Short Story: The Author of the Acacia Seeds

"The Author of the Acacia Seeds" by Ursula K. Leguin as published in The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Quotes:

As the ant among foreign-enemy ants is killed, so the ant with ants dies, but being without ants is as sweet as honeydew.

Emperor! I anticipate my colleagues' response to this suggestion. Emperor! The most difficult, the most remote, of all the dialects of penguin.

What is Language?

Synopsis:

This is an epistolary short story. It is made up of extracts from a scientific journal for the science of Therolinguistics. The study of the language of wild beasts. There are three extracts altogether. 

The first is the eponymous The Author of the Acacia Seeds which is a manifesto of an individualistic and introverted ant using scent to mark some seeds with her potentially revolutionary message.

The second is an announcement of an expedition to the arctic to study the language of emperor penguins. 

And the last is an editorial which posits the possibility of plant and even geological languages.

Thoughts:

This story has an alternative title, which does a better job of setting reader expectations. It is "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics". My favorite bit was the first extract. The idea of an introverted ant that wants to overthrow the monarchy is kind of fascinating to me. I wish there had been more of that.

Not that I didn't enjoy the other extracts. I did. The self-serious tone of the editorial extract even got a laugh out of me. Well, at least a chuckle. But still I would like to see what that ant revolution would look like. Considering that the extract notes that the acacia seed message was found next to the ant authors decapitated corpse, I guess it answered that question, but I would have liked more detail to it.