Atta: A Novel of a Most Extraordinary Adventure is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Francis Rufus Bellamy

Francis Rufus Bellamy

Francis Rufus Bellamy was an American writer and editor.-Life:He was editor of Outlook from 1927 to 1932, and was executive editor of The New Yorker in 1933. He was editor of Fiction Parade from 1935 to 1938, and became editor of Scribner's Commentator in 1939...

 published in 1953. In 1954 the novel was published back-to-back with Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster

Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history...

's The Brain Stealers as Ace Double D-079.

Atta is a Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...

-like tale of a man who is hit by lightning and wakes up, to find himself half an inch tall. He befriends a talking warrior ant named Atta and has many adventures. At the end of the novel, Atta dies, and the man returns to normal size.

Critical reception

Damon Knight

Damon Knight

Damon Francis Knight was an American science fiction author, editor, critic and fan. His forte was short stories and he is widely acknowledged as having been a master of the genre.-Biography:...

 wrote of the novel

Aside from the author's archaic narrative style and his relentless disregard of natural history, the principal irritant in this story is the hero's absolutely impenetrable stupidity...This book could only have been written by a man who thought his idea was brand new. If he had read a little science fiction, he might have been disabused of this and several other misconceptions; but doubtless he took the word of some respected critic that no worthwhile fantasy has been published since 1719.

P. Schuyler Miller

P. Schuyler Miller

Peter Schuyler Miller was an American science fiction writer and critic.-Life:Miller was raised in New York's Mohawk Valley, which led to a life-long interest in the Iroquois Indians. He pursued this as an amateur archaeologist and a member of the New York State Archaeological Association.He...

found the novel unsuccessful, saying "as a satire on human society, it's rather fumbling. And if it's just a story, . . . it could be more skilfully told."

External links

• Atta at The Open Library