Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Ants communicate by exchanging pheromones, and Werber claims to have mastered this language and to have translated it into French.
When I first heard of this novel, I thought the author sounded slightly eccentric. No surprise - the story is definitely strange. However, the novel is fascinating. The story intertwines two plots: one involves the exploits of some ants, and the other is about some human characters. The ants are differentiated, and have personalities. I'll tell you right now that the ant story is far more interesting! I almost wish the author hadn't bothered with the humans. The two stories do connect. Since much of what kept me avidly reading was trying to figure out how the two stories meshed, I won't give you any hints here.
The novel gave me a new view of ants. Before, if they intruded into my consciousness at all, it was just as annoying pests. Now, I view them with interest. For a few months after reading the novel, I even tried to avoid stepping on or disturbing ants when I came across them. (News flash - the reviewer is also slightly eccentric.)
Anyway, this novel is exceptionally interesting, and may even give you a new view of the universe.
By the way, the original of this novel is in French, and Werber has written two sequels. For French students, I think the French is slightly more difficult than that of, for example, Pierre Boulle in "The Planet of the Apes": especially at the beginning, there were a lot of terms relating to ants that I was not familiar with. However, I could still follow the story, and with repeated exposure gradually learned the terms.
Rating: 
Summary: Idea has potential, but story is poorly written
Review: The fictional book Empire of the Ants was written by Bernard Werber and contains two stories: the ants and the humans. Neither is good enough to make this book worth reading. The ant part of this book tells a story from the point of view of ants. It starts out with a male ant, who when gathering food for his colony after hibernating for the winter discovers a 'secret weapon' which kills a handful of ants. The male ant recruits a few other ants in order to help find out more about the 'secret weapon,' who become the main characters in the story. The ants have to deal with colony conspiracies, predators, and enemy ant colonies.
The human part of the story is about Jonathan, his wife, and his son, who inherit a house from his uncle Edmond, a scientist who had a very strong interest in ants. Jonathan was warned by his uncle not to go in the basement, but he does anyways.
The author of this book gives too much credit to intelligence and creativity of ants, where the credit really belongs to ant evolution. He tries to make the ants too human-like to be believable. I found the plot of the ant story to be boring.
The author also has some of his biology wrong. As far as I know, male ants rarely work in order to preserve themselves for mating. In this book, the first ant character presented, a male, acts as a temperature messenger (warms up the colony), and goes out of the nest to retrieve food. In another instance, a bat gets caught in the boy's hair, and sucks some of his blood. Sorry - that doesn't happen. Bats don't get caught in people's hair. Only vampire bats suck blood, but rarely human blood, and only while the victim is sleeping. Bats (including vampire bats) are generally petrified of humans. The author did not do his research.
The human characters in this story are not developed enough. I just didn't care about them. They don't act realistically either. The human story is dull. Most of the story is about people going down in the basement and never coming back, and then when we find out why, the reason turns out to be very unbelievable.
The concept of Empire of the Ants has potential, but the story is written too poorly. I wouldn't recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Werber's Ants trilogy
Review: The Empire of the Ants is really a translation of the French book "Les Fourmis", which is the first part of what I would call the Ants trilogy. The two other books are titled "Le Jour des fourmis" ("The Day of the Ants"), and "La Révolution des fourmis" (The Revolution of the Ants"). It is still unknown to me if these books have ever been translated to English.
Rating:
Summary: Long and boring, much like the spiral staircase...
Review: This book would have been much better had it been at least one hundred pages shorter, and did it not rely so much upon the puzzle of the triangles. The idea is indeed a good one, to educate and entertain at the same time. And I must admit to being fascinated by many of the 'ant' facts that crop up throughout the book. However the story line, especially on the human side, is decidely weak. I, for one, am not convinced that any group of relatively educated adults would not solve the triangle puzzle in anything less than a couple of minutes... and without this puzzle the story falls to pieces. I also question who the intended audience is for this book? At the start it certainly reads like a young adult book. Then later it would seem more suitable for adults... Hmm, actually my feeling is that the weaker human story is less thought out, and better suited for young adults or even children, whilst the ant story is best read by adults... this probably reflects upon the authors background with the sciences, and lesser ability at writing entertaining fiction. Enough said... by page 120 I was bored and disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Great novel, but where is the follow-up?
Review: The "Empire of the ants" (in Danish: "myrerne" ) is a fantastic book, with a lot of useful information on ants, as well as a well-written psychological fantasy thriller! What I miss is the follow-up: according to the back ofthe book, Bernard Werber was
just about to publish a part 2 - and this is some years ago now!
Also: there was a filmatization on its way. Where is this? (I hope it is not "A bugs life", or "Antz" :-))
Rating: 
Summary: A complete piece of crap
Review: Poor translation. Incomprehensible characters (if you could call these 2-dimesional cut-outs that - the dialogue spoken by the little boy is unreal). An utterly ridiculous and stupid story that tried to come off as exciting, philosophical, revolutionary and ended up being a painful chain of events: the ant gets eaten by a sparrow! but the ant bits the sparrow's guts and gets coughed out!. into a river!.. where a trout almost eats the ant!.. then the ant finds a suitable place to make an anthill!.. but it's a tortoise!.. then the other ants attack!.. etc. etc. for 250-odd pages. A "human" story parallels the "ant" story. The book just ends. Too bad there was no resolution to the story, but thank god there weren't 250 more pages. I pity those who read this book - even more those who enjoyed it.
Rating:
Summary: There are pros and cons but generally I liked the book
Review: My review is related to both his books, but mainly to the second one, which I read more recently. I read the Hebrew version of this book. The translation is really bad and there are numerous mistakes. Regarding the book itself: there are pros and cons, but basically I liked this book. The good points are: mainly the interesting facts about the ants~{!/~} lives, many of them I know to be true. They appear in the main text of the book and also in the recitations from the fictive ~{!.~}encyclopedia of absolute and relative knowledge~{!1~}. Many other thought provoking and interesting ideas and facts are recited there, which I really enjoyed. There are a few riddles, that are easy to solve, and I liked the way in which it involved the reader (me) with the book. I also liked the main idea of the book, about communicating with ants, and about the ants as intelligent societies, like human societies. The bad points: I didn~{!/~}t find emotional depth in the human and/or ant characters. The author simply reports the story instead of building more emotional depth to it. The ants as characters are described from a human point of view, and not from their own. Many of the facts are explained in a way that a human reader could understand, but then I miss the ant~{!/~}s point of view. I also feel that the ants~{!/~} society has become too much like our own. I expected to find new dimensions and understandings, and things we could learn from the ant~{!/~}s society, but the ant~{!/~}s society was too human-like. But the pros compensated for the cons. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the natural world around them and to those who enjoy a good stimulation to their minds.
Rating:
Summary: A real pleasant surprise, I'll never see ants the same way..
Review: I'd never heard of this book before stumbling across it in the bookstore, and bought it because I was intrigued by the jacket blurbs. Now, it's among my favorites (at least partly because it's so rare that something you take a chance on turns out to be such a pleasant surprise.) I've passed it along to several friends and relatives all of whom enjoyed it as much as I did. I'm looking forward to re-reading this one, and that's not something I often do. It's an unusual, unique story and the style suits it. I don't want to give anything away about the story (though other reviewers may have already done that) but I did want to cast my vote and recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a little fun, diversionary (and educational!) reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Imaginative, wonderful....but ends terribly
Review: The blurb on the cover of the paperback edition of this book isn't far wrong - "What Richard Adams did for rabbits in 'Watership Down', Bernard Werber does for ants." But it isn't totally accurate. For most of its almost 300 pages, this is a fascinating novel contrasting a vividly imagined world - the insect kingdom - with the equally fascinating and well thought out mystery of a deep and dark subterranean passage beneath the new home of Jonathan Wells. Werber's description of life in the ant world is fully detailed, extremely captivating, and totally believable - which is not surprising, since - according to the small biography at the end of the book - Werber is "a scientific journalist who has studied ants...as an avocation." Little by little, we learn that there are some mysterious goings-on in this little corner of the insect kingdom, and it is up to Werber's ant heroes to solve them. His description of the equally mysterious goings-on in the Wells' cellar is just as fascinating. And you eventually realize that these two stories must be connected in some way, although you have no idea how. But the climax and the connection, when it's finally revealed, is completely idiotic, and straight out of a 1950's s/f pulp magazine. I was expecting a much better resolution than this, and I turned the pages expecting to discover that this was nothing more than an ant dream, and the true climax was about to be revealed. But no - this was it. The book reads almost as if Werber had gotten tired of writing it, and wanted to finish it quickly. Well, he certainly did that - but at the expense of what could have been a truly incredible piece of fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Second time is better.
Review: When I first read this book in January 2000 I really enjoyed and going more than a year with only a few other GOOD books in between I decided to read it again. Not only was it better the second time, it was more understandable. My favorite character in this book was Queen Chli-Pou-Ni, or the 56th female. She was really brave and I thought that all the really exciting, moving, and funny parts involved her. This book has gotten me interested in ants and now I don't go out and kill as many as I can, they are very interestiong little creatures! I truly reccommend this book on its to the fact basis. All of the material that sounds like science fiction is really real, and I believe that makes this book even more interesting. One down-side to it is that when the dialogue changes from Human-Ant it sometime is confusing because of missing asterisks'.
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