Several years ago, Clark Thomas Carlton, a prolific, yet unproduced screenwriter, was on vacation in Yucatan exploring pre-Columbian ruins. He and his partner were at dinner. “One of my peanuts fell under the chaise lounge,” he says. “I bent down moments later and saw it was covered with two kinds of ants. They were in a tug of peanut with each other. The peanut split in half, which would seem to have resolved the conflict, but they continued to fight.” 

That night, Carlton continues, he had a vivid dream: “I saw myself as a tiny soldier riding on the back of an ant. When I turned to look behind me, there were tens of thousands of men on ants. In front of me was a red ant army, and we were all going to war. I wrote it all down.”  

That dream became Prophets of the Ghost Ants, which was published as an indie novel in 2011 and through Harper Voyager in 2016. The Prophet of the Termite God, is the second book in Carlton’s futuristic saga. Kirkus calls this sequel “a dense, complex, and engrossing second installment of a genuinely promising high fantasy series.” 

Carlton, 63, who lives in Hollywood in a Spanish-style home formerly occupied by a writer on the Mr. Ed TV series, has toiled as a screenwriter, script doctor, and ghostwriter. His novelization of the cult classic John Woo film Face/Off waspublished by HarperCollins. He has written industrials (company-sponsored films) and has also produced segments for Eye for an Eye, which he describes as a pseudo-court show that was a combination of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. “It’s not anything I’m proud of, but the pay was OK and they were fun to write,” he says. 

Hollywood being Hollywood, none of his personal projects, for one reason or another, were produced, he laments, but he has been fortunate in that his writing has paid well enough that he stopped accepting writing-for-hire opportunities to work on Prophets of the Ghost Ants. 

In Carlton’s futuristic world, humans have devolved to the size of insects. The Prophet of the Termite God’s prologue recaps the first book’s central conflict between Anand, a lower-caste midden slave, and Pleckoo, Anand’s cousin, who leads the marauding forces of the Hulkrites against Anand’s home of the Slope. Book 2 divides its attention between the triumphant Anand and his fledgling kingdom and the fugitive Pleckoo, who may be out but is not at all down. 

In creating his literary world, Carlton said he did “quite a bit of research” about social systems and the nature of human hierarchies in places like India, Mexico, Brazil, and the American South as well as places like Japan and Thailand where people are typically born into a permanent station in life. He endeavored to parallel human existence with an ant-colony caste system. “There is the queen whose only job is to lay eggs, the soldiers who defend the nest, and there are the ants that clean the nest and those that take care of the young.”

Falling under the heading of “don’t try this at home,” Carlton shares that the plot for the first novel in the series came to him after he ingested a major hallucinogenic while attending the Burning Man festival. “On purpose,” he hastens to add. “It was an incredible stimulus to my imagination. I left the festival itself and moved out into the darkness of the desert. I looked up at the sky and started to see this novel like a movie. Then it was a matter of unwrapping this vision for the next couple of years.”

This experience may account for one of the book’s vividly rendered scenes in which odd and disturbing visions are visited upon a human queen as she transfers from one ant mound to another while going through hallucinatory withdrawal from alcohol addiction:

Living skeletons that traded bones with each other, ball gowns floating to the trees and shattering, the Sun eating Moon and then regurgitating him as bits and pieces that crawled away as whistling maggots. And always, at the back of her mind and in the quietest moments, she heard the agonized crying of…the boys she had left behind in Cajoria.

The actual writing of the book took more than two years. “I had written so many screenplays that people liked or that paid good money, but they didn’t get made,” he says. “I wanted to write something to please myself, and whether or not it became a movie was inconsequential.

“Now that I had my world built in the first book, I could focus on the characters and their motives,” Carlton observes. “I knew the beats of Book 2, and I know the very ending of Book 3, which I’m in the middle of writing now. I have a destination in mind.” 

Carlton’s favorite book as a kid was a book of Greek myths. His introduction to science fiction was a book he bought for 35 cents—The Lost Race of Mars. He discovered Star Trek when it ran in syndication and became enthralled by shows such as The Time Tunnel. He also cites Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as a major influence in allegorically addressing contemporary issues through SF and fantasy. 

Through the Antasy saga, he said, he wanted to tackle issues of race and religion, the latter of which is often used to divide rather than unite. “These problems are very much on my mind, and I wanted to address them,” he says. “My hero and villain are cousins. Something else they have in common is that they are both mixed race. Both are born as untouchables in a caste system, and both are gifted. One of them grows up to fight for equality and justice like Martin Luther King. The other became an Osama bin Laden, a religious fundamentalist.”  

But the primary takeaway of his immersion in and commitment to the Antasy universe, he said, was the reminder that a writer must be true to their vision. “I had written a screenplay many years ago about a boy sorcerer whose father was killed by an evil sorcerer and there was a sorcerers academy he attended,” he says. “It was set in America. My agent sent it out, but people got back to her saying that there was not a market for fantasy. Then, some successful screenwriter friends of mine said they were taking meetings about an amazing new book called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And they told me to keep doing what I was doing. I was headed in the right direction.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.