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Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award winning novelette.

When Simon Kress returned to his home planet of Baldur from an offworld business trip, he was amused to find that his tank of Earth piranhas had cannibalized themselves into extinction, and of the two exotic animals that roamed his estate, only one remained. Now, in search of some new pets to satisfy his cruel pursuit of amusement, Simon finds a new shop in the city where he is intrigued by a new lifeform he has never heard of before ... a collection of multi-colored sandkings. The curator explains that the insect-like animals, no larger than Simon's fingernails, are not insects, but animals with a highly-evolved hive intelligence capable of staging wars between the different colors, and even religion--in the form of worship of their owner. The curator's warning to Simon about the regularity of their feeding, unfortunately, was not taken seriously....

The story originally appeared in Omni, August 1979 and has been reprinted many times. There is a comic adaptation and the story served as the basis for an episode of the horror series Outer Limits. It can be found in the anthologies:

The Best Science Fiction of the Year #9 (1980), edited by Terry Carr
Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Ninth Annual Collection (1980), edited by Gardner Dozois
Nebula Winners Fifteen (1981), edited by Frank Herbert
The First Omni Book of Science Fiction (1984), edited by Ellen Datlow
The Hugo Winners, Volume 5: (1980-82) (1986), edited by Isaac Asimov
The Best of the Nebulas (1989), edited by Ben Bova
Foundations of Fear: An Exploration of Horror (1992) edited by David G. Hartwell
Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Century (2001), edited by Orson Scott Card
In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (2013), edited by Hank Davis
The Big Book of Science Fiction (2016), edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer

It is included in the collections Sandkings (1981), Songs the Dead Men Sing (1983) and GRRM: A RRetrospective (2003).

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