Parasites in fiction
[7] According to the immunologist John Playfair, the term 'parasite' is distinctly derogatory in common usage, where a parasite is "a sponger, a lazy profiteer, a drain on society".
In ancient Rome, the parasitus was an accepted role in Roman society, in which a person could live off the hospitality of others, in return for "flattery, simple services, and a willingness to endure humiliation".
[11] Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula starts out as an apparently human host, welcoming guests to his home, before revealing his parasitic vampire nature.
[13] The social anthropologist Marika Moisseeff argues that Hollywood science fiction favours insects as villain characters because of their parasitism and their swarming behaviour.
Such films, she continues, depict a ceaseless war of culture and nature as involving extraterrestrial species somewhat resembling insects, with humans as their hosts.
[23] Ben Guarino, in The Washington Post, observes that despite all the "cinematic aliens' gravid grotesquerie",[2] earthly parasites have more horrible[2] ways of life.
Guarino cites parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside living caterpillars, inspiring A. E. Van Vogt's 1939 story "Discord in Scarlet", Robert Heinlein's 1951 novel The Puppet Masters, and Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.
Guarino cites the parasitologist Michael J. Smout as saying that the "massive changes"[2] are feasible, giving the example of flatworms that transform from an egg to a tadpole-like form to an infective worm.
They suggest further themes for future science fiction films, including emerald jewel wasps that turn cockroaches into subservient puppets, able to crawl but unable to act independently; or the barnacle-like crustaceans that castrate their crab hosts, or grow into their brains, altering their behaviour to care for the young barnacles.
[2] All the same, a 2013 poll of scientists and engineers by Popular Mechanics magazine revealed that the parasite-based science fiction films The War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) and Alien were among their top ten favourites.
[30] The marine biologist Alistair Dove writes that there are multiple parallels between Xenomorphs and parasitoids, though there are in his view more disturbing life cycles in real biology.
An early example was John Wyndham's 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which sees the women of an English village give birth to and then bring up a group of alien children.
[13][34][35] A somewhat similar approach is taken in Octavia E. Butler's 1987–1989 Lilith's Brood, but the offspring born to the human mother there is an alien-human hybrid rather than simply an alien.
