Why did Deshan love this book?
Liu is the author of one of my favourite recent works of science fiction, a trilogy called The Three-Body Problem, so deciding to read Of Ants and Dinosaurs felt completely natural. He’s working in a very different mode here, though.
Of Ants and Dinosaurs is a modern fable and tells the story of an Earth where these two vastly different species achieve sentience, build a symbiotic civilisation, and what happens after. It’s a fast read, and you can tell Liu was having fun in the writing. Full of wonderful ideas and perspective-shifting observations, this is an oddball science fiction/fantasy.
Try this one if you liked George Saunders’ Fox 8 or Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
1 author picked Of Ants and Dinosaurs as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem. On an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch. From humble tooth-picking origins, ants and dinosaurs - two species so unalike and yet so complementary - forged an alliance that culminated in an antimatter-powered Age of Wonder. But such magnificent industry came at a price - a price paid first by Earth's biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it. And yet the dinosaurs…