Dinosaur cities were now immeasurably vast, on a scale even larger than those of the Steam-Engine Age, with skyscrapers that towered 10,000 metres into the sky – or more. Standing on the roof of one of these buildings was like looking down from one of our high-altitude aircraft, putting you way above the clouds that seemed to hug the Earth below. When the cloud cover was heavy, dinosaurs on the perpetually sunny top floors would phone the doorman on the ground floor to check whether it was raining down there and if they’d need an umbrella for the journey home. Their umbrellas were voluminous, of course, like our big-top circus tents.

Though the dinosaurs’ cars now ran on petrol, not steam, they were still the size of our multi-storey buildings and the ground still trembled beneath their wheels. Aeroplanes had replaced balloons and these were as bulky as our ocean liners, rolling across the sky like thunder and casting titanic shadows across the streets below. The dinosaurs even ventured into space. Their satellites and spaceships moved in geosynchronous orbit and were, naturally, also colossal – so colossal, in fact, that you could discern their shapes quite clearly from Earth.

The global dinosaur population had increased tenfold and more since the Steam-Engine Age. Because they ate a lot and because everything they used was on a massive scale, dinosaurs consumed foodstuff and materials in astronomical quantities. It required untold numbers of farms and factories to meet these needs. The factories were powered by hulking great nuclear-powered machines and the skies above them were perpetually obscured by dense smoke. Keeping dinosaur society functioning efficiently was an extremely complex operation and the circulation of energy resources, raw materials and finance had to be coordinated by computers. A sophisticated computer network linked every part of the dinosaur world, and the computers involved were necessarily enormous too. Each keyboard key was the size of one of our computer screens, and their screens were as wide as our walls.

The ant world had also entered an advanced Information Age, but the ants obtained energy from completely different sources; they did not use oil or coal but harvested wind and solar power instead. Ant cities were cluttered with wind turbines, similar in size and shape to the pinwheels our children play with, and their buildings were covered with shiny black solar cells. Another important technology in the ant world was bioengineered locomotor muscle. Locomotor muscle fibres resembled bundles of thick electric cables, but when injected with nutrient solution, they could expand and contract at different frequencies to generate power. All of the ants’ cars and aeroplanes were powered by these muscle fibres.