Guess What I Found?

I just found JT McIntosh’s The Fittest on Kindle Unlimited.

It is a book I’ve had a love/hate relationship with for years since I first read it as a kid. It is a post-apocalyptic novel in which there is a plague of intelligent animals. (Mice, rats, cats and dogs. There is also a strain of intelligent horses but the author only mentions them in passing as having been wiped out very quickly by the dogs.) The creatures in question were developed by a scientist named “Paget,” leading to their being named “paggets” or pa-animal name (pamice, parats, padogs) and when the animals eventually escape they breed, form colonies and begin destroying the infrastructure/hunting humans.

The first chapter or so is the main character gruesomely imagining how his wife must have died after being attacked by various kinds of pagget-animals. From there, main character has various adventures and is eventually taken in by a community that eventually finds out his Secret. (Because the main character has a Secret.)

The love-hate relationship can be divided up into the following areas:

• Writer is misogynistic and has certain misogynistic opinions of women. (Not just dated opinions, actively misogynistic; I have read other works by him and oooh boooy…) When a writer who is misogynistic writes romance it is always a rollercoaster of terrible opinions and pedestals. When a misogynistic writer writes women, they are often completely unlike real people with actual thoughts and emotions. In the case of this particular writer, he feels the need to explain in detail why women are completely alien and other, vilifying them and at the same time putting them on a pedestal in turns. So much whiplash. So. Much. Also, detailed essays on why women are terrified of mice and rats, and men are not.
• Writer associates felines as feminine. Specifically giving them a concept of the “malicious feminine.” Jealousy, envy, spite. He then associates canines as “malicious masculine.” Aggression, rapaciousness, and rage. As a result, the paggets don’t act very much like real animals, even real animals with increased intelligence.
• Writer also underestimates how absolutely terrifying a herd of intelligent thousand pound herbivores might be. (Predators? Actually pretty shy and will leave you alone if they aren’t hungry and you aren’t like, poking them with a stick or something. A herbivore is a lot less predictable and will stomp you flat if they feel threatened by you. Being a prey animal, with all that entails, their default is “feels threatened by you.” Add intelligence to the mix, and they can plan out the exact consistency of the paste they’re going to stomp you into.)
• Writer doesn’t seem to have a clear understanding of actual animal behavior in general. The intelligent animals in the book seem to default toward malicious, as if intelligence=evil. This is somewhat par for the course when the apocalyptic agent is a living entity (or an unliving mobile one in case of a zombiepocalypse) but given the misogynistic underpinnings of cats=women and dogs=men, rodents=apparently supernaturally terrifying to women…let’s just say it gives the impression that there’s some kind of obnoxious allegory going on here about human nature according to the author.
• Attendant to the lack of understanding of animal behavior is the part where author doesn’t understand that intelligence does not inherently mean superiority. Writer follows the idea that evolution is an upward advancement instead of evolution being the result of organisms finding and adapting to niches in the environment that they are fit for living in. This leads to some situations where the writer assumes that a pack of intelligent dogs would be Absolutely Perfect Killers/Hunters. This would not be the case. Hunting is a skill, and it’s subject to a lot of factors! Human hunters end up empty handed a lot of the time! So do animal predators!
• Writer doesn’t seem to understand the inherent usefulness of intelligent animals. In the story, they are primarily an interesting oddity, and end up in circuses and other entertainment venues. This led to the colonies of escaped paggets being more or less ignored until it was too late because they were “entertainment.” You don’t have ranchers or the military wanting the dogs (or the horses!) and so on. Can you imagine how useful even an intelligent rat might be as an assistance animal for the disabled? I just have general doubts about the sequence of events that lead to the animal plague. Writer doesn’t have anyone realising how dangerous a feral population of intelligent animals might be until the intelligent animals are an obvious and imminent threat. (Which isn’t how something like that would work, really.)
• What I did love about the book as a kid was the adventure/survivalism of the story as the main character struggles along before allying himself with another community. The apocalyptic agent was a fascinating and variable opponent! Despite the general flaws of the writing (that is the knee jerk misogyny), the main character was interesting and sympathetic. The work was also very inspirational in the sense that I got so. Many. Story. Ideas. For this book. True, most of them were based on: “Writer, stop hating on cats. Writer, that would literally never happen. Writer, oh my god shut up. Writer have you ever actually spoken to a woman in your life? Writer, no,” but still, the book was a jumping point for a number of not-fan fics. (That is, when I was younger I did not write very much because of privacy issues. Instead, I would play very elaborate imagination games. This would help my writing in the future.)

Generally, my imagination-game stories involved:

• A disabled character with one or more intelligent companion animals assisting them, either as a scavenger or a homesteader.
• Same story, except non-disabled character.
• A non-disabled character who becomes “the hands” for a pack of intelligent dogs, or colony of intelligent cats.
• A character actively re-domesticating and civilization-training various animals. (Teaching concepts like herding and agriculture and so on.)
• Hard-mode horse girl stories. (Yes I was one of kids who Really Liked Horses Dammit.)
• Any permutation of these, only the main character was telepathic. Because telepathy.

So, I’m going to be reading it, and I may either write fan fiction or original fiction vaguely based on it. As you do. Or I might just write meta and complain about it. Which is another thing you (I) do. (If I write fic, I will definitely post to AO3.)