NatureCulture 5 (2019). 26-49.

Abstract

Because SF is a thought experiment and engages in worldbuilding, this paper is a hybrid faction piece that presents a history of ants in SF (across texts and media) as one connected narrative, while working through this history as an insertion into Nature-Culture debates through the production of new SF. In constructing SF worlds, writers work with what is called the genre mega-text: the tropes and themes that constitute the identity of the genre. For SF however, this mega-text also involves a cluster of associations from other forms and kinds of texts, including scientific speculation, anthropological theory, STS, among others. The main storyline is based on several fiction and film pieces that structure the enquiry, from early works by H. G. Wells and Premendra Mitra, to Big Bug films, to new SF from the 21st century. The stories can be read as standalone pieces, yet we hope that the reader will read the endnotes, picking up the references which provide a glimpse into our strategies of worlding. The speakers in the endnotes are two time-travelling scholars writing from an unspecified far future, at a time when other beings rule the planet. They are using references from STS scholarship and SF that are more familiar, from our own time, in order to speak to us, even if the necessity to traverse multiple temporalities through simple language to express the Ant Network Theory (ANT) on occasion produces spatiotemporal anomalies.