Re: [OT] Bug history was: Starship Troopers

Beth.Fulton@csiro.au wrote:

> G'day,
>
> > I think the "bugs" idea goes back further than the movie "Starship
> > Troopers". The GW Tyranids are defintiely earlier. They, in
> > turn, seem to owe much to "Alien" (late 1970's) .
>
> I haven't been paying much attention to this thread (yes I'm sorry and
I
> will go and sit in the corner now), but I would've thought that the
ideas
> stretched much further back than that. No hard references to back that
up
> mind, but just based on comments my granddad made about books he read
in his
> childhood and stories he and his brothers made up using beetles etc.
>

I suspect that the earliest entry into the genre was the short story
"Linengen
and the ants" (?) which was later padded out into a feature length
movie,
starring Charleton Heston (?).	The ants are normal army (driver?) ants
that
completely overrun the hero's plantation, and eat everything that fails
to
escape.  It is the archetypical tale of Man against Nature, with the
hero ending