OF ANTS & DINOSAURS

RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback/ebook/ audiobook

Author Cixin Liu

Publisher Head of Zeus

At first glance, this feels like a major departure for Cixin Liu. China’s best-selling science fiction author made his name with a series of weighty, hard SF novels like the Remembrance Of Earth’s Past trilogy. In his books the ideas come thick and fast and the page counts sprawl.

By contrast, Of Ants & Dinosaurs – first published in China in 2004 – is a kids’ book about the parallel evolution of dinosaur and ant societies. Initially these two contrasting superpowers cooperate and build empires that cover the world, but their differences lead to eventual war, stalemate and cataclysm.

Yet look a little closer and you can see the similarities with Liu’s other novels. Like much of his work, this book is fundamentally about the systems that keep societies functioning. Characterisation has never been one of his strengths as a writer and here that’s simply not a problem given that, well, we’re dealing with ants, dinosaurs and a timescale that spans tens of thousands of years. The book is certainly strongest in its opening chapters, where the author displays an ingenious use of logic to intertwine the nascent societies.

Somewhere between whimsical thought experiment and eco-fable, this is a curiosity in Liu’s bibliography, but an enjoyable one. Will Salmon