When I got handed this book I was told it was "a political allegory about workers overthrowing their opressors", so I got excited and essentially expected it to be a more modern Animal Farm. Sadly, the book did not deliver.
It suffers from an issue worryingly common in xenofiction stories with thinly-veiled allegories for a worker class: that one fucking trope where, while the workers can organize together and overthrow their oppressors, they eventually self-destruct because they are incompetent or biologically incapable of creative/independent thought. These stories, then, often go one of three ways: they give an anti-revolutionary message by framing overthrowing the ruling class as a fatal mistake with ramifications too complex for the oppressed's inferior minds to understand; they serve as colonialist propaganda by having the protagonist (often an outsider) step up as a natural leader with their superior creativity and/or intellect; or they frame ecocidal oppressors as the "lesser evil" at best or misunderstood good guys at worst by eventually returning to a marginally less oppressive status quo, usually with taken-down-a-peg oppressors still holding most (if not all) of the power.
Needless to say, I fucking hate this trope, and was left extremely disappointed with the book. My instinct is to assume Liu's cultural context of growing up in Great Cultural Revolution-era China musthave painted his decision to include this trope in the book, he openly supported the country's government's antidemocratic mass control/surveillance policies and the Uyghur genocide during a The New Yorker interview in 2019, after all... But I admittedly don't know enough Chinese history to be fully sure this assumption doesn't come from internalized sinophobia, so don't quote me on this hot take I guess; I'm fully ready to drop it if I'm wrong.
Anyways. What I'm trying to say here is that Pixar's A Bug's Life did the ants-as-workers concept better.
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