BWBC 31: Them!

I have a friend who has a theory. According to him every animal is one of four types: a bug, a slug, a rat, or a lizard. These are categories are less to do with the animal’s biology than how they interact with humans. 

Slugs generate disgust, bugs generate extreme terror at their alien nature, lizards a more familiar terror (we might not like it but we can recognize their desire to eat us), and rats are familiar and knowable. Fish and birds are lizards, wolf and deer are rats, jellyfish and manatees would be slugs, and spiders, shrimp and hornets are all bugs. A test would be what would your reaction if you were to encounter a large one of these creatures. 

So by this theory, any normal person who meets a large bug, no matter how peaceful its intentions, will default to abject terror at such an alien monstrosity. 

And such is the exact premise of this week’s story. 

“The Large Ant” by Howard Fast

Fast might be most famous as the guy who wrote Spartacus, which he did while in prison for contempt of congress since he wouldn’t give names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His output spans decades and I remember him largely through stumbling on his books in discount bins alongside Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Leon Uris. Those sort of Cold War era potboilers that had BIG THEMES. Or so I gather. This story’s actually the first thing I read by him. Like all decent writers he wrote genre. 

Our narrator is a normal guy and knows humanity doesn’t have much longer to survive, not least because we’re violent murderous animals with A-bombs. You see one day our guy was on vacation at a cabin in the Adirondacks improving his golf swing. After a busy day of strenuous relaxation he’s sitting in bed reading, when he spies something monstrous in the room. It’s an ant but one that’s a bit over a foot long. 

Being the normal guy that he is our guy instinctively grabs his putting iron and beats the thing to death the moment after he sees it. He then packs the corpse up and drives all night back home where he promptly gets in touch with an entomologist at the natural history museum. When he gets to the museum he finds the entomologist is not alone but has a number of government types waiting with him, scientists and military personnel. Our narrator then learns that these ants have appeared repeatedly, and seem to mean no one any harm, but unfortunately humans instinctively hate them and kill on sight. The scientists don’t know what to do, but they suspect the ants will stop being peaceful at some point and decide they need to get rid of us. All because we’re apes that can’t get over our terror response at the sight of bugs.

I feel like Fast here is playing in the Bug-Eyed Monster genre famous in the pulps and used by such as Heinlein, Haldeman, and countless others, only Fast posits that it will likely be us rats that prove the aggressor because we can’t imagine a bug that might come in peace. Or at least we couldn’t during the Cold War. This is one of those stories that posit that this is what normal people are like when it assumes that Post-War Americans are the human baseline. Removed from that era when I read, “this is what people are like,” I understand it more as “this is what we are like”. 

It’s like The Lord of the Flies. That book’s commonly viewed as a universal statement on the human condition when it’s very specifically a critique of the British ruling class and their educational system. When a group of six schoolboys actually got stranded on an island their adventure proved very different than the book’s.  My point being that these scientists and generals are like “humans will always kill bugs” when any perusal of #bugtwitter will prove otherwise. 

Which is all me bringing too much reality to this story. “The Large Ant” is another fable in science fiction clothes that asks how can we expect to discover intelligent life when our very biological wiring might prevent us from recognizing it? Which is an interesting question to ponder and learn from, rather than viewing the story as a puzzle that needs to be solved. 

Next week, a story by the guy who wrote The Joy of Sex.