Sandkings by George R. R. Martin

Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979) is one of the standout stories I remember from my early magazine reading and a piece I went back to recently after I read Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020). I did this as I wanted to read other Microcosmic God-themed or related stories to see how they handled the same subject matter.¹
The opening, which limns the story’s main character, Simon Kress, presages everything that will follow:

Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city. So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself. The little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine Earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Finally Kress just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat one another if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.  p. 1 (Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Ninth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1980)

By the time Kress returns all the fish are dead, as is the carrion hawk (which was eaten by the shamble after it climbed up into the belfry). So Kress takes a trip into Asgard, Balder’s biggest city, and he eventually finds himself in Wo and Shade, a shop selling imported artefacts and exotic lifeforms. Kress soon makes his requirements clear to Jala Wo, the co-proprietor (“I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals.”) and underlines the point by telling her that he occasionally feeds his shambler unwanted kittens. After perusing her stock he leaves after ordering four differently coloured colonies of Sandkings, insect-like hivemind creatures that have rudimentary telepathy and, if kept in a terrarium and fed limited food, will fight wars against each other that involve truces and alliances.
Three days later Wo arrives to install the Sandkings in the terrarium, and fit a plastic cover with a feeding mechanism (“You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping”). Kress settles down to watch:

The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours they had been incorporated into the castle walls.
The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate, seated on the couch so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.
He was disappointed. Days passed, the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and to answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war.
He was getting upset.
Finally he stopped feeding them.
Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.
Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.
When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners.
After that, war followed war.  p. 7-8, Ibid.

Kress subsequently invites his friends and acquaintances over to a party at his house where the main attraction is watching the Sandkings war. The gathering is a huge success, but there are a couple of discordant episodes, first when a former lover, Cath M’Lane—whose puppy was eaten by the shamble when she and Kress lived together—tells him he is disgusting before walking out, and secondly when Jala Wo asks if he is feeding the Sandkings sufficiently. When Kress tells Wo to mind her own business, she says she will discuss the matter with Shade, and leaves, telling him to “look to his faces”. When Kress later looks at the castles in the corners of the tank, he sees that the images of his face the Sandkings previously created on the walls now have a slightly malicious expression on them.
The parties continue to be a success, and the guests start betting on the various castles; then other alien animals are introduced into the terrarium to (unsuccessfully) fight with the Sandkings. During this there is the first sign of a coalition between the various castles when three of them wait for an invading sand spider to emerge from the fourth castle.
While all this is going on Kress’s ex-lover M’Lane reports him to the authorities, and he has to bribe an official to bury the complaint. Then, as payback, Kress puts a puppy (similar to the one M’Lane lost previously) into the Sandking terrarium, films the result, and sends it to her.
It’s at this point where matters (spoiler) start spiralling wildly out of control. Kress notices the Sandkings have changed the faces on their castles to look malevolent and leering, and punishes them by sticking a sword into the maw of one the castles. Then Cath M’Lane comes to his house, furious at the film he has sent her, and attacks the tank glass with a hammer. Kress tries to stop her stop her causing any damage to the terrarium, but ends up stabbing her with the sword which is lying nearby. In her death throes she smashes the glass, and the Sandkings escape. Kress flees.
The rest of the tale sees Kress trying to clean up his various messes, which variously involve an attempt to kill the Sandkings in the garden and cellar with insecticide (but the latter only after he chops up Cath’s body for them to dispose of), his recruitment of “cleaners” with flamethrowers (who destroy two of the colonies but are either eventually overrun or pushed into the cellar by Kress), and invitations to friends so he can feed the hungry creatures (one wonders why he didn’t just open an account with the local butcher). Eventually he contacts Wo, who tells him that the remaining maw is becoming sentient and birthing second generation “mobiles”.
Eventually, Kress flees into the desert and, when later suffering badly from dehydration, runs towards a house in the desert only to find it has been built by the missing orange Sand Kings . . . .
This is very good, near excellent piece of SF horror and, even if a couple of things are slightly far-fetched, it has a relentless, over the top ghastliness that makes it a compulsively readable piece.
I note in passing that, although this has some similarities with Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, it is more about man’s appalling treatment of other species (something that Martin would return to again in his contemporaneous series of ‘Haviland Tuf’ stories) rather than the idea of man-as-god. That said, you could liken Kress’s boy-burning-an-anthill sadism with that of a capricious deity.
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 16,000 words.

1. Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) sees a man accelerate the evolution of a colony of creatures (by repeated genocide among other techniques) to produce inventions which he then sells. You could say that the protagonist essentially converts their pain and suffering into money. Reviewed on my other blog here.