Le Jour des fourmis

Lore & Background

The Day of the Ants takes place one year after the events of the first novel. Seventeen people, including several relatives of Edmond Wells, remain trapped under an ant nest. A new queen has taken charge of the nest, and the food supplies given by the ants to the humans are growing increasingly smaller. Meanwhile, in Paris, strange murders occur: several producers of insecticides are found dead under peculiar circumstances with no explanation of how the murders were committed. A wolf-fearing police detective and a human-fearing woman, Edmond Wells's daughter, combine their knowledge to investigate who or what is behind these murders.

Reader's Guide

The novel explores the theme that humans can learn from ant civilization and vice versa. The people living under the ant nest begin acting more like ants and reach spiritual enlightenment, while some ants discover religion through humans and start praising humans (whom they call Fingers) as gods. Another theme is that humans are not the owners of the earth. In a chapter of Edmond Wells' Encyclopaedia of relative and absolute knowledge, Wells argues that buying something from another human does not make one its true owner—only that one has more rights to it than other humans. Ants in the novel consider themselves masters of the Earth and claim to have caused the dinosaurs' extinction, while cockroaches feeding from human trash consider humans their slaves. The novel's significance lies in its continuation of the trilogy's exploration of interspecies communication and perspective.

Did You Know?

• The novel is the second in La Saga des Fourmis trilogy.
• Seventeen people, including relatives of Edmond Wells, are trapped under an ant nest in this novel.
• Ants in the novel claim to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.