through their own biases. Turns out we can learn a lot about the world, and correct some things we got wrong. All we need is a different, feminist lens.
*Weirdly no one ever adds mosquitoes. Too close to home.
**Excessive apostrophes are a sign that this Important Fantasy.