"Revolt of the Ants," by Milton Kaletsky
Appeared in Amazing Stories, April 1940Continuing, the ants said: "We are excellent engineers, architects, agriculturists and herdsmen. We are far better economists than you because every ant has a job and enough to eat. We live together without laws, courts and police. We ants have no drunkards, thieves, politicians or lunatics; no moral troubles, no poverty, no swing bands, no fake stock salesmen and no taxes. We actually practice what we preach. Can you humans say the same? You will never eliminate all your faults and defects by yourselves, so we must do it for you. Good day."For much of the twentieth century, science fiction was popularly pigeonholed as a genre of nerds and weird loners more concerned with fanciful spaceships than the problems of the present day. Today, thankfully, the general impression isn't nearly as skewed and science fiction has come into its own - though, to be honest, a lot of it isn't called science fiction so bluntly, and some of its writers have no desire to be known as science fiction authors. Take Harlan Ellison, who expressed his reasons why in a 1980 interview available on YouTube. Until Star Trek and Star Wars started to gain traction in popular culture, science fiction was a genre of ray-guns and rocketships, found in magazines with lurid covers of monstrous aliens menacing scantily-clad women, and even then it took a while for the pendulum to shift."Revolt of the Ants" by Milton Kaletsky, while including neither ray-guns nor rocketships or scantily-clad women, is firmly within that school of science fiction. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, it only ever appeared in print twice. The most recent was Science Fiction Adventure Classics, March 1972, which I've never encountered. Where I found it was right at home, right where it was meant to be, in the seventy-year-old pages of the April 1940 issue of Amazing Stories (cover story: David Wright O'Brien's "Fish Men of Venus"). I found it in a Wrigleyville bookstore while wandering Chicago and bought it on the spot for $15, but the magazine would have been a bargain at three times the price.This is an actual god damned pulp science fiction magazine, the source of that pigeonholing. Aside from minor age-related yellowing around the edges of the pages, it is in excellent condition. See for yourself.
Of the six stories in the April 1940 Amazing, "Revolt of the Ants" may at once be the closest to reality and the most ludicrous. A calm day at the White House is shattered when thousands upon thousands of ants stream into the Oval Office and, as they are "very intelligent animals" and have become literate by "examining children's elementary reading books and dictionaries" in landfills, demand the right to vote.I'm not sure if this is just ludicrous or awesomely ludicrous. I'm going to summarize the plot here as well; considering how obscure this story is, locating a copy might be an adventure in itself.The human characters in the story seem to take the idea of intelligent, communicative ants fairly well in stride. Only a few weeks go by before the Supreme Court rules that ants born on American soil are, in fact, natural-born American citizens and thus fully capable of exercising the right to vote. Considering the actual political environment of 1940, when racist Jim Crow laws were still very much in force throughout much of the United States, I can't help but see this as extremely forward-looking and optimistic on the part of the author.Matters become complicated when the newly-enfranchised ants wish for the extension of that privilege to bees and termites, and the President plays his trump card - the ants, bees, and termites can vote when they reach the age of twenty-one years, the same as any other citizen.1 The insects, being "noble, honorable, efficient and intelligent" by their own description, respond to the human-centric laws of the United States of America by formally declaring war on humanity.It isn't much of a war, actually, as wars were considered in 1940. It's more of a sustained global terrorist campaign waged by insects, conducted by bees "stinging at everyone they could catch" and termites forcing the cancellation of baseball games as they "ate the bats into uselessness." Truth be told, throughout the story the insects prove themselves to be on an entirely different plane of morality than 21st century human terrorists - their tactics never go beyond vandalism and annoyance, and there's no mention in the story of any human actually dying as a result of the "war." Plenty of ants, bees, and termites are, though - after four months of this asymmetrical warfare, their numbers are halved through sustained human chemical warfare.Still, the war against the ants brought humanity together, and the climax of the story finds the President of the United States at a conference meant to unite the quarreling political parties and fight as a united front. Into this, representatives of the Grand Supreme Council of Ants, Bees, and Termites (yes, really) deliver a new message - an end to the war and an indictment of humanity, effectively summarized by their last statement: "To hell with you."Predictably, of course, as soon as the spectre of insect bites and insomnia from nighttime swarming attacks is lifted, humankind's newfound amity dissolves into political backbiting - "Brotherhood broke up in a riot. The United States was back to normal."I found an earnest simplicity in "Revolt of the Ants" that was, frankly, endearing. There's none of the social or futurological speculation that is the foundation of the genre, little characterization - the characters are ciphers, nameless and referred to only by position - or plot twists and suspense; it's a story about ants that revolt.Of the story's assumptions, one of two which struck me as particularly unusual was the idea that the ants were individually intelligent. The concept of an insect revolt isn't that sophisticated, but a more modern treatment would likely have given the ants a hive mind, like the hornets in Neal Asher's Polity universe. It may be that the concept of a hive mind was what was sophisticated then; one of its first substantial uses was by Olaf Stapledon in 1930, only ten years before "Revolt of the Ants" was published.The other odd assumption was the ants' mention of swing bands as a particular negative of human society. This would appear to be the personal view of author Milton Kaletsky; the "Meet the Authors" section of the magazine tells me that in addition to swing, he disliked "liquor, modern art and poetry, economics, dictators and the movies."Kaletsky also expressed a desire to "see Halley's Comet when it returns in 1986." I checked up on this. According to the ISFDB, Milton Kaletsky wrote his last piece of short fiction in 1942 and died in 1988. I can't know if he was in a position to see that "source of tears," as Eilmer of Malmesbury is reputed to have called it, but - it made me feel a bit better.ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5Previous Short SF Reviews:1 Looking into this led me to a bit of history I wasn't previously aware of. In 1940, this actully was the voting age. In the United States, it wasn't standardized at 18 until the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971.
When I was young, the Swamp was what nature was. Back then, before Barrie's city planners had suburbanized the city to the grim extent of today, it was practically on the edge of town, beyond which there were only farmer's fields and developer's dreams waiting to be realized. I remember trekking into the bush there, in winter and summer, and how after only a few steps it was as if I was in a primeval wilderness a thousand miles from home.Today, it seems, the Swamp is under siege. Housing developments are pressing against it form the south, and the recent extension of Ferndale Drive South, from which this photo was taken, has cut it in two. I've never learned its name, never even learned if it had one - it never needed one before. It was just the Swamp. But you see, things without names rarely have power.
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Human nature is one of those things that resists easy definition. Some people tend to believe in the "inherent goodness" of humanity, while others tend to look at crowds with jaundiced eyes. Personally, it doesn't matter what side of the fence I'm on - human nature may be our most stalwart ally, or our greatest enemy, in the years to come. Knowing us, it will probably be both at the same time.One of the most significant discoveries regarding human nature came out of the Milgram experiment, an investigation into social psychology and obedience. In the experiement, the person being experimented on was led to believe that he or she was "teaching" a learner through the application of progressively higher electric shocks, but the real purpose of the experiment was to see how many times the teacher would shock the learner with the experimenter, a stern man with authority and a lab coat. I first learned about it in university - it chilled me then, and it still does. I suggest you read it - if nothing else, maybe to inoculate you against something similar.What I get out of this, and other news I've found, is the impression that a great many people would, subconsciously, like nothing more than to be automatons - to not have to be responsible for any of their actions. In the case of the Milgram experiment, people followed orders to do something with which they were uncomfortable because of the pressure of authority and the lack of perceived responsibility - the abdication of personal responsibility.But what happens when, at the same time as a person considers themselves not responsible for their actions, they're presented an opportunity to do something they want to do?Generally, that's almost all of what you need to get a riot started. Which is exactly what happened at a coat store in Columbus, Ohio earlier this week, as reported by MSNBC.com, when a woman touched off a riot by claiming that she had won the lottery and the merchandise was on her. This is a recipe for opportunism and chaos regardless of whether you're in the grip of a recession. A Columbus police officer said that at least 500 people were in the store with another thousand outside trying to get in - if cell phones enable one thing, it's flash mobs looking for bargains or freebies - with no evidence other than the woman's own word that she had won $1.5 million and would pay for everything.When she had her rented stretch Hummer take her to a bank but returned with nothing - in the interim, two dozen police officers had had to be brought in for crowd control, and hopefully no other crimes were made possible or easier because of this redeployment - the bargain hunters rioted."Everybody was like, 'I still want my free stuff,' and that started the riot," Detective Steven Nace was quoted as saying, which really gets down to the core of it. People adapt quickly, and people are able and willing to see salvation in the dimmest flickers of light. By then they'd probably already mentally identified whatever they were carrying as "theirs," and when they realized the erstwhile millionaire had only been winding them up, it was as if the store was stealing from them, and not reclaiming property that had never left its ownership.Points like that don't really matter to a wound-up crowd that's got dollar signs in its eyes and has marked its territory, though. The store was practically torn apart in the riot. I would not be surprised for the footage to eventually make its way to YouTube. They knew what they wanted, they knew what they had, and when it became clear that they couldn't have it, they reacted with the fury of basest human instincts.This is the well that charismatic dictators draw from, and it's the platform from which psychics and snake-oil salesmen wheedle you for your money. This may well be one of the sources of popular skepticism toward climate change - to their eyes, it's as if they're being asked to change their ways for something they can't see, and if they can't see it it might not even be happening. When someone wants something, and they're led to believe they can attain it or maintain it with no personal consequences - it's dangerous to be in their way.
My rather jaundiced opinion toward the Don Valley Parkway was not improved much last Friday, when I found myself standing on a standing-room-only GO Transit bus as far as Aurora - which wouldn't have been too bad, if it hadn't been for the holiday traffic just sitting and chilling on the lanes.I came across an article in NOW Magazine today broaching the possibility of the Don River being included in Ontario's current Greenbelt legislation, environmental regulations restricting or prohibiting development in sensitive areas such as the Oak Ridges Moraine. The City of Toronto's Parks and Environment Committee is set to discuss the possibility of endorsing this idea today. It'd be good - though I can't help but wonder what the Don Valley might look like if the Don Valley Parkway didn't run through part of it. Maybe kind of like the Nordheimer Ravine, next to which the Don Valley would look like paradise had the Spadina Expressway been allowed to crash through it.It's not as if the whole valley is developed. It's just that the most developed parts, like this portion immediately north of Queen Street East, are the easiest to find.
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When it comes to public transit, there aren't that many cities in North America with which Toronto can treat as equals. New York City's transit system is massive, complex, and wide-ranging, only befitting the city it serves, while Los Angeles has gone from its days of Pacific Electric glory to operating what may well be the shittiest heavy-rail transit network for a city of its size on the continent. Chicago, though - Chicago is comparable.
A CTA bus northbound on Chicago's Michigan Avenue on October 3, 2009
The city of Barrie has always had delusions of grandeur. If there's one thing its government doesn't want to face, it's that the city is steadily forsaking any identity it might have had in favor of annexing great chunks of Innisfil to build more housing developments from which property tax revenue can be extracted. Because, obviously, if there's one thing Barrie doesn't have enough of already, it's sprawling subdivisions.This is also the case along its main shopping drag, Bayfield Street north of Highway 400. The signs call it the "Golden Mile," and with a name like that, you'd expect attractions, draws, and excitement, wouldn't you? In actuality, it's anchored by Barrie's three major malls - Bayfield Mall in the south, Georgian Mall in the north, and the centrally-located Kozlov Centre - and otherwise dominated by the same sort of low-rise commercial development you'd find in any GTA bedroom city. I mostly remember it for the truly incredible traffic jams it produced - because, obviously, dropping three shopping centres within spitting distance of each other on one four-lane road is a very good idea.In this photo, you're looking south along Bayfield Street from Cundles Avenue, next to Kozlov Centre. The forested valley on the far side of Kempenfelt Bay, visible where Bayfield Street drops off into nothingness, really underscores the difference.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.
For the record, I'm hardly the final authority on writing. Really, I'm not an authority at all. One story published with the possibility of more in the future doesn't make me much more than a just-starting-out scrivener hanging from the bottom rung, but that doesn't mean I can't dispense advice about it. Maybe my experience, brief as it is, will keep others from repeating my mistakes. Opinions don't require authority.While well-written stories are the absolute core of the writing business, a professional cover letter can help demonstrate to the overworked editorial staff that you're not just some simpleton who thinks their keyboard smashings the equal of Shakespeare. They're not absolutely necessary, but I've included one with every submission I've done. Recently, while going through my old text files, I found the cover letter I used for my first short fiction submission ever, for a stinker of a story called "Covenant of Ashes" back in 2007.Oh boy.At the time I was a total piker, having only just lifted my head to the skies and realized that there were stars to reach for. I finished the story in a white heat while riding the Toronto Express south from Barrie and submitted it to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, out of Australia. The rejection they gave me is the earliest in my file, and for that it'll always be relevant.If the story itself was a stinker, though, the cover letter was the epitome of Trying Too Hard. Don't take my word for it, though - see it for yourself. This is exactly how it was sent, minus the redaction of personal information and the fixing of my email address to make it harder prey for the spam harvesters.Andrew Barton(street address)(city, province, postal code)CanadaPhone: (redacted)Email: apbarton at gmail dot comTo the Crew of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine,I would like to submit my short story, "Covenant of Ashes," to be considered for inclusion in a future issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. It is a story that deals with the preservation of past knowledge in a post-apocalyptic setting.I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, where I spent three years on the editorial staff of the student newspaper Absynthe. I have been actively writing as a hobby since 1997, and am currently in the process of editing a novel-length story which I completed earlier this year. I have not yet been published professionally, but I believe my writing has reached a state where it is worthy of consideration.Thank you for reading my story, and I hope it meets with your interest. If for any reason you wish to call me before June 15th, I can be reached at (phone number redacted). I can be reached by email at apbarton at gmail dot com. I hope that I will have the opportunity to discuss this with you further.Sincerely,Andrew BartonObviously, what I did here was take a job application cover letter and modify it just enough to make it applicable to a story submission. What I didn't realize, though, as that almost everything I had in it was entirely irrelevant. If it's a sin to waste the reader's time, this cover letter's going to require a lot of redemption. The letterhead at the top was probably the only thing I did right.The editors don't care where I went to school. They don't care what I might do in the future - that novel-length story, by the by, is still sitting in an unfinished fifth-draft state on my hard drive, and realistically would have to be rewritten from scratch in order to have a chance. They don't care what I THINK about my writing. The cover letter is thoughtful gift wrapping; the story it accompanies must stand on its own.This was well before the time I discovered Robert J. Sawyer's website, particularly the "On Writing" section. He specifically warns against the sort of synopsizing I did in this letter. Today, my cover letters are three or four sentences at the most. There's absolutely no need for wordiness or over-explanation in a story cover letter. Reading it now, two years later it made me cringe - it really did.Personally, I see the arrogance of inexperience in it. I'd been writing for ten years at that point, but with "Covenant of Ashes" I thought - wrongly, I've since decided - that I finally had something worthy of publication. I couldn't fathom the idea that the magazines to which I sent it would pass on it... but, somehow, they did.Brevity is a virtue in short stories and the cover letters that accompany them. Save your ink, and don't waste the editor's time. They don't have nearly enough as it is.
Chicago Midway International Airport, the city's second international airport behind O'Hare and the one I flew into and out of earlier this month, was named such in 1949 in honor of the American victory at the Battle of Midway. Midway was one of those "unlikely victories," highly dependent on unusual and time-sensitive circumstances like the distracted Japanese fighter cover, the dive-bombers from Enterprise and Yorktown discovering the Japanese carrier force at just the right time, and so on. One of those dive-bombers, an SBD Dauntless, now hangs from the roof at Chicago Midway International Airport on the way Concourse A. It's the centerpiece of a memorial to the battle, the only one I can ever recall seeing.
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People tend to go on about the inevitability of death and taxes, but there is one constant in civilization they're missing; disagreement. In most respects, disagreement and ensuing argument is a beneficial thing in the long term, as it can enable viewpoints to be moderated and consensuses to be reached. This process most definitively goes off the rails, though, when ideology enters the equation.The Fraser Institute is a Vancouver-based think tank that bills itself as working toward "a free and prosperous world through choice, markets and responsibility," and which supports "greater choice, less government intervention, and more personal responsibility." It's a decidedly conservative think tank, in other words, that counts among its senior fellows former Ontario Premier Mike Harris and ex-Reform Party boss Preston Manning, who loves that word "refooooooorm."On Thursday, the Fraser Institute put out a press release which urges Canadians to "set a world record" for a movie premiere's attendance by hosting their own release parties of Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary that "examines the hype and fear-mongering of the environmental movement over global warming."Oh boy. The sheer weight of the bias in this article is enough to make Atlas shudder. At first I thought the quote from filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who says the movie will "clearly expose the overblown rhetoric and false claims behind... environmental doomsday predictions," was harsh enough, but it's nothing compared to what the Fraser Institute itself has to say about this.Apparently, sayeth the Fraser Institute, actions to curb carbon dioxide emissions will destroy "Canadians' middle-class lifestyles and dreams for their children," and there's no real problem with the environment anyway because the film will reveal "the deceptions about global warming that scientists, politicians, educators, and the media have been force-feeding the public for years... the same kind of anti-human propaganda that triggered a ban on DDT and condemned millions of children to death by malaria."The cheek is absolutely outstanding. This press release is so vociferous I can't help but read it as a parody of itself. I simply can't believe that anyone would look at something so charged and consider it perfectly reasonable. So I went to the Not Evil Just Wrong website for an unfiltered look.Oh boy."Global Warming alarmism and the tax increases that go along with it are going to increase costs for working families during one of the worst recessions in living memory." Didn't you read the papers? The recession is over, baybee! Well, okay, I'm being a bit facetious and Canadian there, but the quote is nothing more than the enshrinement of the temporary over the long-term - the same thing that, by the by, got us into this mess in the first place. Ten years from now the recession is going to be a memory, but ten years is only half of the average residence time of a carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere."Al Gore and his allies want to ban fossil fuels in the developed world." This is absolutely insane. Though I can't honestly say I wouldn't like to see fossil fuel burning banned, I'm realistic enough to realize that it would make Prohibition look like a triumph of law and order. France and Ontario are the only jurisdictions I can think of, off the top of my head, that do not derive a majority of their electricity from burning fossil fuels. 86% of all electrical generation in the world is derived from fossil fuel sources."They want us to change the way we live," says the trailer. My god, says I. Take steps to move away from an isolating, entrapping existence between city and country that puts you at the mercy of a ton of coughing steel? Why would anyone ever want to leave that behind?"I don't think it would be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up," says a man quoted in the trailer. "In fact, ice is the enemy of life."What.If the trailer is any indication, this movie will be full of "rah-rah AMERICA FUCK YEAH," telling people about how environmentalists are wrong and evil because they want to close factories and put millions of people out of work and send the world back to the Dark Ages. Because, you know, there's no chance of the consequences of increased global temperatures working out to the exact same thing.Let me say, for the record, that I would love for the people behind Not Evil Just Wrong to be right. I can't think of anything I'd rather be able to know for a fact than that climate change is a scientific error, and that Earth isn't threatened by ecological collapse. I would love to live in that kind of world. But we know that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas, and we're pumping more and more of it into the atmosphere every day. But who cares about increasing the possibility of death when the alternative is TAXES?To pretend that it doesn't exist might not be evil - the jury's still out on that - but it most definitely is reckless and irresponsible. And the people who made it are definitely not going to be on the invite list for my weather bunker.
Toronto's Lawrence Avenue has given its name to two TTC subway stations, Lawrence and Lawrence West, the latter of which was also used as a very painful character name pun in Scott Pilgrim vs. The Universe. Chicago, as it turns out, also has a Lawrence Avenue, which gave its name to Lawrence 'L' station a full fifty years before the one in Toronto was built. Interestingly enough, one stop south of it is Wilson station, another name which is duplicated in Toronto's system.Lawrence station was the farthest north I travelled in Chicago. Though rebuilt in 1995, it still retains much of the turn-of-the-century wood and naked steel construction that seems to be common across the 'L' system. What I didn't notice until now, though, is that the Lawrence platform appears to lack the platform-edge safety strips that are universal in Toronto and common in Chicago, as well.
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Of the six stories in the April 1940 Amazing, "Revolt of the Ants" may at once be the closest to reality and the most ludicrous. A calm day at the White House is shattered when thousands upon thousands of ants stream into the Oval Office and, as they are "very intelligent animals" and have become literate by "examining children's elementary reading books and dictionaries" in landfills, demand the right to vote.
