Why Termites? and how have your stories developed?
Back in the 1970s when I was writing imaginary-world fantasy, I saw the wonderful documentary “Mysterious Castles of Clay,” narrated by Orson Welles. It used microphotography, which must have been quite new at the time. The camera was inserted right into the mound of the African fungus-growing termite, revealing their complex lifestyle, including views of minuscule nymphs begging for food like little puppy dogs! I was hooked!
This gave me an idea for a race of intelligent giant termite on an alien planet that had evolved from a similar species, keeping many of their termite characteristics like the Caste structure, the unique Mother and King, etc.
Since termites are deaf, they would communicate non-orally though antennae emissions. At some future date, one of these creatures would be captured
in an off-world expedition and brought back to Earth, where a female linguistic anthropologist would realize it was intelligent and would devise a way to communicate with it.
I kept the germ of this idea in mind for years, until I started writing again in 2000 and decided the time for that story had come.
And so The Termite Queen was born.
Prior to that, I wrote the novella “Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder,” which has been my most popular book and has consistently received 4 or 5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads. Kaitrin Oliva (the female anthropologist in that novella) is the same character who learns to interpret the termite language in The Termite Queen.
In fact, all of my books are interconnected through the sharing of characters, events, languages, future history, and philosophical concepts.
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