Le Jour Des Fourmis is a 1992 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 by
French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 writer Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber

Bernard Werber is a French science fiction writer active since the 1990s.-Novels:His style of writing mixes different literary genres, notably the saga, the science fiction of the inter-war years, and tracts of philosophy.In most of his novels, Bernard Werber uses the same form of construction,...

.

Le Jour Des Fourmis is the second part of a trilogy, preceded by Les Fourmis ("The Ants", 1991) and followed by La Révolution des fourmis ("The Revolution of the Ants", 1996).

Plot summary

The Day of the Ants again, just as its predecessor has several connected plotlines, some of which take place in the world of humans, while others - among ants. A year has passed since the time of The ants. 17 people including several relatives of the pioneer of the deceased inter-species communication Edmond Wells are still trapped under an ant nest. Since a new queen has been in charge in the ant nest, the supplies of food given by the ants to human are growing smaller and smaller. Meanwhile strange murders are happening in the city of Paris, when several producers of insecticides are found dead in peculiar circumstances and no explanation of how the murders were committed. A wolf-fearing police detective and a woman afraid of humans, the daughter of Edmond Wells, combine their knowledge in order to find out who or what is behind these murders.

Learning from each other

One of the central themes of the novel is that humans can learn a lot from the civilisation of the ants and vice versa. The people living under the ant test are acting more and more like ants and thus reach spiritual enlightenment. Meanwhile some of the ants from the nest through humans discover religion and start praising humans (or Fingers as ants call them) as gods.

Humans are not the owners of the earth

In one chapter of Edmond Wells' Encyclopaedia of relative and absolute knowledge the protagonist is ask about the best way to get rid of ants in ones apartment. To this Edmon Wells says that there is no reason why one should consider himself more of an owner of his own flat than ants. He claims that merely the fact that you buy something from another human doesn't mean that this something is yours now - you have merely more rights to be its owner now than other humans. Ants in this novel consider themselves the masters of the Earth and even claim to have been the cause why dinosaur

Dinosaur

Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...

s became extinct. Meanwhile cockroaches feeding from human trash consider humans their slaves.