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The Cretaceous Past

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About this listen

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 that gave rise to culture?

This is the question posed by Hugo Award winner Cixin 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 rex suffers pain from meat trapped between its enormous teeth, a nearby colony of ants risks entering the great creature's maw to make their own repast from the remains of the dinosaur's most recent meal. From this humble beginning, over the course of millennia, a symbiotic civilization achieves amazing advances, 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 Stapledon's classic Last and First Men did for the future.

©2020 FT Culture (Beijing) Co., Ltd. (P)2021 Tantor Alternate History Science Fiction
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I loved this book. Dinosaurs and ants. Remember the ant at the beginning of one of the Three Body Problem trilogy? (great books) Well let’s take this to another level.

Short and sweet alternate past (probably alternate!)

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Great example of taking a small, elegant concept and turning it into a massive exploration of imagination. It takes sophistication and loads of experience to do this. On the downside, and without being a spoiler, the primary conflict of the escalating action of the story is strongly identified, then completely abandoned. That is an unfortunate flaw, as I perceive it.

Sophisticated but flawed

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This is an incredibly creative story! That settles it, Cixin Liu has definitely become my favourite author!

Extremely clever!

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If you like an imaginative story told with satirical elegance and lots of scientific detail you should enjoy this book. BJ Harrison’s narration is masterful and pitch perfect.

An amusing sci-fi fable

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