Not to mention healthcare and problems with parasites and wasps and termites.Īll that makes this book fantastic read, stepping more in-depth into the consciousness of the creature another than human. It grows into a community with detailed descriptions of communication, desires, histories, wars, past, future, how time is perceived and managed (temperature! Meet me when it is 20 Celsius,) how duties go, and how a rebellion can come out of necessity and secrets, and by accident. Still, it goes beyond the personal narrative. It would be easy to think the Werber’s ability to tell a story from an ant’s perspective stops there. The empire or should I say empires are full of individual stories, taking into account what is to be part of millions of others with responsibilities and expectations given by nature (worker, future queen, warrior, scout…) and yet have individual needs. Having now read a thing or two about ants, I can fully appreciate the way Werber mixes facts with fiction and wove a believable story from the ants’ perspective. The book is written from three perspectives humans (note the plural,) uncle Edmond, and ants (plural here as well.) The writer portrays ants and their dynamic with each other and the rest of the world so vividly that it swept me away. I love this book, and I’m sure I didn’t fully understand it back then, but the effect was the same.

Wow, those were the exact thoughts when I finished the book this time and back when I first read it over twenty years ago.

Empire of the ants werber