Let The Ants Try: From War’s Ashes, Ants Rise

Let the Ants Try by Frederik Pohl begins in the aftermath of the Three-Hour War, with Detroit devastated and scientist Salva Gordy left with almost nothing. His family is gone, civilization has been shattered, and the world around him is changing under the effects of radiation. Then another survivor, biologist John de Terry, arrives—and a strange mutation among the local ants gives the two men an extraordinary idea. Gordy possesses something almost unimaginable: a working time machine. Together, they decide to travel forty million years into the past and give these unusual ants the evolutionary head start they would need to become something far greater.

What begins as an experiment becomes a journey into an Earth neither man could have anticipated. Pohl combines nuclear catastrophe, biological mutation, time travel, and evolutionary speculation in a fast-moving story about humanity’s confidence that it can manipulate forces it barely understands. Let the Ants Try asks a wonderfully dangerous question: if humanity has failed as Earth’s dominant species, should something else be given a chance?

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) spent more than seven decades helping shape American science fiction as an author, editor, literary agent, and anthologist. His early fiction appeared in magazines including Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories, and he later became an influential editor of Galaxy Science Fiction and If.

Pohl’s best-known books include The Space Merchants, written with C. M. Kornbluth, and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel Gateway. His fiction frequently mixed ambitious scientific ideas with sharp observations about human behavior, institutions, technology, and unintended consequences. Let the Ants Try, first published in 1949, is an early example of Pohl taking one enormous speculative idea and following it in a direction that becomes increasingly difficult to control.