Books/of Ants and Dinosaurs

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Author: Liu Cixin (Chinese name)
Category: Science Fiction

"of Ants and Dinosaurs" is a fable by Liu Cixin exploring the nature of intelligent life on earth.

Review

This book isn't hard sci-fi like his famous "Remembrance of the Earth's Past" trilogy. Many reviewers who were first exposed to Liu Cixin's works through the trilogy tend to give lower ratings to his soft sci-fi works. These works are supplementary to his bigger works. They are focused on exploring a specific aspect (like intelligent life in this case) which might not get enough consideration in his bigger works. When a scientist explores a specific physical variable, they tend to keep the remaining factors constant. Many of the kinematics and dynamics problems we solved as students of physics assume that friction doesn't exist, for example. In my opinion, readers should focus on the aspect highlighted by the author in this book and choose to ignore the obviously scientifically wrong parts.

The introduction to this book is a delight to read. The author explores the vastness of time and the fragility of intelligent life. Intelligent civilizations were like the sparks of fireflies in the vast and endless night of time. The two intelligent species in this book are separated from humans by a timespan so vast that the continents literally looked different back then (Laurasia and Gondwana). The entire introduction serves to emphasize the plausibility of evolution of intelligence in two species and the cooperation between them, while greatly separated in physical size and individual characteristics.

Note: The translator made a mistake in the introduction to this book. He said that dinosaurs existed for a billion years when the author might have originally meant 100 million years. This must be because of the difference between the Chinese and western number systems.

The dialogue in this book is very nuanced for ants and dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are believed by human scientists to have primitive lizard brains. Human brains have two more layers on top of the lizard brain - a layer of mammalian brain and the neocortex which is considered the seat of intelligence. Ants are essentially swarm creatures. Their intelligence on an individual level is insignificant. Ants however do form complex colonies sometimes spanning miles and engage in resource wars with other ant species that might go on for centuries.

This book was probably written for children. Cooperation between two species is imaginable. But this book involves cooperation between two large groups of species. Many species of dinosaurs and ants cooperating with each other seems too fantastical. Unity between dinosaur species, with some of them being herbivores is hard to believe considering the history of the human civilization where Neanderthals who were close cousins of homo sapiens were driven to extinction. Tens of thousands of years later, humanity still suffers from conflict between the races.

The epilogue is equally brilliant. The narrator takes the form of an ant who recalls tales about the Age of Wonder where the dinosaurs collaborated with the ants to create a planet-spanning civilization. Since the dinosaurs are wiped out, the ant then contemplates if there can be a species which has the combined skills of their two species - individual creativity and dexterity of limbs. This is still the Cretaceous period and time seems endless, so a species like that might evolve on this planet...

Parallels to the "Remembrance of the Earth's Past" trilogy

Spoiler Alert! This entire section is full of spoilers about the trilogy.

Baoshu in his sequel to the trilogy portrayed the Trisolarans to be some kind of tiny bugs, like ants. This assumption fits well with the trilogy. The trisolaran planet was ripped apart by the combined gravity of the three suns which aligned in a straight line to the planet. The smaller piece became a moon around the larger one. Life took 70 million years to evolve again on that planet. It is possible that the life that developed on this harsh planet wasn't of the complex animal-like form but much more primitive and evolving hive intelligence over individual intelligence. The first book also mentions that the evolution of their science and technology was at a linear pace as compared to humanity's exponential pace. This indicates that their civilization lacked creative thinking, to the extent that they couldn't even lie; which a 5-year-old human child is perfectly capable of. It is easy to draw parallels between humans and dinosaurs, and trisolarans and ants in this fable. But each civilization in the trilogy is individually more advanced than the combined Cretaceous civilization of dinosaurs and ants depicted in this book.

The individual creativity of the dinosaurs and the hive mind of the ants are illustrated very well in this book. This is a good parallel between Earth and Trisolaran civilizations. Most of the differences in culture between the two civilizations can be attributed to this singular fact. Maybe this book is a much easier sneak peek of what an Earth-Trisolaris cooperation would look like. But such a cooperation would be in violation of the Dark Forest hypothesis. Two species on the same planet cooperating with each other to form one unified civilization is more plausible. So, a book about cooperation between Earth and Trisolaris might never be written.