In Fiasco, Stanislaw Lem proposes that meaningful contact between humans and other interstellar civilizations would be about as realistic--and ultimately futile--as human communication with bugs. Empire of the Ants can be seen as a response that not only imagines useful interspecies interaction, but demonstrates just how much we can learn from "alien" beings in our midst. What the two books share, however, is the pessimistic viewpoint that-humans being humans, after all-meetings of such dissimilar life forms are likely to have disastrous, even if unwitting, consequences for both sides. Originally published in 1991 in France as Les Fourmis, the English language version about a mysterious threat to a colony of ants comes with considerable publishing hype, including comparisons to Watership Down and reviews such as the one from Great Britian's The Sunday Times that describes the novel as "quite simply, a masterpiece." It's neither.
Empire of the Ants lacks the narrative scope and charm of the classic rabbit fable; moreover, its depiction of how nature works presents an unsettling matter-of-fact brutality that may be unsuitable for pre-adolescents. The at times clumsy language (and it's uncertain whether that is the fault of translator Margaret Rocques or just her making the best of what she had to work with), coupled with a contrived plotline reminiscent of pulp science fiction at its worst, results in far from masterful storytelling. That said, the novel has sufficient redeeming qualities to make it worth reading.
There are two parallel stories fated to converge, albeit awkwardly. Entomologist eccentric Edmond Wells has bequeathed his nephew an apartment, accompanied with the cryptic warning, "ABOVE, ALL NEVER GO DOWN THE CELLAR." Of course, that is precisely what the nephew and a variety of successive characters do. Then there's also the question of Edmond's missing manuscript, The Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge, that one unscrupulous character would like to get his hands on, which is somehow related to solving the riddle of, "How do you make four equilateral triangles out of six matches?"
Meanwhile, the 327th russet ant serving Belo-kiy-kiuni (the Queen and only ant entitled to a name) uncovers not only a devastating new enemy weapon, but a conspiracy within its own nest to keep knowledge of the weapon's existence from spreading.
Author Bernard Werber (the Anglicization of Albin Michel), is a scientific journalist and avid student of ant life-indeed, he suffered a near fatal attack of African magnan ants, an experience evidently echoed in Edmond's less fortunate encounter with wasps. So it's perhaps not surprising that his rendering of ants is more interesting than his depiction of humans. At first, the juxtaposition of human and ant situations provides a clever commentary on their mirroring social structures. But as the human side of the story becomes increasingly ridiculous and one dimensional-e.g., a wife who waits fully eight hours for her husband to come out of the cellar before calling for help, as well as the eventual explanation for where everyone has disappeared to-it is the ants that hold your attention. This despite the author's inability at times to overcome the inherent difficulties of ascribing human-like motivations to ant behavior that sometimes result in such stilted and silly descriptions as:
"...It was something he had never seen or smelled until then. A female. And what a female! He took the time to look her over. She had shapely, slender legs decorated with little hairs that were deliciously sticky with sexual hormones."In passages such as this, it's hard to decide whether Werber is trying to be funny, if his prose abilities just aren't up to the task he's set for himself, or if the translator has stumbled. Similarly, in the time-honored tradition of Hard SF, there are times when the narration becomes a lecture, but instead of discussions on the practical application of faster-than-light travel according to theories of quantum physics, Werber expostulates on the social hierarchy of ants. Though such lectures can frequently bring a book to a crashing halt, the depiction of ant behavior, even in its most awkward and pedagogic descriptions, is actually quite fascinating.
What ultimately redeems Empire of the Ants is its worthwhile ideas, a deserving addition to that body of science fiction in which poor writing is excused by interesting postulations relevant to humanity's future, if not its very existence. How does society deal with non-conformity? To what extent does "groupthink" hinder-at the same time as it protects-social development and scientific knowledge? How do circumstances and accident dictate our personalities and, by extension, our social roles? In what ways do biology and intellectual limitations hinder our understanding the true nature of the universe? In such cases, the ants aren't really all that different from us. The one significant difference, which ultimately forms the core of the novel's thesis, is that unlike ants, humans kill for no reason.
In a book full of bugs, that's the notion we're left with that should bug us the most.
Go to the main Nova Express Home Page
Go to Lawrence Person's Home Page
After almost drowning in a deluge of Korean Spam, I'm now munging my e-mail address, so please remove all the "H"s from the following to e-mail me: lawrencehh@hiho.com
Like every other web page in the universe, this one is Under Construction.