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A parable of times when ants went headbutting the dinosaursQ:But in the hours before this tenth of a second, what was life on Earth doing? Was every single living being doing nothing but swimming, roaming around, breeding and sleeping for… well… billions of years? Was every other organism universally and unremittingly stupid – for aeon after aeon? Of the countless branches on the tree of life, was our small twig really the only one to have been graced with the light of intelligence? It seems unl...
3.5/5, rounded up to four for capturing the tension and tragedy of failed cooperation. Built off a short story in one of his collections, this novella/novel tells the parable of a dinosaur-ant civilisation that existed on Earth during the Cretaceous period. There are many lessons here, and it begs for the reader to make connections to the world powers as they exist right now and their inability to cooperate. Quick, entertaining, and a good read for anyone looking for a short thought provoking re...
This reads like a fable, of the age-old tale of the rise and fall of civilizations, when one side or the other or all become greedy and self-important and smug and forget our interrelatedness and interdependence. In this telling, it is the ants and the dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period. Oh you say you didn't know of the great Formic and Saurian empires and their vast achievements in science and technology and space travel? Well it's all right here in this charming novel that might just serv...
Thanks to Tomislav and his review, I have learned that this novella is different than the short story I have read in Liu Cixin's collection, The Wandering Earth: Classic Science Fiction Collection. As a matter of fact, I think there are 3 different versions: this one, 256 pages, 18 chapters, preface and epilog, the short story with the same name in above collection which is 53 pages, 9 shortened chapters and a preface, and The Cretaceous Past, which is 192 pages, but don't know yet if it's exact...
An interesting concept, but when you start trying to see the correlations behind the story and fit things to humanity it doesn't always work well. 🤔
This was a fun, immaginative story about a civilisation formed of Ants and Dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous. This premise had me intrigued and the story crafted by Liu was absurd and fun. The civilisation rises with mutal cooperation (ant-dino dentistry). It is a political allegory of the threats to our civilisation: lack of understanding (cultural, religious etc...); ignorance of the threats our world faces; and threatening mutual destruction.The allegory is thinly veiled and no characters are
"And so we can assume that, through the endless night of antiquity, budding intelligences flickered on and then off again like the brief, brilliant twinkles of fireflies."First translated into English by Holger Nahm in 2012, newly translated into English by Elizabeth Hanlon in 2020 (under the title Of Ants and Dinosaurs), and produced as an audiobook (under this title, using, I think, the Nahm translation) in December 2021, this satirical sci-fi novella is probably new to most English readers of...
This is a weird little book. I'm not sure if the author intended it to be a satire, a sometimes heavy-handed allegory, or a sort of hard-science Aesop's fable, what with the talking dinosaurs and ants. I'm also not sure it succeeds at any of them, no matter how you define it.Cixin Liu, of course, was the first Chinese writer to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, a few years ago, for The Three-Body Problem....which, overall, I didn't like very much. I liked the second book of the series even less...
Another of his “ants and dinosaurs” stories, but this is not as interesting, creative, or emotionally fulfilling as the one about spacefaring dinosaurs. Several things I find problematic. Alternative histories are rarely as interesting as reality, and this story tells of how the crustacean period ends instead of by means of the impact crater off the Yucatán Peninsula.The characters in the books are animals, but they seem to think like mankind instead of their own species, so it reads like social...
Wonderful and original story about co-operation and wars between dinosaurs and ants. Not quite the Animal Farm of the 21st century, but well on its way. Cixin Liu must have a beautiful mind.
Brilliant, like everything Liu writes.Encompasses nanotechnology, the politics of nuclear arms, holy wars and the birth and death of a civilisation.And I expected nothing less!!
Okay kiddies; here's a nice little story about how we fucked up the planet. A huge amount of disbelief must be ignored for this book as we have talking dinosaurs and thinking ants who have enough intelligence to create large cities and religious dogmas. Of course, it's an allegory, but it reads like a fairy tale for very little children. The narration also comes across like you're being spoken to by a kindergarten teacher. It seemed condescending and I almost quit...because I can only take so m
More of fable than anything else, but it had an interesting theme/lesson, even if I fond the reading a bit dull.
The moral of this allegory is perhaps too heavy-handed, but it’s so original I cannot give it less than four stars. Also, the characters are as cardboard as in the The Three Body Problem, but it bothers me much less when we deal with ants and dinosaurs.
Very nice idea with a good execution and an interesting story. I think this is my first contact with the writing of Liu Cixin and I had a positive impression about it.
The ants perform surgery on the dinosaurs.If that doesn't sell you on the book I don't know what will.
This is a fun little novella. It feels a little like Cixin Liu writes Redwall but I'm not sure how much of that is that 100% of the characters are animals who communicate with each other using language. However, it does still cover many of his favorite themes around civilizational growth and conflict and could be a good intro to someone who is to young or unsure if they'd like it to read his The Three Body Problem
English language readers of Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin will be interested to know about his “new” short novel, entitled The Cretaceous Past. After searching numerous internet resources, I believe that the one-and-only original novella was published in China in 2004 under the title “当恐龙遇上蚂蚁”, which according to google-translate means “When Dinosaurs Meet Ants.” The first English translation was significantly abridged for inclusion in the 2013 collection The Wandering Earth: Classic
Not as good as other Cixin books. However, it’s a quick read and kinda funny plot. The translation is excellent as usual. I’d maybe give it a 3.5 if I could.
A decent read but the style made it difficult to invest.This is an imagined history of the Cretaceous Period where Ants and Dinosaurs set up a kind of symbiotic civilization based on mutual needs. It covers around two thousand years of history and details how the relationship between the two species started and developed and of course goes into the conflicts too.This is a pretty unusual but interesting book. It's told in a kind of dry and humorous tone that jumps through time periods fairly quic...