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Why would E. O. Wilson write a novel? He says he hopes Anthill - about militant ants and the coupled fate of humans and nature - will spark a conservation revolution
You have said that To Kill A Mockingbird influenced everyone in the American South. How did it influence you?
Quite the reverse: it enriches the context.
What I wanted to address were the countless wars and conflicts between societies. We have a powerful propensity to be territorial and respond quickly with aggression to territorial invasion. I wanted the attentive reader to make the comparison with the ants and their countless wars.
Should readers infer from the ants in the story something about what it is to be human?
Did you worry that adhering to scientific accuracy would undermine the drama of the story?
There are many great tragic times when people are caught in a similar situation to those ants. For example, the Christians trapped in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in 1453 as the Ottoman Turks closed in. They don't realise they are going to die. They are praying,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], hoping for divine intervention, and it doesn't make sense. It's one of the tragedies of existence.
It gave me a new instrument to promote the conservation ethic so badly needed in the South, which is still a frontier region in its psychology and attitudes. To Kill a Mockingbird came out at precisely the right time to serve as a literary impetus for the civil rights movement. People in the South have destroyed the long-leaf pine savannah ecosystem that once covered 60 per cent of the land. But as I illustrate in the novel, there is a burgeoning conservation movement,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], so I have given them a heroic role. In that sense, I hope this will be my equivalent of To Kill a Mockingbird.
(Image: Steven Senne/AP/PA)
People respect non-fiction. They give you prizes for non-fiction. But people read novels.
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Sam Kean,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], contributor

What can fiction achieve in a scientific age?
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This is the first time anyone has written about the lives of ants from their point of view. And I think this is the first novel set in the American South that pays close attention to the environment. I have made the environment, the treasured habitat that Raphael Semmes Cody fights to save, a character in the book.

But the original ant colony, after being attacked, spent a night trapped by its attackers and couldn't comprehend what was happening. The ants experienced instinctual fear, but they didn't understand their fate, like humans under siege might.
There's a huge difference between a species and an ecosystem. The ecosystem is vastly more difficult to characterise, both accurately and in sufficient literary detail to be interesting. We are on the cusp of inaugurating detailed journeys into the world of natural history as a part of fiction.
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Entomologist Edward O. Wilson is Pellegrino University Research Professor at Harvard University and twice winner of the Pulitzer prize for general non-fiction. Anthill is published this month by W. W. Norton
Over 90 per cent of novelists present nature simply in terms of its impacts on human emotions. I wanted to develop in vivid detail the living environment - which is so important for the fate of the human characters - as it really is. That's something really new in this novel, and I hope it takes.
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You have said you wanted the book to lay out nature as it is. Why?
Why did you feel your novel, Anthill, had to be written?
Herman Melville's Moby Dick paid obsessive attention to whales. Is Anthill doing anything different?
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