The ant culture
The ants Culture ( ISBN 3-442-23163-9 , 1972, Orig .: Half Past Human , 1971) is a science fiction - novel of US writer T. J. Bass . The novel is a combination of the two short stories Half Past Human from 1969 and GITAR published in 1970. The novel belongs to the Hive series and is continued in the novel Der Gott-Wal .
His novels Die Ameisenkultur and Der Gott-Wal were nominated for the Nebula Award . Ant culture emerged as a short story, which Bass later developed into a novel. He used his medical background to achieve a realistic level in his stories that has never been achieved to this day. Both novels tell of a human-like race with only four toes that has lost all aggressiveness.
action
In Bass' future vision of the earth, the biota serves as part of the food chain . Human science has managed to breed a race of four-toed, short-lived humanoids . Care was taken to breed disturbing characteristics such as aggressiveness , curiosity and comparable attributes from the behavior of the newly created breed in the course of the breeding program. The fifteen-toed mankind, called Buckeyes, uses so-called organic farms to fatten the new breed. This drastic step resulted from the extinction of all animal life, so that only humans populate the earth and therefore humans have become part of the food chain and are specially bred for this purpose.
The conflict between four-toed people who are hunted like vermin by the hive security and the original humans forms the background of the novel. Something strange goes on when it is noticed that the primitive breed is showing signs of evolution with an uncertain goal but one that will upset the Hive's balance. A third faction seems to have developed that tirelessly lead a rather successful fight against the computer-controlled balance of this world. Conflicts that threaten to escalate into an epic battle between four to fifteen people are becoming more and more common.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The ant culture in the catalog of the German National Library
- ^ Nebula Final Ballots from the 1970s