Review | Ants and dinosaurs as metaphor for China and US, interdependent but doomed to conflict, in Cixin Liu’s new sci-fi satire
- As fantastical and imaginative as followers of Cixin Liu would expect, Of Ants and Dinosaurs depicts a symbiotic relationship between a T rex and an ant colony
- Communal, obedient and organised insects collaborate with boisterous, overconfident dinosaurs, until a religious question divides them
Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Cixin Liu (translated by Elizabeth Hanlon), pub. Head of Zeus. 3.5/5 stars
If you’re still searching for that perfect pandemic novel, you could do worse than Cixin Liu’s Ball Lightning (2004 in Chinese; 2018 the English translation), in which a cosmically generated illness devastates Earth’s adult population, leaving the planet in the hands of a young, inexperienced generation.
The latest book by the Chinese sci-fi giant seems less concerned with humanity’s future than its origins. Liu’s beginning begins: “If the entire history of the Earth were condensed into a single day, one hour would equate to 200 million years, one minute to 3.3 million years and one second to 55,000 years.” By this reckoning, while “life” rises and shines at roughly 9am, civilisation doesn’t rear its head until “the last tenth of the last second of the day”.
This weighing of scale to measure otherwise unimaginable stretches of time locates Of Ants and Dinosaurs in a long tradition of satire: most famously, the sudden shifts from the very large to the very small in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.
One of Liu’s more obvious predecessors is Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), whose mind-boggling number of jokes about the vastness of space include the invasion of the Milky Way by the combined G’Gugvuntt and Vl’hurg armies. On reaching Earth, Adams continues, and “due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was swallowed by a small dog”.