There was no way I was passing up a book with a cover like that.
I don't read as much straight sci-fi as I should outside of comic books, and I've meant to change that all my life. Fortunately, the Book Club of Desolation may be my chance to get on the right track. I recognized in my childhood that I always leaned towards the softer side of the Sci-Fi Hardness Scale, and a lot of the big names in classic sci-fi--Asimov, Anderson, Heinlein,
But this really is all just incidental. I really did buy The Ant with the Human Soul exclusively for that cover.
Bob Olsen's '30s pulp adventure tells the story of Kenneth Williams, who is suicidal after his college experiences have made him doubt his Christianity. He is rescued from a drowning attempt by the sinister-seeming scientist Dr. De Villa, who suggests that perhaps an uncommon experience will help remind Williams of the beauty of life. And by "uncommon experience," he means "having his brain transferred into the body of an ant." How, you ask? Why, for that matter? Well, De Villa has perfected a ray which can cause ants to grow to the size of people. From there, it's simplicity itself to splice Kenneth's "memory center" into the ant's brain, while Kenneth's body is kept in suspended animation. The ant containing his brain-chunk will then be shrunk back down and returned to its colony, and Kenneth will record all of the ant's experiences as his own, all for the purpose of solving the secrets of ant colony behavior.
Kenneth ends up undertaking more than one lesson in ant-hropology, though one has to wonder how many times a single person can have their brain chopped up and transplanted in a week. In his first expedition, he is sent to a colony of common garden ants, where he sees that ant society is uncannily similar to that of humans, albeit with ant-like twists. Sure, it's a rigid caste society where automaton-like drones constantly search for and carry food to and around the colony, there are also bars, dances, and funerals. Next, he is sent to a more violent type of ant, one which spends a lot of its time drinking liquor and holding wrestling matches. Finally, he is sent to a colony of farmer ants, where he learns the joys and hardships of raising bug "cattle." And, following this adventure, the book decides to stop, so he gets a happy ending with his girlfriend.
The Ant with the Human Soul starts really strong and slowly declines. As the frontispiece for the book states, Bob Olsen was noted in his prime for his lighthearted approach to sci-fi prose. That shows itself quickly, because even in the face of depression and suicide, there's a pluckiness to the book, where everyone, even the mad scientist, behaves in a sort of golly-gee-gosh manner. This helps the audience forgive the stunning weakness of the book's attempts at hard science explanations, which admittedly may have been something Olsen intended. Olsen is skilled enough at using this tone that when the book's theme starts emerging it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere. Unfortunately, the themes of Ant are where the book kinda shits the bed. After the second ant encounter, it becomes clear that the different species of ants are supposed to represent different social circles of humans. The first ants represent an example of the middle class's conception of a stable society, while the second represents the criminal element. But then, when Dr. De Villa starts describing the farmer ants in the setup for the third incident, Olsen makes it overwhelmingly clear that it's not morality he's meaning to examine, it's race. He says that the criminal ants of the second incident are basically ant black people, while presumably the first group of well-behaved ants are the white ones. Meanwhile, this third group represents the "semi-primitive nomadic races." Bleccchhhh. The fact that the ending tries to claim this whole thing was about the evils of atheism makes it even lamer. While there's plenty of great stuff in the beginning with the improbable science, and the suggestion that Dr. De Villa is, y'know, Satan, it's all discarded in the end in favor of something that makes it all feel like a waste of time.
There's also something that really started bugging me, but in that way that makes me laugh. Dr. De Villa puts a lot of stock into how his exposure of ant behavior will secure him his place in history, but the man already has inter-species brain transplants and a growth and shrink ray. How, in any way, could discovering the secrets of ant social structures add to the scale and possibility implied by inventing things like those? The neurological medicine that could be derived from De Villa's understanding of the brain, to say nothing of how space-altering rays would affect the struggle for resources, is way, way more important than figuring out if ants put their dead in caskets or not. Again, this annoyed me, but the more I thought about it, the more hilarious it became. I guess I don't get it because I'm not a scientist. Anyway: this probably won't be the last ant-related book I feature on here, because I also own a copy of Spiridon, a French philosophical novel about a human-intelligence'd ant, and something called The Ants of Timothy Thummel, which appears to be the Bible, but with ants. Huh.
Armchair Fiction was also kind enough to include a second story in their publication of The Ant with the Human Soul. Keith Laumer's Night of the Trolls is the first novella of his Bolo series, which centered around a series of super-scientific tanks. An astronaut named Jackson awakes from suspended animation to find the world destroyed in a holocaust. He learns of his wife's death, and believes that his son and astronaut unit have also perished. He learns that some of those folk are still alive: one of his fellow astronauts, Toby Mallon, has set himself up as "the Baron," the mysterious dictator of the land that was once Jackson's home city. Mallon has ruled the land so ruthlessly that people have fallen back into superstitions, believing the colossal Bolo tanks he controls are Trolls. (This also lands Mallon the title of "the Trollmaster," which is pretty fucking cool.) It will take all of Jackson's wit to get his hands on one of the Bolos and stop the Baron before he can conquer what's left of civilization.
This was a good one, and not simply good for trash purposes. Night of the Trolls has a punchy and quick pace that's so efficient and effective that it makes one realize how stodgy Ant with the Human Soul really was. In about 70 pages, Laumer is able to bringing an engaging and straightforward plot that actually has some good character scenes. The Bolos themselves, and how they fit into the world Jackson left behind, are interesting enough to merit the sequels the story got. I don't know if I'd feature any other Bolo books on the site, but I will almost certainly be reading them.
Hey, look, you can tell it's good because the review is short and relatively free of spoilers. A lot of the trash material I talk about I talk about rather freely because, well, if this blog is meant to chronicle the unique feelings that stuff gives me, skimping on details is counter-productive. I give spoilers because I'm a bad person. The only out I've given myself on that is that a lot of these are absurdly hard to track down, and so if people want to know what actually fucking happens in them, they can know for themselves. While I'm fine with spoiling some details of The Ant with the Human Soul because I don't really if it's worth your time, I will leave the read of Night of the Trolls to your own discretion. It's not a deep or complex work of fiction, but...check it out. Tackle Ant if you consider yourself a trash-lit master.
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Image Source: Armchair Fiction
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