As you all know, way back in the Carboniferous the dragonflies, and various other insects, were enormous, as the fossil record records. The assumption has been for a long time that the atmosphere back then was more highly oxygenated, and therefore that the chief limiter on size for insects is their respiratory system (1).

Vandenbrooks, however, seems to be the first person to actually try and test this by rearing insects in high oxygen conditions. This was actually a bit of a risk, I assume — just because conditions would allow a big bug doesn't mean that existing species would spontaneously grow to outlandish sizes. However, joyfully, it works (2).

Of course, if you're going to do it, you have to do it with dragonflies, because they're the giant Carboniferous insect poster child. However, dragonflies are very difficult to rear, and the adults need live prey, so Vandenbrooks had to hand feed them. The subtext is obvious: he has not only created a race of giant dragonflies, but a race of tame giant dragonflies that will obey his every whim! I am so happy with this news.

He has giant beetles too, apparently, but not giant cockroaches. The cockroach thing sounds like a disappointment, but in actual fact they still give less space over to their breathing apparatus: rather than using the extra O2 to get bigger, they've used it to become more efficient.

Annoyingly, I haven't yet found any pictures to show just how giant these insects have become, as this is presumably just a model. Or possibly fortunately. After all, they've almost certainly just become "a bit bigger" whilst if I haven't seen any pictures, I can imagine that they're big enough to give kiddies rides on.

(1) Insect respiration 101: most insects are kind of passive breathers. They have a series of holes down their sides that let the air into their innards through a series of tubes, so that oxygen exchange can occur. Larger insects need more tubes, and as an insect gets bigger the percentage of its volume taken up by this tube system increases disproportionately, meaning that eventually there'd be nothing but tube and no insect inside the carapace. A higher oxygen content to the air means that you need less air to get the same amount of oxygen, and therefore fewer tubes for the same volume of insect. Some insects, as an addendum, do sort of breath — Wasps (I think I have this right) flex their abdomens, changing the interior volume and therefore drawing air in actively for an extra boost.

(2) And surely this is exactly what Vandenbrooks cried out, witnessing his creations for the first time, possibly adding, "and they called me mad!".

Well, I did claim this to be Bee month, and it appears the Daily Mash agrees with me, with this article. The final paragraph about bees and wasps seems particularly appropriate.

For the curious, this is a send up of a genuine news study, reported here. Viva insect superiority!

There are plenty of links on this, within the somewhat clannish corridors of palaeontology, but I choose for reference this one.

To declare, in tones of astonished wonder, "a Devonian anomalocarid!" is unlikely to prompt any great response, apart perhaps from "gesundheit". However, to get an idea of the true significance of the discovery, imagine Professor Challenger's declaration, on attaining the plateau of the Lost World, "that I should see with my own eyes a living pterosaur!" (1) and you have the right general order of magnitude.

But of course Schinderhannes is a little water-bug rather than a great aerial dragon, and the Devonian was still around 400 million years ago, and so nobody's going to be seeing the li'l fella in the flesh but, even so, the same general timescale of survival is involved, and a modern day mammoth, or even tyrannosaur, has nothing on it.

So, what's the deal? This is basically about the Burgess Shale (2), a fossil site of nigh-miraculous preservation, showing a hitherto unguessed-at range of animals living at the beginning of the Cambrian period,. unthinkably early on in the evolution of multicellular life. The preservation of soft parts (as opposed to just heavy shells such as those owned by trilobites, for example) revealed a vastly more diverse fauna than had previously been believed to exist. This discovery has since been the ideological battlefield between various schools of thought, one claiming that the creatures there disclosed can mostly be classified conventionally and represent reliable survival-of-the-fittest evolution, the other (expounded most accessibly in Stephen J. Gould's Wonderful Life) claiming that they demonstrate a lottery element of evolution, and those individual lineages that did survive, whilst they were clearly fit, were also lucky. (3)

Anomalocaris was (4) the biggest of the big back in Burgess Shale days. Around two feet in length, uncertain in classification, and a predator, though an unconventional one. It probably looked something like this. Although it was best-guess included in the broad category of arthropods, it seemed at the time to have no obvious close relatives there. Other Cambrian anomalocarids turned up in other sites of similarly good preservation across the world, but it seemed as though the creatures vanished without a trace thereafter.

Needless to say, based on this situation, various palaeontologists took the opportunity to demonstrate just how ill-adapted for survival poor lumbering Anomalocaris was. As I've previously mentioned, the study of fossils can be very political. Mankind is a self-serving beast, and there are plenty of people who will advance arguments for evolution that, explicitly or implicitly, suggest that the evolution of something like us was basically inevitable once life got going (5), and all that mucking about with dinosaurs was really just a waste of the valuable time the planet has before the sun goes pop. The triumph of the mammals, which is John the Baptist to mankind's Christ, is greatly trumpeted, despite the fact that our hairy little rat ancestors evolved at around the same time as the earliest dinosaurs, and spent an embarassing number of millions of years jumping about in trees at night (6). Anomalocaris goes the same way as the dinosaurs, shown as inherently unfit, dying alone with no family at its bedside. The BBC Walking with Monsters even kicks off with a scandalous Cambrian section in which we see brutal, stupid anomalocaris being hounded to extinction by our own minute ancestors. There have been theories about how that circular mouth was a bad design, how the big clutchy arms didn't work, any part of the animal was seized upon as a smoking gun to show how poorly adapted the thing was, and therefore how reliable and predictable the operation of evolutionary survivals and extinctions.

Baloney, it would seem. Enter Schinderhannes. In fact, enter Schinderhannes around one hundred million years laterthan the date set by the, apparently greatly exaggerated, rumours of the anomalocarids' demise. The fossil record is incomplete. That is, as Dick Cheney would say, a known known (7). The fact that anomalocarids were only known from sites of extremely good preservation should have tipped people off, really. Although they were arthropods of sorts, they did not seem to have particularly durable exoskeletons — predators are seldom required to be heavily armoured, which is why T-Rex isn't got up like an ankylosaur, or a lion armoured like a rhino. So, anomalocarids were doing fine for several palaeontological ages since the Cambrian and, by logical extension, might well have gone on for some time after. Indeed, as some scientists now classify them as very early chelicerates, they may well have living relatives still amongst spiders, scorpions and similar arachnids. Not so shabby then?

And of course, if the anomalocarids lived, then they just have been well adapted, after all those years, and one wonders if the authors of papers on how badly the ring-mouth or the clutching arms were suited for continued existence will now go and write papers explaining how those features were actually extremely fitting, and clearly the reason the line lasted so long. I suspect not, but you never know.

Mr Gould is no longer with us to advance his argument that random chance can scotch the best evolutionary careers, and his theories have certainly come under reasoned and logical attack from other palaeontologists, and so it's another make-up-your-own-mind deal. Still, one imagines that he might be chuckling now.

In other news

Things that have caught my attention recently:

- Who Watches the Watchmen? If it's not you, then why the hell not? The film is exceptionally good and very faithful to the original (there is some tinkering towards the end, the character of which I cannot discuss for spoiler reasons, but I actually liked the changes).

- For RPGers, I was recently recommended the novel Game Night by Jonny Nexus, the premise of which is that, if gods can play games with mortals as the pieces, why shouldn'y they play role-playing games in the same way? The results are hilarious, and at the same time utterly heart-breaking.

- Similarly, and following on more closely from the article I wrote for Death Ray recently, I note that a new RPG has been produced of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fireseries, definitely one of the bigger epic fantasy worlds currently on the market. The game is produced by Green Ronin, who made their name with superior Dungeons and Dragons open licence stuff, has a bespoke system, and looks extremely good so far.

- Finally, bringing the subject back, very loosely, to the palaeontological, I see that next week the third series of Primeval is set to start. From a first series that had a surprising, and pleasant, amount of scientific rigor and internal logic, the series lurched to the second series, which became increasingly incredible in its creatures (8) and ludicrous in its plots (9). I'm hoping for a return to the axioms of series 1, but not exactly holding my breath.

(1) Or he did in the film. Or one of the films. Or something very like it.

(2) I was delighted to find a reference to the Burgess Shale fossils at the end of Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, which I finally got round to reading recently.

(3) I need to very strongly point out, however, that both sides are still arguing for evolution, rather than any "alternative", it's just that one side has more faith in the inevitable survival of the fittest organism, whereas the other believes that the vicissitudes of history can conspire to undo all the advantages of a good body-plan, and that being in the right place at the right time can also have a lot to do with surviving the evolutionary crunch.

(4) There is a moderately complex story concerning precisely how anomalocaris was finally identified. See here for details.

(5) Or even that the universe itself is constructed specifically to make it inevitable that there will one day arise a human being who will propose something extremely like the philanthropic principle.

(6) Reptiles, and the birds that evolved from them, have excellent colour vision, superior in many ways to our own. Most mammals have very poor or no colour vision, with primates having apparently re-evolved the facility. The strong conclusion is that all mammals are descended from nocturnal ancestors, who lost their colour sight in order to improve their night sight. The strong conclusion from that is that they were nocturnal because the daytime was a dangerous, dinosaur-filled place.

(7) Perhaps no other speech in modern history has so divided exponents of the English language. For my part, it makes perfect sense to have known unknowns and unknown unknowns, but make up your own mind.

(8) If you want a burrowing monster that can move through wet sand at the speed of a running man, then you can have one. It doesn't matter that, in the Silurian era, there was nothing on land that size. Fine, it's speculative. However, if you want said subterranean racing-monster to be, basically, a modern whip-scorpion, which in the real world is a non-burrowing creature with a profusion of long, spindly legs and a body shaped like a plate, you are offending not biology but basic physics.

(9) The bad guys, with time travel and awesome futuristic technology on their side, decide that the best way they can use it to take over the world is to radio-control prehistoric monsters. There are backwards cousins of failed Bond villains who could do better than this.

   wrote Edgar Allan Poe (1), although very few fantasists haven't felt like that on occasion. It's a genre that traditionally appeals to the odd and the misadjusted. Fiction about other worlds will be more attractive to those who find their world somewhat lacking.

   So, a small digression, as it's been a while since I wrote about… insects, for example (2). I put forward the following as a reasonable touchstone of the way most people seem to see insects.:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/animals/animals-headlines/huge%2c-disgusting-insects-on-brink-of-extinction-20080506927/

   I like insects. I find them aesthetically pleasing. I'm not alone in this, but it's decidedly a minority position, occupied by me and Jean Henri Fabre (3) and a handful of entomologists (5, 6). There's an Oxfam advert on the screens at the moment where various words from papers take on a life of their own and turn into centipedes or moths or similar, before we come across an enormous injustice-monster that is disposed of by people gobbing sparks at it. Well, all very well, but it relies on the viewer making certain associations. You're probably not meant to watch and think how nice the creepy insects look.

   Empire might be carving itself a new niche. Forget pretty butterflies and industrious bees, in fiction insects show up mostly as expendable villains — see the implacable insect enemy in Swainstone's Year of Our War, for instance. Insects, in their infinite variety, tend to end up symbolising slavish uniformity, a mindless advance and urge to increase (7). Insects and robots, although these days, with AI being fashionable, robots are traditionally accorded more humanity, and possibly even representing the future of humanity (8).

   But insects have a role to play in literature. They show us the dark side of ourselves. There is a particular literary tradition in this, and it is an Eastern European one. Man as insect. Insect as man. I think it's the variety and specialisation of insects that opens the doors for this: forget all that valedictory business about eagles and lions as wonderful expemplars of human virtues (11), we all know that it's the flaws that maketh the man, that heroism and virtue can only shine against a background of darkness. Because insects live determined, conventrated, single-minded (or mindless) lives, they become another kind of exemplar, for all the things that we cannot deny, but would rather not say about ourselves.

   Three examples:

   Poor old Gregor Samsa wakes up as a beetle (12), and receives some fairly shabby treatment from his nearest and dearest.

   In The Insect Play the brothers Capek have their tramp protagonist act as a voyeuristic commentator on the bitter, murderous struggles of the insects around him, the fickleness of butterflies, the genocidal wars of ants, the bug-eat-bug world of carnivores and parasites (and snails with speech impediments). It's worth a note that los bros Capek are better known for their RUR, a very early take on (decidedly unfriendly (13) ) artificial intelligence, which gave the west the word 'robot' in the first place.

   If you really want to twist your brain, find a copy of Viktor Pelevin's Life of Insects, a supremely disorienting piece of work where characters shift seamlessly between the insect and the human. After finishing the book the reader is prone to scrutenise his fellow human beings, like the narrator from The Island of Doctor Moreau, wondering if one can see the bug beneath the skin.

   There's quite a heritage of the insect not as Other, bus as Us, in our worst moments –six legs bad = two legs worse. Of course, I'm dragging the tradition from the satirical into the fantastical with Empire, but it's interesting to note (especially after Pelevin, whom I only discovered recently) that others have been inspired to show the finger of man and the claw of the insect reaching towards one another like a distorting mirror of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I may, of course, be the first to find some positives in amongst the negatives.

   Two legs good. Six legs better?

(1) From Alone

(2) ie. the way people view insects, not the way insects view the world. There probably isn't a bee somewhere painting its honeycomb black and complaining that its mother doesn't understand it.

(3) Father of modern entomology, who combined a fluid writing style and a rigorous scientific method to demonstrate, frequently, just how mindboggling stupid insects are. One of his more spectacular experiments involved firing a cannon at some cicadas. (4)

(4) Also one of the few times he was wrong. As the cicadas didn't flick an antennae at the sound, he claimed that the fabulously noisy insects were deaf. In fact they hear extremely well, but they have no interest in any sound not being produced by a cicada.

(5) Originally typed "entomologeists". Who you gonna call?

(6) Possibly fewer than you think. I was disappointed to discover at University that a large proportion of insect study is preparation for doing away with as many of them as possible. It's a bit like seeing Bill Oddie going after the rooks with a shotgun.

(7) It’s apparently a little understood fact, in creative circles, that most insects aren’t social. The social insects, however, are lauded by naturalists as the apex of insect evolution, and why not? They are famers, builders, slave-takers, war-makers, all the things that make them the insects most like us, and yet they are used to often to symbolise being alien and facelessly inhuman.

(8) The word for this is, I think, "transhumanism". I refer my honourable friend firstly to the cartoonist Dresden Kodak (9) who makes a continuing case for the idea of humanity's onward evolution, and secondly simply to the very sympathetic way that intelligent machines are often portrayed in fiction these days — they have gone from being either the terrible but fallible oppressor or the slavish and devoted servant to being something more mature and intelligent than the mere human — Ian M. Banks is one of the chief exponents of this, of course. I do wonder if one reason that the film I Robot didn't satisfy was that the whole muderous mechanical idea is so out of fashion, so very 20th century. (10)

(9) Read the blog entry at the foot of the comic at http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_040.html  Then read the rest of the site.

(10) Or, if you prefer, so very 2001 — and it's telling that a certain amount of the follow-on to that plays apologist for bloody-handed Hal's actions.

(11) In the case of lions, especially, notably inaccurate. Four decades of nature documentaries have exposed them as lazy, inept, misogynist child-killers.

(12) usually cockroach, but if I have this right the word Kafka uses has no specific species denotation. In fact I'll stick my neck out and say that I think the strict translation is "vermin", although I'll wait for Tiwla to correct me on this.

(13) but, depending on how you read the play, not unjustifiably unfriendly. The revolt of the robots, whilst genocidal and desstructive, is a revolt of slaves against vastly cruel and callous masters.

Specifically, a full half-dozen people have sent me links to the same news story, linked herewith: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7104421.stm

The obvious thought, when confronted with this, is, “slow news day.” Had the story broken a day later, then the football (1) would have squeezed it out entirely. Like the fossilisation process itself, a news story about fossils (3) must have very specific conditions if it is to endure.

So, Jaekelopterus rhenaniae. It’s interesting to see how the story is marketed, because the popular news, having inherited news of an ancient sea monster, have no real idea what the significance is. In this case, the pudding is over-egged. We’ve known about eurypterids for a long time, and that they were very large. We’ve known, too, that in general invertebrates were much bigger around the 400–300 million year mark than they are today. The news seems to think that old Jaek is the first herald of a hitherto unknown era of the bug, despite cadging pictures from Walking With Monsters (5).

Of course, it’s the fascination with the huge, which is the usual stick that pushes any fossil story onto the world news stage. The largest whatever is newsworthy, despite the fact that the fossil may be vastly less significant than some smaller cousin. For example, a while back they found a cretaceous bee preserved in amber, which raises all manner of interesting questions about the K-T extinction (6), but it didn’t make the headlines.

The sea scorpions are a beautiful (8) example of a lost animal. They are some of the earliest arachnids known, and their body-form suggests that they were active, pelagic hunters. Some had claws, others did not. Some could walk on land, and land scorpions seem to have arisen from their lineage, and relatively quickly. Jaekelopterus is the largest, at around eight feet, but other species of man-size were already known. Of course, seagoing animals grow larger than landbound ones, because of the lesser need for physical support, and arthropod gills are more efficient than any terrestrial arthropod breathing apparatus (9).

As for the title, the eurypterids are not quite the earliest arachnids in the fossil record, or possibly so. The Burgess Shale is a notable source of Pre-cambrian fossils, some of the earliest large animal fossils discovered, and preserved with their soft parts infact. Amongst the curious, and sometimes hotly debated (10) fauna discovered there is a fearsome monster, very similar to a sea-scorpion in shape but for a ferocious beard of spiny claws. This critter would seem to be an ancestral arthropod, and the tiny great-grand-daddy of the mighty Jaekelopterus. Because archaeologists sometimes have a sense of humour, it was christened Sanctacaris – Santa Claws.

And yes, before you ask, sea scorpions in all their glory, and considerably bigger even than Jaek, will be making their appearance at some point in the Empire series. After all, if fact is stranger than fiction, then it is the resulting prerogative of an author to set the balance straight and make fiction even stranger.

(1)   Or the lack of football. The news today was full of an absence of football. I am not a follower of the “beautiful game” (2) and I’m afraid that, to me, the only thing duller than football news is a main headline that is basically about there not being football.

(2)   I have no idea how the sport gained this moniker. If pressed, I’d award the nickname to anything other than a sport, and if pressed to award it to a sport, then, well, perhaps skiing is beautiful, or curling, or fencing, but football, for all that it seems to require a fair amount of skill and teamwork and dedication, is surely too energetic and undignified to call “beautiful.”

(3)   That is, fossils that aren’t of enormous dinosaurs or tiny people that get stolen by unscrupulous archaeologists (4)

(4)   And are named, with fantastic inaccuracy but extreme journalistic skill, “hobbits”. One wonders if they found a ring with the poor little bastards.

(5)   Which I did rather enjoy, despite of the griping earlier. Its only failing was the preachiness masquerading as drama.

(6)   The K-T extinction is the one that got the dinosaurs, whether by meteorite, catastrophic vulcanism, excessive junk food or some combination of the three. The question raised by our little bee is this: the bees of the cretaceous are revealed to be extremely similar to modern-day honey bees, as insect designs seem to be peculiarly adaptable and hardwearing throughout the ages (7). It even had pollen sacs on its legs, showing that the bee-flower relationship was already going strong seventy million years ago. Now, modern bees are actually not robust animals, especially where changes of environment are concerned. They are exceptionally highly-strung and sensitive beasties. However, they managed to survive one of the planet’s larger extinction events unscathed, when most theorists are positing immense climatic changes, global winter, global warming, years of darkness and similar biblical events. How did the humble, fragile, flower-dependant bee make it through unscathed, to reach us in our modern age in a near-identical form? We don’t, insofar as I’ve read, know.

(7)   People joke about cockroaches being the great survivors, the only critters likely to walk away from a nuclear explosion and the like. They don’t know the half of it. The cockroaches of the Carboniferous, three hundred million years ago, are close enough to shake antennae and call them cousin. Sharks have changed more.

(8)   To my particular aesthetic. More beautiful than football, anyway.

(9)   Curiously, scorpions and spiders use book lungs, which are not bad as respirators go, whereas insects, the most land-restricted group of arthropods, use spiracles, which are inferior and a real limitation on their size and development. Aside from a more oxygenated atmosphere the only solution to increased activity has been developed by some fairly advanced insects such as wasps, which use their body muscles to force air in and out of their spiracles, turning their entire body into a primitive lung.

(10) Presented in more detail, albeit with fiercely disputed conclusions, in the late Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life.

Palaeontology, hotbed of political controversy, jingoism and prejudice!

A bold statement, you might think. I mean, anthropology, yes. One can see how debates over the history and development of the various races(1) of man could be turned to a number of political ends, and generally highly undesirable ones, but go back far enough for palaeontology to take up the baton and surely the politics has turned to stone like the rest of it?

Not so, not so, for there is a conspiracy. (3)

There was a great wailing and a gnashing of teeth (4) when Darwin published that book. They cried out from the mountains that he had removed man from the centre of the universe. Let’s face facts: man had been sliding from the universe’s centre in stages: Copernicus and Galileo were only a couple of the crusaders of knowledge who had been crowbarring away at human importance. Darwin, however, dared to make the (5) point that we were, basically, apes in shoes and neckties. We were not set above the animals to use and abuse them by divine right, we were part of a continuum with them, just another species.

So far, so good, so, politics? Did they find a some fossil liberals? Well, the problem is that there is a trend, amongst people otherwise entirely scientific, to restore man to his imagined central place in the universe, or at least the (pre-)history of the earth.

It is a Foucaultian duel of ideas, really. There is a implicit belief in a lot of popular science, especially evolution, that mankind is either (a) the pinnacle of evolution (7) or (b) the inevitable result of evolution (8). This idea manifests itself in a kind of staggered apartheid of species, where anything closer to us is better, and was always bound to succeed anything further from us. Hence vertebrates were bound to “succeed” invertebrates, amphibians triumph over fish, St-George-like mammals assert their destiny over the slain corpse of the reptilian dragon, and so on. (9).

This agenda leads to some curious and unscientific behaviour. Mammal-centrists will fight to the death over the cold-bloodedness of dinosaurs, and the picture of the noble saurians as lumbering, witless, underevolved clowns is still widespread, as though they were simply keeping the mammals’ seat warm while we slept in. It takes considerable determination to overlook the fact that their tenure on the earth was around a hundred and fifty million years, and that mammals, our remote ancestors, were there in their shadow from the start. Whither inevitability? To take a more recent example, it’s hard to shake the stereotype of the poor Neanderthals as “stupid cavemen” despite the fact that they had bigger brains than we did.

And of course, to warm to my pet subject, the same goes for the poor invertebrates. The most disgraceful version of the inevitability theory, in fact, was perpetrated by none other than the BBC in its series Walking with Monsters.  We are presented with evolution from the Precambrian through the Carboniferous as an arms race, between the (villainous, bullying, icky) arthropods and the (plucky, resourceful, heroic) vertebrates. We see big, clunky Anomalocaris bettered by a swarm of tiny fish-ancestors, because its hard old carapace makes it too inflexible to get them (10). We see clever early fish outwit dumb scorpions – in fact, the scorpions fall prey to other scorpions, in a peculiarly Dick-Dastardly sort of way. Mind you, this pales into insignificance before…

In the Carboniferous, apparently, the BBC found a fossilised deus ex machine. Here we see some kind of large newt (vertebrate, more like us, hooray) confront an arthropleura millipede (boo, not like us). Can it kill the large bug? Not on its own, but– look! The armoured giant falls and impales itself on a handy branch, lunchtime for our amphibious cousin. What are we to conclude? That early amphibians routinely used traps and deadfalls as standard hunting tools? Or that the world is out to get the upstart invertebrates, who don’t know their place?

Or let’s take the spider. It’s a giant killer spider (11) chasing down our poor ancestral lizard, like the cad it is. Probably it wants to tie the poor critter to some train tracks and then twirl its pedipalps a bit. All right, it gets its prey, but does it get to enjoy it? Nope, because our evil spider is punished by being struck by lightning. That’s right, directly struck by a bolt of actual lightning. This is the BBC positing actual divine vengeance as the cause of the vertebrate triumph. I understand that it is traditional for nature documentaries (12) to fiddle the events to tell a coherent story, but in this case the story is pure humanocentric propaganda.

After all, this is not the age of humanity. This is the brief space between the ape and the atom bomb in which humanity lives. Our companions from earth’s earlier eras remain with us. To declare that vertebrates “won” against arthropods just because we ended up bigger (13) is to ignore the fact that they ended up more numerous and enduring. (14)

Anyway, rant over with. Next: Back to the publishing mullarkey. I promise.

(1)   Races? Pshaw. Fantasy role-playing has probably done a great deal to dispel the idea of discrimination based on the “races of mankind” by devaluing the terminology. To a gamer the word you put next to “race:” is not Caucasian or asian but ‘elf’ or ‘half-orc’ and, although one can certainly use imaginary races to explore the concept of racism (2), the average gamer would say that if it doesn’t get some solid racial modifiers, it doesn’t really count as a racial distinction. Egalitarianism by attribute scores.

(2)   As, in fact, I do in Empire.

(3)   This isn’t the same as the genre conspiracy I was talking about. This is an entirely different conspiracy.

(4)   It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult to both wail and gnash one’s teeth at the same time.

(5)   Frankly blindingly obvious (6)

(6)   But then it always is the blindingly obvious lies that people hold onto so desperately.

(7)   Untenable as an idea, but it’s very, very popular. It’s not hard to find people writing about evolution as though everything is desperately striving to, in the words of the song, “be like you-oo-oo.”

(8)   Arguable, in a philanthropic-principle kind of a way, but an idea I find dubious to say the least.

(9)   If you want to hear about this from writers immensely more qualified and erudite than I, I recommend Gould’s Wonderful Life or Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies.

(10)  For the world, of course, is just crammed full of examples of small animals routinely preying on large top carnivores. Piranhas aside, my main candidates for this behaviour are not vertebrates.

(11)   Giant spider? It’s the size of your head. Perusing my Monster Manual that makes it a large spider at best. Pah.

(12)  Yes it’s not a nature documentary, but it’s following the pattern of a nature documentary.

(13)   To claim victory by being bigger than an insect is surely a wretched and beggarly triumph.

(14)  And when the ants take over the world and overthrow the nation-states of humanity, I’d respectfully ask them to take all this into account when considering what to do with me.

After promising some manner of insectery, which in itself is a monstrous and unwieldly neologism (1), I appear to have failed to deliver. The thronging hordes in their millions of species have been conspicuously absent. Even the affectation “the insect man” is currently unsubstantiated.(2) Why, then, “theinsectman”?(6)

Insects and their invertebrate kin have an uneasy relationship with fantasy fiction. However, just as there are few environments in the physical world not yet conquered by the many-legged throng, so it is in literature. Tolkien himself peopled the Hobbit with surprisingly loquacious spiders, and of course he graduates to the glories of Shelob in his longer work. Once that door was open the way was clear for the arthropods to cut their evolutionary niches in the genre, eking out their lives in the peripheries of fantasy: Here there would be an insect enemy, an unnumbered horde of ravaging, mindless monsters to be destroyed without mercy. There we would find a sister of Shelob to trouble the likes of Conan, and invariably come to an unpleasant end.(7). Here, more gently, something more allegorical, such as the moths used by the killer in Harris’ Silence of the Lambs. (8)

Which isn’t quite what I’m doing with them. I’m giving them a new niche to evolve into. It’s plain enough, and old Tolkien sets the standard, that insects aren’t exactly our favourite part of creation. Tolkien’s spiders show only his utter loathing of the breed, although he at least has the grace to allow the possibility that poor, hungry Shelob licks her wounds and resurfaces somewhere in the great bathtub of the Fourth Age. Elsewhere, insects are simply an easy way to have waves of bad guys that nobody cares about if you squish them, like the cop-out battle droids in The Phantom Menace.

I have always been fond of insects. I’m the go-to man to peaceably remove spiders or shepherd flies out of a window. It helps being in England, where being fond of insects is unlikely to get me fatally killed at any point. I sit in the cinema and cheer on the bugs in Starship Troopers, booing the wicked, expansionistic humans (9). It’s not clear what went wrong, really, with insects. In earlier ages of the world, and in other places, they have plenty of good press. Achilles’ picked men were called Myrmidons because of an admiration for the ants’ discipline, and you can find deified mantids and beetles in old Egypt and Africa. In the west, though, the entire breed is viewed with horror and even the word “bug” appears to derive from something frightening (as in “bugbear”).

So, what am I doing with the wretched creatures that’s so different? Am I doing a Brian Jacques and writing some kind of insect Redwall? No, I am not. Empire in Black and Gold is a heroic fantasy played out between human protagonists that are as real as I can make them. But insects, yes. Just as a Native American tradition (I think) has it that the world is built on ants, because wherever you dig, there they are, so my book is built on insects and their kin.

And speaking of books, I was going to write about submissions again. More insects later.

After all, there are always more insects.

(1): Stephen Fry has coined (or at least I assume he coined it. With someone like Mr Fry such authority is a natural assumption) a rather pleasant phrase, namely “youtubery”, referring to some piece of embarrassment, preferably involving a celebrity, caught on camera and subsequently distributed for the world to see. In this case it was, I think, Julie Andrews stepping someone out of brief as she encouraged a crowd of sports fans. (Sports? Some American sport. Baseball. Possibly that football thing that looks like armoured rugby. I don’t know). I suppose in an earlier age before that internet prodigy was matriculated he would have had to say “You’ve-been-framedness” or even “Allright-on-the-Nightation”, neither of which are remotely as easy on the ear.

(2): Of course the man who should be blogging under this name is Jean-Henri Fabre, the French Entomologist and writer, who managed in himself an unequalled marriage of prose style and scientific understanding. If he applied to me, in person, of course, I would without hesitation yield the name to him.(3)

(3): I’d also run like hell as he’s been dead the best part of a century.(4)

(4): Although he makes a kind of return in inexplicable and bizarre circumstances as a villain in the encouragingly-titled anime series “Read or Die”.(5)

(5): Four footnotes eh? Eat your heart out, Mr Pratchett.

(6): Not just because “thatinsectguy” is too informal.

(7): I can’t actually place the provenance of this but I recall reading, a long time ago, a Conan (-esque?) comic where the musclebound hero faces an enormous spider that is being sacrificed to and worshipped by some degenerate locals. The name of this arachnid divinity? “The Decapitating God”. The what? This, one assumes, from that school of fantasy art prone to give spiders and their cousins human faces from either laziness or ignorance of natural history. Spiders have two hollow fangs for injecting poison. Decapitating with what? Did it carry a huge pair of scissors?

(8): What’s that? Not fantasy fiction? You mean all that could actually happen? Based on a true story, was it? Ah well, no doubt I’ll get onto the subject of genre boundaries some other time.

(9): To the director’s credit a valid reading of the film, for all Caspar Van Diem’s Aryan poster-boy posturing. (10)

(10): Footnotes are addictive. I can see I’ll have to rein myself in.