The Edge of Tomorrow

Review of The Large Ant from this book.
Ants make me squirm, so I was not keen to read this 1960 short story from “The Edge of Tomorrow”, but although this does feature a large ant, I’m grateful that “the government man” didn’t allow the inclusion of any photos - it’s framed as a true story that no one will believe amid a slew of fake news.

The narrator stays in a remote shack after his friends have left. He awakes to a large ant, and instinctively clubs it to death. He’s revolted by it, and by his reaction, but takes the body with him so a museum entomologist can have a look. That’s the setup.

The story itself is a Twilight Zone-type speculative fiction that is a mirror for the weaknesses of humankind - and why show more physical strength and violence are so often the response to the unfamiliar. It was compulsive, philosophical, and powerful.

Image: Entomology jars - none containing ants. (Source)

Quotes

• How will “it” end? “One held that sooner or later there would be too many people; another that we would do each other in, and the atom bomb made that a very good likelihood… All sorts of notions except the simple fact that we were what we were… we have never been any good at changing ourselves or the way we behave.” I didn’t fully agree with the last part, but went with it, and came to see Fast’s point.

• “Aside from a racetrack, a museum is the most interesting and unexpected place in the world.”

• “We don’t look carefully at a thing that is horrible or repugnant to us.”

• “A cultured and intelligent man, yet you cannot conceive of a mentality that does not include weapons as a prime necessity.”

• “If they are without the curse of murder, they may also be without the curse of fear… fear and hatred are two sides of the same coin.”

See also

• Six months’ ago, Short Story Club read - and I disliked - Calvino’s The Argentine Ant (which would be more accurately called “The Plague of Argentine Ants”: see my review HERE).

• In Manguel’s anthology of “fantastic” literature, this follows on from an equally good, but very different, piece that explores similar themes about the human propensity for violence and war: Marco Denevi’s A Dog in Dürer’s Etching “The Knight, Death and the Devil”, which I reviewed HERE.

• I detest ants, but not all insects: Kafka’s Metamorphosis (see my review HERE) makes me ponder, tear up, and chuckle every time.

• Any debate about catastrophic collapse versus technological solutions reminds me of Kenneth Boulding’s A Conservationist’s Lament and The Technologist’s Reply. You can read both poems in my review of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, HERE.

• Howard Fast also wrote epics that were filmed, including Spartacus, Moses, and The Prince of Egypt.

Short story club

I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.

I can’t find an online version of this story to link to.

You can join the group here. show less

Stories with a pretentious tone, messy/tedious structure, and bad science. It's clearly the author's intention to be profound and mind-blowing, but his ideas are dumb and poorly thought out.