Er, Mark:
I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but far from the creation of life being the sole province of the Maker of All Things, it was done eight years ago just 20 miles from where I am sitting.
As to insect overlords: Biologist E. O. Wilson (see We Are Doomed, pages 7, 143, and 145), who knows more about ants than any person alive — more, very likely, than most ants — has written a novel about them. There was a long excerpt in the January 25 New Yorker. Sample:
Lamentation and hope were mingled among the Trailhead inhabitants. The ants were a doomed people in a besieged city. Their unity of purpose was gone, their social machinery halted. No foraging, no feeding and cleaning of larvae, no queen for them to rally round. The order of the colony was dissolving. Out there, indomitable and waiting, were the hated, filthy, unformicid Streamsiders. Finally, all that the Trailheaders knew was terror, and the existence of a choice — they could fight or run from the horror. There was nothing else left in their collective mind.
Hm, sounds a bit like the Democrats last Wednesday. Anyway, Wilson, as readers of We Are Doomed already know, is a pretty good guy, as endoskeletals go, so I urge you to try his novel when it comes out in April. You might want to warm up with a poem.