Of Ants and Dinosaurs
Of Ants and Dinosaurs, also known as The Cretaceous Past, is a science-fiction novel by Chinese writer Liu Cixin, first published in 2004 and again, expanded, in 2010. It was published under the former title by Head of Zeus in 2020 and under the latter title by Subterranean Press in 2021. Although it is not included in the English translation of the collection The Wandering Earth, translations in other languages include the shorter version.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
4people
2020–2024years
60% recommend20% neutral20% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Been asking myself the same question for months.
So Egan's stories are basically a mathy whodunit -- start from first (fictional) principles and eventually solve some universe-scale question or crisis. His characters are basically walking textbooks meant for info dumping / FAQing the derivations.
In that light, some similar stories I've found are...
The first two are especially similar to Egan's stuff in that the only real character is the civilization / setting not the people.- Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) - Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Liu Cixin, 3 body problem author) - The Andromeda Strain (Crichton, more medsci than math) - Schilds Ladder, Diaspora (other Egan stuff)I've also tried some of the more common hard scifi recommendations like Reynolds and Stephenson, but I personally don't enjoy the dialogue / scenes meant for character development. I guess it's because the stories usually take a human-scale perspective instead of taking a what-if to its reality-bending extreme like Egan does.
- I agree with both sentiments but the closer I get to primary-resource history / prehistory the more I appreciate the horrifying astronomical randomness of what is preserved / what we stumble across / what we use to cobble together our lumpy inconsistent historical narrative.
There is so much cosmic space that exists between any two historical artifacts. There's definitely room for a multitude of completely unpreserved civilizations.
On-the-nose reading that comes to mind, Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin... very anomalous book / quick entertaining read...
- Cixin Liu's latest book "Of Ants and Dinosaurs" explores this topic in a very entertaining way: https://headofzeus.com/books/9781789546095
- And in Cixin Liu’s short story "Devourer" they even come back to earth for a last visit...
Of course, this has a back-story/history, see "Of Ants and Dinosaurs".
- > Weaving the Web by Tim BL
> Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Liu Cixin
> The Unix O'Reilly Guide
All quick entertaining reads. All written by software engineers. All utterly useless for managing state in your React apps.
