The Cretaceous Past By Cixin Liu


I love Sci Fi/ Fantasy and this is probably the most fantastic and mind boggling trip you’re ever going to read. Cixin Liu takes anthropomorphism to unheard of levels. Although fantasy,it does raise some interesting questions. My whole family loved it. The Cretaceous Past This book was not what I expected. Rather than clever sci fi set in the Cretaceous period, it falls in the realm of fantasy. It's like a child's morality tale than the kind of clever plots I have enjoyed with Cixin Liu's other works. Frankly, I found the plot to be preposterous, rather than engaging. The Cretaceous Past I loved the Three Body Trilogy. But this must be his first try at writing. It is childish and amateur. I thought it was his first work and if you check out the Chinese edition it is copyrighted 2008, so it might be.
Every thing I have read by him has been light years better. Try his collection of short stories. The Cretaceous Past

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All the years of human civilization represent an infinitesimal fraction of the time since life first burgeoned on planet Earth. How likely is it, then, in those great depths of time, that humanity alone benefitted from the spark of intelligence which gave rise to culture?

This is the question posed byChinas preeminent science fiction writer for than twenty years and Hugo Award winner for The Three Body ProblemCixin Liu in his magisterial new short novel, The Cretaceous Past. The answer he offers is unexpected, supposing an unlikely alliance between the largest creatures in the world of the deep past and some of the smallest.

And it all begins with a toothache.

When a Tyrannosaurus rexsuffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creatures maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaurs most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, reaching dizzying heights in countless endeavors scientific and social, facing dangers and exploiting opportunities at every turn.

In this absorbing tale, Cixin Liu manages to describe the history of successive epochs of a might have been world, doing for the past what Olaf Stapledons classicLast and First Mendid for the future. Here, Liu embarks on a new journey, sure to please the legions of devoted readers of theRemembrance of Earths Pasttrilogy.

The Cretaceous Pastoffers Liu at his finest, demonstrating flights of imagination and depths of speculation sure to reward new fans and old alike. The Cretaceous Past

The 'Three Body Problem' trilogy was a revelation. A completely new approach to SF, which mostly had to rely on mysticism, magic, and horror to attract readership bored with the classical scientific and technical genre. Hence, it was with expectations and excitement that I started reading this novella. Alas, I was painfully disappointed. The author spins a tale of imaginary symbiotic civilization emerging in the Cretaceous age through a dinosaurs ants partnership. While the dinosaurs contribute size, brute force, imagination and invention ants take advantage of their small size, cooperation, obedience, precision, and perseverance. Obviously, such a partnership is difficult to conceive and impossible to maintain for ever. The Cretaceous is at best a meta stable culture. Many aspects of the short novella are disappointing. Most of all the writing. It seems aimed at the early teens and lacks sophistication and style. Moreover, the world created by the author is cartoon like and one expects phrases to appear in balloons. Some of the feats attributed to ants are variants on the nanobots so beloved by the SF writers and are indeed cute, but all the rest is painted with a heavy brush and lacks elan and color. Just inadequate for a reader above an unsophisticated ten year old. Inexpensive as it is not worth the money The Cretaceous Past Cixin Liu is one of the few modern authors who understands and speaks of the dangers of nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. I only wish he were famous. Without hero’s like Liu who speak the truth, we are doomed. The Cretaceous Past Cixin Liu and Neal Stephenson are the only authors I automatically buy anything they publish, and that is because they are always very good to great.

This story is at least very good. It has some degree of believable plausibility which makes the read fun. Make no mistake, this isn't intended as hard sci fi. It's just a great thought experiment.

I think 12 15 year olds would benefit from this as an assigned read, the world creation conveys concepts of interdependence and innovation fairly rigorously.

Where this work reaches a greatness is as metaphor for current tensions breaking years of international trade and cooperation, and the potential for armed conflict. I can see the USA and the West versus China in this story, and this fable spotlights the foolishness of seeking war. The Cretaceous Past A war between interdependent cultures, once friendly and now risking global catastrophe in a brinksmanship quest for world domination. Sound familiar?

Well known to us today, this theme is explored as a sardonic explanation for the end of the dinosaurs and other worldly beings, some 66 million years ago.

Cixin Liu’s 2021 dark satire, “The Cretaceous Past”, is a science fiction look forward by reconstructing the past with familiar, disquieting results (originally published in 2020 as “Of Ants and Dinosaurs).

By accident and self motivated interests, two physically opposite species – dinosaurs and ants – form an unexpected mutually satisfying relationship building on each other’s skill sets. This arrangement leads to 3,000 years of economic and technological prosperity throughout the era’s Gondwanan supercontinent.

But not without tensions and competitiveness leading to first religious, then, nationalistic, species bias motivated conflicts. Dinosaurs are presented as creatively innovative but physically inept, while ants as micro fine motor skilled legions of unimaginative technocrats.

Not unlike the breaking apart of the supercontinent at the time, the dinosaurs split into two competitive subgroups: one with an autocratic, monarchy feel, the other republic oriented by its description. The parallels with the current world political orders for all three groups are apparent.

Will the conflicts be resolved or end in a sort of Dr. Strangelove accidental finality marking a geologic boundary for future scholars and explorers to study?

While Liu’s dry humor and wit keep the narrative moving quickly forward, the characters, motivations and events are hard to empathize with – sort of like looking at an experiment in a Petri dish. It is interesting, even entertaining, to see the results but at times hard to feel excited.

A similar investigation worth reading is Czech writer Karel Capek’s 1936 brilliant science fiction satire of human motives at cross purposes with another species, “War with the Newts”. And along the same lines about efforts doomed to repeat is Walter M. Miller Jr.’s 1959 amusing and disturbing “A Canticle for Leibowitz”.

You might be surprised by this quick read and find Liu’s fable confirms William Faulkner’s thought: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The Cretaceous Past I'm not sure what this book was supposed to bea young adults sci fi novella? a rather clumsy parable? history according to the Flintstones? It started out promisingly enough, with all the elements of a fascinating speculation about what might have occurred given the vast amount of time the dinosaurs existed. This quickly devolved into a sort of morality tale about power, hubris and rampant environmental degradation; worthy topics for sure, but not done well here. In any case, I was disappointed to read something this amateurish from the usually creative, imaginative, clever author. The Cretaceous Past

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