-La reencarnación existe, la historia la hacen los vencedores y en todas partes cuecen habas (y las queman, incluso)-.

Género. Narrativa Fantástica.

Lo que nos cuenta. La peste negra arrasa Europa. China y el Islam comienzan a competir por la supremacía. Mediante las vivencias de los personaje reencarnados vemos la evolución de ambas culturas y sus choques a lo largo de siete siglos, sin presencia de humanismo cristiano ni cristianismo.

¿Quiere usted saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

hhttp://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/2013/01/tiempos-de-arroz-y-sal.html

It’s a cultural roller-coaster: “In a cool storage building they went into a room filled with sealed porcelain and glass jars, and found a black penis for Kyu to take with him” (p. 67). That said, and although it seems like a good book, I DNF at 100 pages. It is just not for me, at least not right now. It’s less about a plague or apocalypse, than about culture and religion. There is reincarnation, “karmic jati,” and a quest for “buddha wisdom.” There are odd scenes in the afterlife (in Bordo), with judgment by a white god and black demon. And Robinson defines colic in babies as a battle between souls. I just couldn't get into all of that. Other than that, my only gripe is that Robinson ends every chapter in an irritating way: “but to find out more, you can read the next chapter” (p. 24); “but no doubt the next chapter will tell us” (p. 54). Come on. For real?

Based on the 100 pages I read, here are the ratings I would give:

1) Story (3/5)
2) Writing (3/5)
3) Originality (5/5)
4) Characters (4/5)
5) Set pieces (5/5)
6) Suspense (2/5)
7) Ending (-)
8) Relationships (romantic or otherwise) (4/5)
9) Dialogue (3/5)

This book is so unusual--not sure I've ever read a novel with this much reincarnation. :) At first I thought it was just K and B and I was keeping a list of their names in each new life...then I realized OH it's the I characters as well. Oh and the Ps.... WAIT A SECOND. Ha. Took a while to realize it was the whole jita / bardo / what have you.

But there were points when it became a bit of a slog. Or days when I found I didn't read, because this is what I was reading and I didn't feel like reading it. Some sections were more engaging than others-- I particularly loved the Nsara section (second from the end) and the last section as well.

He's wrestling with some really big ideas here --not just reincarnation-- and while I don't think it's always obvious what's happened in this alternate history, it's always interesting.

What causes well-fed and secure people to work for the subjugation and immiseration of starving insecure people? What, indeed.

Hmm. I liked the Mars trilogy and had high hopes for this one but couldn't get more than 3/4 of the way through. Premise - excellent. Execution - awkward. "What if the Black Death had wiped out 99% of Europe's population instead of only 30-40%?" Whole course of history altered, etc etc. Unfortunately, it was too ambitious and might have worked better at half the scope, with the rest left to the reader's imagination.

Robinson doesn't give you enough time to really get attached to the characters before cranking along to the next episode in history, even though the main players are literal reincarnations of those in the previous one. Maybe I just found the reincarnation thing a little too precious a device.

Admirable project, just a little heavy-handed in parts and too sprawling to really get invested in it.

Ressenya en català:

http://www.elkraken.com/R-Tiempos_de_...

Reseña en castellano:

http://www.elkraken.com/Esp/R-tiempos...

I knew the basic premise going in; what if the black death had killed off 99% of the population of Europe instead of the historical 30%. What I didn't expect was the form it would take in a novel: a series of somewhat interconnected short stories following the reincarnation of various characters through hundreds of years of history. At first I didn't know what one had to do with the other until the novel began to bring up themes of reincarnation as do-over, a chance to try things again in different ways. And isn't that what alternative history as a genre is? In interviews, author Kim Stanley Robinson has said that this book came to him when he tried to find the biggest change that could have happened to history while still leaving history recognizable. Or, he was trying to create an uber-alternative history, thus the meditations on the form within the book.

The world of the novel really got under my skin, its point of view sometimes more likely-seeming than actual history. China discovering the new world? Samarkand initiating the Renaissance? A South Indian ocean-spanning empire in the 1800's? These didn't happen? And that great world-building (as all great sci-fi and alt history novels should have) is probably what is going to stick with me the longest.

The short stories themselves were a mixed bag. Some I loved; the Golden Hoard general, the Chinese Columbus, the Samarkand Renaissance, the modernist stylings of the 60-year World War chapter. Some, not so much; the post-war spy thriller, most of the chapter on the resettling of Europe. And although I liked how the novel ended, I wish there were some way to bring the bardo (afterlife) back in one more time to wrap things up.

Really fascinating book - love the cavalcade of characters, following the same souls through a non-European world. Gets way too philosophical near the end, but justified, but still a great read!

DNF @15%

That was plenty of time to realize that this book is not going to hold my interest. Disappointed, because the synopsis holds a huge amount of potential!

So this really was another accident of the classic "Frank didn't read the blurb before starting" variety and I can tell you that when I did stop to read it, I felt like a bit of a silly billy.

As such this "review" (which is far too long) will be, more than usual, a collection of thoughts from a timid (and in this case largely uninterested) observer, after which I'll add a little digression at the end about how this book bounced up into my current reading pile.

If you'd like an actual review that brilliantly explains what this book is about look for the review by Claudia on GR which is just spectacular. I was looking for some guidance and read that review when I was about half way through the book and it helped me focus a lot better in the second half of my read through.

This is not at all a book for me given my inability to retain historical data (not for a lack of trying). Also, it doesn't help that I don't read alt history in general and would prefer (or generally require) a strong scifi element if I did. I don't know enough about history to know when this really diverged. Or even how much of it was different to actual history which is, I'm sure, the main draw for these books. At 760 odd pages I was definitely in deep, deep water with this one.

All told and in hindsight, I was able to laugh and scream in equal measure throughout this story. It's quite brutal near the start and after witnessing the castration of a young slave boy I was ready to give up. I'm glad that I persisted in some respects, because I do hate to give up on a story, especially one by a favourite author, but also because the story would eventually bring me as much joy as grief.

Just briefly, in case you too didn't read the blurb before starting my review. The premise is: How would society have changed if the Black Death had wiped out an even more significant portion of the population?

Ok anyway, the story only began to catch my interest around 250 ish pages into it when the characters began to develop scientific concepts. For the reasons mentioned I don't want to comment too much about how different things in the book are from reality, so don't over analyse my take, but I was grabbing the notion that maybe science blossoms earlier because say the period referred to as the dark ages doesn't come about and consequently libraries aren't burned etc... and there's no information reset.

I can see it, if the right(wrong) persons weren't around for one thing, but also probably civilisation's prior obtained knowledge would have to be considered much more precious a resource in this scenario, of course I'm way on board with that idea.

For an example of how little the details could possibly mean to me; at one point the Khan is watching a demonstration of ballistics and wind resistance comes up as a topic. The Khan makes a reference to a knife slicing through butter and well I don't even truly know what century this is happening in beyond a guess so even though it sounds like a modern phrase I'm not sure if the Khan would have butter to reference or not. How old is butter? (A decade ago I would have been Googling this kind of thing while reading, but I'm just not that interested lately.)

All of this reinventing science at a different time or a different place is conceptually stimulating, however as a story this is rather dull. Particularly if you're already familiar with basic science and I'd presume that it's not much less dull even if you aren't. So, what is this book all about? What's the story and where is it going? I think basically imagine that Western dominance isn't a thing and we get a narrative of Eastern folks adding their values more dominantly into the march of progress.

Is it an optimistic view as I've hinted at above or ultimately a pessimistic take on what could have been? Well like any good story it flips a little back and forth with the flow of the narrative and I'll let you decide once you reach the ending for yourself.

With very few exceptions I generally don't enjoy watching others play sports and as it turns out, I now know that I enjoy reading about a fictional lacrosse game even less.

"Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation."

There are a few religions that feature to varying degrees in the story which is as you'd expect, but interestingly probably the most frequently mentioned religious idea is the Buddhist notion of reincarnation and at least twice we seem to follow characters into the afterlifey, transition period (like a catholic "limbo" I guess, where the person goes between incarnations). This inclusion of the supernatural and the occasional "keep reading to see what happens in the next chapter" thrown in by the narrator had me rather confused about what exactly was going on with this book.

Stories that span large periods of time can lose a lot of steam because of switching characters and consequently diminished attachment to the expanding cast. Marina J Lostetter got past this in her 'Noumenon' series by having her generation ship populated with clones, who were never quite the same person twice but managed to provide an ongoing connection. In this story reincarnation eventually serves that same function and I liked that aspect of the narrative.

Another thing I didn't pick up on, which I learned from Claudia's wonderful review, was that the author connected the reincarnated individuals by always matching the first letter of their names. This was one of the things which really helped me focus better in the second half and was actually necessary in order to understand and appreciate the final line of the book!

Here's a comical exchange about reincarnation that I wanted to share:

"just before we're sent back into the world, the Goddess Meng administers to us a vial of forgetting."

"I don't remember that," Keeper said.

"That's the point."

- (Zing! Well, duh! Keep up, Keeper!)

And a few more quotes which are just random observations from the text that I also decided to share:

"To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time is even harder. If you want release from the wheel, persevere."

"In a rage he committed her to a monastery, then he burned the monastery down."

"A bodhisattva, Dizang Wang, took her spirit to the Forest of Corpses, where she helped the unsettled ghosts. After that she went down through the levels of hell, teaching the spirits there to rise above their suffering, and she was so successful that Lord Yama returned her as the Bodhisattva Guanyin, to help the living learn these good things while they are still alive, before it's too late for them."

"Think of equations as excuses, and you'll be fine! But all you do is think of ways not to think of things!"

And that's all I can really observe about the book for you, folks. It's possibly a good alt history but I'm not the person to ask. I've told you how it made me feel a bit of everything at various stages. KSR is probably the perfect author to do alt history because his books tend to be detail heavy and very focused on political and technological elements.

I'm going to end with the promised digression about how I got here, so most readers can probably skip the last few paragraphs, provided merely for entertainment value, at my own expense of course.

So how did I so mistakenly begin reading this book? Well, being a KSR fan this was already in my TBR pile and by chance this came up as a nomination for an August read in a scifi book club that I recently joined on fb. It didn't win the poll but on an impulse I decided to read the 5 or 6 losing nominations as well as the winner. To add to the hilarity of my silliness, I had actually voted for this based solely on familiarity with the author, again, I hadn't read the blurb at all. In a stunning bit of added irony, I had recently started a discussion in that same fb group about how I wasn't convinced that alt history was scifi and that I couldn't see myself reading much of it.

Well, it's not exactly my first alt history, I'm thinking of the Flashman papers and a short story by Eric Choi called 'The Greatest Day' and it is true that I enjoyed both of those but the former is a comedy and the latter very scifi so I definitely enjoyed them for reasons other than the alternate take on history that they presented.

This book has done nothing to change my mind and I still think I'll avoid alt history as a general rule except by accident (as in this case) or by hook, if historic events might be reimagined to include aliens or something similarly, unambiguously scifi.

I'm going to end with a quote from near the end of the book which many book collectors will appreciate and seems particularly fitting in this case, for me. Talking about the many and varied books on his shelves:

"But I have not read them, I must admit. They exist only for their titles, which say it all. They could be blank inside."

Possibly my most favorite book ever.

My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson is an immense story. It is the history of a world, similar to but not the one that we live in today. The tale begins on the premise that the Black Death of the 14th century killed, essentially, the entire population of Europe, removing Christians from the development of history. This is an alternate history of the world.

The story is told over a time span of about six hundred years, from the Plague Years up until what corresponds to the year the book was published, 2002. It is divided into ten “books” that follow a jati, that is, a group of kindred spirits that are reincarnated together in each life. The exact number of the souls in this jati is never specified, although it's suggested there are eight of them, and they are easily identifiable by the common first letters of their names in each incarnation. The characters have no memories of their time as spirits in the realm of the bardo, but their fates are intertwined and their personalities constant, despite being embodied as different people.

The impression I got from this book is that most of what’s happened in history has been inevitable – oppression, invention, discovery, war, globalization - with or without Western involvement. So, why write an alternate history, if everything ends up being the same?

I think there is a lot that can be accomplished. First, while the book does not disproportionately praise any one of the cultures it introduces as the major players, except perhaps the Hodenosaunee League, it does try to legitimize these often overlooked viewpoints to the reader. The motivations of the people in this alternate history are, at their core, identical to the ones that "Westerners" know so well and learned in their history classes. That is, simply, they are human motivations. It is a key theme of the book, in fact - that the human experience is transcendent of a single race or culture, gender or age. This is especially clear when thinking about the variety of people the jati group are reincarnated into - men and women both, of every religion and on every continent.

So, understanding the distinct similarities between our history and this one, readers must then think more closely about why history is unfolding in the exact same way. Who or what force is responsible for this? What drives civilization? Is history indeed like a river, allowing for little change in course? And is there any meaning to it? If so, what?

It’s a thought-provoking read, and extremely well-written (even though some parts beg incredulity, e.g., Book 4, The Alchemist). Not only does Robinson describe the scenes in gorgeous details, he chooses interesting characters and backdrops for the historical events unfolding, and matches the writing style of each book to extant literature corresponding to the time periods and cultures he is writing about. Since I spent my university career reading literature hundreds of years old from a variety of places (such as The Journey to the West, The Ramayana, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon) this was like candy.

It is not a book, though, that you can fly through. There are many unexciting moments, and others that require a lot of examination. If you dislike books that introduce too many characters to remember their names, foreign terms often without explanation, and long philosophical, religious, historical, and epistemological discourses, this is not a book for you. In fact, I don’t know that I could have enjoyed this book as much as I did without the background knowledge I have from my university courses. Much of it would have gone over my head. For example, I noticed that many reviewers who disliked this book criticized the “patronizing” or “cheesy” tone of the first section, how the chapters would end with phrases like, “To find out more, you can read the next chapter”. Except this was merely copying the style of storytelling that Journey to the West used. Robinson even sets the mood by using a quote from Journey to the West as the book’s epigraph, but, if you don’t know anything about Journey, all of this is lost.

I think this is a book that you either love, or hate. It’s my first KSR, and I understand from reading reviews that it is nothing at all like the Mars Trilogy, to name one of his other works. But, I enjoyed it immensely, and I definitely gained respect for the author – I can’t imagine how much time must have gone into planning this. If anything, I want to read his other works now more than before, to see how they differ and what they do share in common with this one.

While the premise is interesting, I was unable to read beyond the first two chapters. I found the whole thing bland. A single character running around for two whole chapters without any kind of character building along with the clipped writing style ensured that I dumped this book right at the start. Onwards and upwards now!