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City Question 7: Ants and Violence
The final tale of the book for a very long time, how did the concept of the entire planet being consumed by ants land with you? Did you find Jenkins' moral dilemma of whether to tell the dogs how to deal with the ant an interesting one. Did it make sense for this robot to be the one who ultimately decides the fate of all of the creatures on the planet, and to have made that particular choice?
Comments
I kind of felt that here Simak just went off on a curious tangent rather than developing the main thrust of the idea. For me this part didn't have the same appeal as most of the stories. Yes, Jenkins's moral dilemma was a nice twist, and I guess the narrative required that the burden of choice be on some individual (again, not unlike the role of the robot Giskard in Asimov's Robots and Empire). But looked at another way it made Jenkins into a kind of superhero that made pretty much all of the crucial decisions through the book.
Thought it was bizarre, and absurd without any humor. It didn't even fit with the story so far. It's out of left field and should have stayed there.
It's the ultimate 'the meek shall inherit the earth' tale, right? Just when we thought the dogs were meek, along came the ants.
(and then the mice)
So I am with everyone that the tone of these stories is quite straightforward, that we always have reliable narrators, that they are little more than coathangers for an idea that struck Simak as sellable in magazines. But as I got to the end of the book I started to see them as quite subversive. I mean the protagonists were so dim, the ideas so outrageous (only the Webster home is spared because thay are important - really?) that I couldn't help but think that Simak was having one over on the readers who weren't a little bit suspicious of the author if the narrator seemed reliable. Maybe that's just because I have been researching and thinking about LLMs lately, which likewise produce seemingly coherent but absolutely batshit stuff.
I thought the ants as this unknowable force that just grows and marches on and slowly consumes everything were interesting. We have a book exploring what it is to be human and then what it is to be mutant, and robotic, and an intelligent dog ( so all various degrees of mysterious/knowable) - but then we have the ants and they just ARE. And in the end, we don't find out much about their motivations or anything (other than they worship the "foot") but they end up as the ultimate rulers of the planet. They could have been eliminated so easily but the one creature that we know the least about (particularly their internal motivations) forces off all of the other intelligent life.
I thought Jenkins choosing not to give the information about how to fight back was sort of the classic Neil Peart "If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice". He chose to withold the information and in so doing he was just choosing to let one particular group wipe out the other, as opposed to the opposite. I didn't see it as really anything noble.