Clark Thomas Carlton

The first book in the Antasy series is "The Prophet of the Ghost Ants," and I could not locate this in the San Jose library system nor the link plus system that retrieves holds throughout libraries in California and even the University of Nevada in reno. For that reason, I was going into this book a bit blind, but the publishers blurb for this first book was helpful for understanding how the setting in the book, and context/background came to be:
"In a savage landscape where humans have evolved to the size of insects, they cannot hope to dominate. Ceaselessly, humans are stalked by night wasps, lair spiders, and marauder fleas. And just as sinister, men are still men. Corrupt elites ruthlessly enforce a rigid caste system. Duplicitous clergymen and power-mongering royalty wage pointless wars for their own glory. Fantasies of a better life and a better world serve only to torment those who dare to dream."
Anand, who I surmise figures more prominently in the first book, is the leader of a rather socialist experiment in the midst of warring lands on all sides. His cousin, Plethoo, is a big part of the second book. Plethoo hates Anand, for a reason that's probably understood by reading Book 1.

The interactions between humans and insects in this book is fascinating. There's even a part where some kind of sex is going on between priestesses and crickets:
" 'she comes! Hail cricket!' The priestess shouted as a chubby, dark, and Shining cricket entered the tabernacle, with her long antenna twitching around her head. The people rose, pressed hands together, and bowed to the cricket as it crawled its way to the altar. Some made contact with it, touching its legs or tails, and then wiped its oil on their hair and faces. Soon other crickets entered and followed the first to the altar. The priestesses halted their chirping to lower their heads and arms, and knelt to assume the mating position."
Apparently, the priestesses fool the female crickets into thinking they are males, and tricking them into depositing their eggs. You will have to read this to believe it lol.

I have a small cactus and succulent garden, and one of my favorite cactus is the prickly pear, or nopal. Here's a part I loved:
"One of the few sites to break up the landscape were growths of the paddle cactus, a clustering plant with thick, juicy leaves that were spotted with prickly dots of sharp hairs and had edges lined by sharper spikes. At the top of the paddles was their round and intimidating red fruit. These were covered in patches of hairs that could break off and sink into human skin, resulting in a painful irritation or even death. [Remember that these humans are tiny, and the cacti are not.] Anand remembered eating pickles and preserves of cactus fruit in Dranveria, but only on special occasions, as they were expensive and dangerous to harvest."

The datura plant figures largely in this book, too. I know of one Facebook friend who tried it once, and more or less said she'd never do it again.
It's harvested, and used, for one thing, as ammunition in fighting and war. It's packed into eggshell skins, and dropped on soldiers from pilots on locusts, which incapacitates them.
"... After these were the Great patches of datura, that lovely but deadliest of plants, with its enormous Moonflowers and it's Thorn-covered fruit. The smell from the flowers reached his nose, which was pleasant at first and then made him faintly dizzy, then mildly ill. He was painfully reminded of the time he had wandered up to a datura, so taken with its massive blossoms that he crawled on its leaves to touch its bright white sepals that fused into a single tube. Sometime later, he remembered, he woke up ill and with blurred vision. For days, he was stuck in a waking daymare where he argued and wrestled and punched at a larger version of himself. During all of it, he endured an endless thirst and a constant need to piss that left him aching with a thousand inner itches he could never scratch."
And a battle scene of a villagers' army who have been "datura-fied":
"Polexima was stuck in the saddle, struggling to rise in it, when she heard a buzzing from overhead. 'Thank Cricket,' she said inside her breathing mask, then wiped sweat off her goggles. Eggshells fell and exploded, releasing fine powders. Soon, the ragged villagers' army was coughing, then seizing, then shouting, then weeping. They wandered in blindness, colliding and attacking each other, shouting at themselves and using their fists to bang their skulls until they fell on the ground to bang some more. Some were rolling around, violently wrestling with invisible partners, or each other. Others screamed at the heavens, then down at the ground as they tried to peel their own skin off with their nails or daggers. Some bumped around, screaming in panic from sudden deafness and hoping to hear their own voices as they tore at their ears. One man was licking the air, over and over, while another man stopped yanking out his own hair to yank out someone else's.
Daytura madness. May I never know this agony, polexima thought."

Just as they do in our own reality, different cultures worship different "gods." In this case, some Revere crickets, some Revere ants, some Revere other insects.. and their rituals are no less amusing than the ones from our own silly religions:
"... A few of the musicians with thicker clubs stood at upright drums of stitched human leather and began their somber beating. A choir entered, and dance-walked down the aisle to join the orchestra and commence the first of the ant Queen hymns, 'praise her odors,' followed by 'tireless is her womb.' "
… (más)

Prophets of the Ghost Ants (Kindle Edition) by Clark Thomas Carlton is a fabulous book I was allowed to read from NetGalley and the book publishers. I thought it was going to be a middle grade children's book but it is an young adult/adult fantasy book. It is very detailed in it's world building. The social structure is defined in all the communities so wonderfully including the caste systems, religion, dress, food, courtship, jobs, war, etc. The bigger picture also of how the different communities interact, the world view, and all the smaller tidbits that would be overlooked it but brought to light in this amazing book. It is a time after the big boulder has struck and great famine. Man, to avoid hunger, has evolved smaller and then smaller. This is an age when man is as small as an insect and interacts in the insect world. It is totally fascinating and I can not stress enough the detailed imagination that went into this. Unfortunately, the cruelty of man did not evolve out of him. Shown in the prejudice of the caste system, the wars, the slavery, and more. But love, valor, and bravery is there also. It is a clever book, long, but full of intense wonder and creativity.… (más)

Disclosure: I received this book as a review copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

In the far future, humans have shrunk to the size of insects and now live a parasitical existence dependent upon the ants, roaches, and termites that are now comparatively the size of draft animals. All of the larger creatures have disappeared, leaving the planet to the insects and the now diminutive humans who coexist with them, but the same lust for power and wealth familiar to those living in the current world remains. Against this backdrop, Clark Thomas Carlton has crafted a story of love, betrayal, oppression, religious strife, and war that remains epic despite taking place in an area that is likely no bigger than a football field.

In the miniaturized future world Anand lives as a member of the midden caste, the lowest caste of the leaf cutter people in Mound Cajoria on the Holy Slope, enduring a life of hard labor and privation while the nobility and priesthood live in opulent comfort. It turns out that not only is Anand a member of the lowest caste, he is a half-breed, the child of a leaf cutter man and a woman of the roach people, who the leaf cutters find both fascinating and revolting, and as such he is the most despised member of the most despised social group on the mound. And from there Anand embarks on a journey that takes him from the lowest of the low to the height of power, although not in a manner or with the results that one might expect.

Early in the book, Anand is taken to meet his mother's people, where he discovers that his birth was not an accident, and the Roach people, or Britasytes as they call themselves, want him to serve as a bridge between their people and the Slopeites of Mound Cajoria. After Anand has been feasted and feted, he falls in love with a Britasyte girl named Daveena and pledges to marry her, but then he has to return to his life of drudgery and oppression in Mound Cajoria. He finds himself setting out for unknown territory with half of the mound dwellers when the colony splits, gets captured by a hitherto unknown group that call themselves the Dranverians, learns a new way of life that rejects the castes and the gods whose priesthoods enforce them, and then returns to Cajoria to liberate his people with the teachings of the Dranverites, only to find that war has come upon the Slopeites in the form of a new threat from the ghost ant-allied servants of the termite god Hulkro.

Through the story, Anand learns and grows, eventually ending up as the innovative war-leader of a movement of disaffected workers from the slope, collections of roach allied people, and the ally of the reluctant noble classes of the various Slopeite mounds as they confront the shared menace of the servants of Hulkro. In the end, victory on the battlefield coupled with the foolishness of his enemies and a political marriage brings Anand to a position he could have only dreamed of at the outset of the book. And yet everything does not finish with a fairy tale wedding. Yes, he marries the princess, but she despises him. Yes, he reforms his kingdom, but at the cost of thousands of lives. Yes, he implements some of the egalitarian reforms espoused by the Dranverites, but his means of accomplishing them causes the Dranverites themselves to reject him. Triumph, it turns out, is a mixed bag.

To a certain extent, the story of power politics and religious intolerance is only half of the point of the book. Slopeite society is unjust, but it seems that a large part of its unjust nature is driven by the symbiotic relationship humans have with the ants they live with. The ants have a rigidly structured society, and so the humans that live with them wind up with one as well, a pattern replicated throughout the various insect allied societies that show up in the game. Human society has become a reflection of insect society, and it should surprise no one that the strictures that insects live under seem ill-suited to humans. And humanity seems to have almost no other choice because humans have not so much domesticated the insects in their lives as they have simply fooled them into not noticing that they live among them by bathing themselves in the insect recognition scent.

Even after Anand has conquered and married the vain Princess Trellana to secure his political position, the stark fact remains that humanity is entirely dependent upon the insects they live among. Everything the humans eat comes from the insects they live with. The dwellings the humans live within are carved out of the nests of the insects they live with. The insects serve as beasts of burden and weapons of war for the humans. When wild insects show up to prey upon the humans, they need their insect allies to help fend off the predators. And so on. And each of the microscopic societies that make up the patchwork quilt of humanity seen in the book is markedly different, and the cause of this seems mostly to be that they have conformed their human lives to accommodate living among their insect companions. And even still the characters remain very human. The nobility exploits the lower classes. The priesthood lies to royalty. Wars take place over religious differences. And so on.

But despite the attention to detail in so many places in the book, there are other areas where physics and biology simply hand waved away. At the tiny scale the story takes place at liquids work work very differently from the way we are used to due to the fact that surface tension would become a significant issue, and yet this never seems to be accounted for in the book. Rain would be something of a natural disaster, causing what would be comparatively torrential flooding with even a summer shower amounting to a deluge that would submerge entire nations. The physics of the very small would fundamentally change the way that tiny humans interact with their environment. The reduced amount of mass for humans would mean that they could tall from a comparatively great height without fear of injury. One human punching another human in the face would be completely ineffective at that size, as their tiny muscles would be unable to generate enough force to cause damage.

The humans in the book seem unaffected by their small size other than the fact that they are now tiny, a development that seems more than moderately implausible. There isn't a direct correlation between brain size and intelligence - after all, some animals such as whales and elephants have larger brains than humans - but there does seem to be a minimum brain size below which one cannot go and expect intelligence, and the humans in Prophets of the Ghost Ants clearly have brains well below this size, and yet seem to be just as intelligent as full-size humans. Everything about the humans in the book other than their size seems to have been unaffected by this radical scale change. Despite the story being presumably millions of years in the future, humans still come in a variety of skin tones, and darker skinned humans are still discriminated against. For a portion of the book it seems like some humans have become enormously more fecund than humans are at present, but then it is revealed that this is simply a byproduct of the diet that they eat. Similarly, for a time it seems that some humans have developed an ability to prevent the spread of fungus through any mounts using their urine, but this too is revealed as a side effect of their diet.

The lack of attention paid to these details seems out of place in the book, because Carlton clearly spent so much time making sure that so many other elements made sense. The human interactions with the insects around them are controlled by using the insects' instinctive reactions to various pheromone scents. Carlton clearly understands how difficult it would be to harness the use of fire on this small scale, and how dangerous it would be as well. Though set in the far future, human technology has regressed to a primitive state in many areas, and this seems to be in large part because of the difficulties that would be inherent in using heat to generate electricity to power technology at such a tiny scale. The result is a fictional setting in which it seems that a fair amount of care has been taken to consider the ramifications of some of the conditions the characters find themselves in, but in which others seem to be simply hand-waved away without much thought.

These issues aside, Prophets of the Ghost Ants remains an engaging piece of fiction built upon an imaginative idea. Even though everything takes place on a very small scale, the scope of the conflict remains epic and the nature of the conflict remains quintessentially human. The book has so much packed into it - from an exploration of class divisions, to the religious hypocrisy of the ruling and priestly classes, to the causes of religiously driven wars, to a coming-of-age story for Anand - that any reader will almost certainly find multiple levels of material in it to interest them.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds.… (más)