The Gondwanan Empire and the Laurasian Republic of Dinosaurs, keeping their conquest of space secret from the ants, each use a passing interstellar asteroid of antimatter to create an even more devastating superweapon.

Paul Di Filippo wrote in the Locus Magazine, that the novel is "an old-fashioned speculative look back into the deep past, as well as a wry parable about politics, hubris, power, competitiveness, and intolerance."

He further wrote that the novella "indulges in a bit of Lovecraftian atmosphere" and near the end "harks to no other author more than Stanislaw Lem", being "like one of those lunatic forays into some bizarre yet organically authentic culture."

He added that it is has "playful tone and enormous scope", but still "doesn’t leave much room for characterization, and even the handful of generals, diplomats, and scientists who are given names and individual identities are little more than talking viewpoints.

"[5] Publishers Weekly wrote that the novella "delivers a sharp allegory of ant-dinosaur relations in this high concept alternate history," which "mingles real science with prescientific beliefs and invests his critters with enough anthropomorphic attributes to make them understandable but not so much as to render them humans in costumes, similar to Orwell’s masterful pigs and sheep in Animal Farm.