So, what if, back in the Cretaceous, there was a hyper advanced twin civilisation, based on the dinosaurs doing the thinking and the ants doing the making? Admittedly, not something I’d ever considered (one or other, yes, but not both) but it’s the basis of Liu Cixin’s story.

Right, let’s go with it. All sorts of clever work arounds so that ants and dinosaurs, not naturally suited to communicating with each other, are able to do so. Indeed, this is the best part of the book, the set up, when these two very different communities start working out how to work together.

Unfortunately, after that we start getting into fairly heavy-handed political allegory and symbolism, which is quite uninteresting and actually less profound than the book’s playful beginning. Even so, it might have worked. But the problem is, we all know how the age of the dinosaurs ended: the end-of-the-world rock smashing into the sea just off the Yucatan Peninsula. If Liu Cixin had found some way to work this in as the end of dinosaur/ant civilisation then the whole parable might have worked. But he didn’t. Instead, he invents an entirely different ending, with war between the ant and dinosaur civilisations finishing off the Cretaceous rather than the meteor. It’s strange he didn’t go with what we know: he could have worked it into the climax simply by having the two civilisations essentially hurling space rocks at each other and then one going awol and hitting where it shouldn’t.

On the whole, a disappointment.