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Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Looking for the name of a Sci-Fi story. My hunch is Asimov. It's about how a human keeps an ant colony and plays god to it. Later the human dies and after a while the ants attempt to build a tower to see what has become of their god.
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I've read a book about an ant colony and interaction with a human a long time ago, but I'm really not sure it's the story you're searching for. It's the SF novel Empire of the Ants from Bernard Werber, originally in french. I just don't remember a tower.
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The plot begins as two stories that take place in parallel, one in the world of humans (in Paris) and one in the world of ants (in a Formica rufa colony in a park near Paris). The time is the early 21st century (the recent future, relative to the time when Werber wrote the book). The human character receives a house and a provocative message as legacy from his recently deceased uncle. He begins to investigate the life and mysterious activities of his uncle and decides to descend into the cellar of the house but does not return. His family and other people follow and disappear. The ant character is a female whose foraging expedition gets destroyed in one strike by a mysterious force that comes from above. She suspects that a colony of another ant species has attacked them with a secret weapon, and attempts to meet with the queen and to rally other ants to investigate the disaster. However, she attracts the attention of a secret group of ants within the same colony that appear to want to conceal this information. As the plot unfolds, the humans and the ants encounter new mysteries and participate in challenging events, including a war between different ant species. The descriptions of ant morphology, behavior, and social organization as well as their interactions with other species are engaging, detailed, and scientifically based, although Werber significantly exaggerates the reasoning and communication capabilities of the ants (rendering his work science-fiction).
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