Масштабная альтернативная история, в которой чума выкосила всю Европу под корень. Китайцы открыли Америку, но захватить ее не сумели - индейцы спаслись, сохранив независимость и образовав союз. В результате мир поделен между китайцами и мусульманами, Северная Америка принадлежит индейцам, белые и рыжие встречаются разве что в гареме, а буддизм является доминирующей религией (после завершения 20-летней войны между китайцами и мусульманским союзом, в которой последние проиграли).

Удивительно, но несмотря на дерзкую задумку недостатки Робинсона здесь заметнее обычного, а уровень упрощений - виднее. Текст состоит из десяти глав с разными героями в разном времени. Робинсон использует реинкарнацию и конкретно идею о бардо, промежутке между жизнями, как сценарную связку. Бардо существует, герои в каждой главе разные, но одновременно это группа из трех душ, претерпевающих перерождение. Раб, умерший в ярости, суфийский мудрец, монгольский воин или китайский адмирал - человек может оказаться, кем угодно, колесница перерождений не останавливается.

С одной стороны, фантазировать на тему другого миропорядка интересно. С другой стороны, Робинсон всегда продвигает идею о том, что человечество - это рой, способный достигать чего-то работой поколениями. Он чересчур дидактичен. Герои обсуждают инженерные достижения или философию и очень похожи друг на друга. В его фантастике это более-менее работает - что в терраформировании Марса (трилогия про Марс), что в полете к дальним планетам ("Аврора") есть цель. Здесь же как роевая деятельность предстает прошлое, что снижает любопытство, а отстраненность усугубляется хаосом перерождений, безжалостностью буддистского колеса, ведь опыт и старания человека каждый раз обнуляются. По Робинсону люди не слишком отличаются друг от друга, поэтому его итоговый мир менее технически ориентированный, без интернета и космоса, более коммунный, но в целом узнаваемый. Это любопытный мысленный эксперимент, смелая идея, но довольно скучный текст. Мне не досталось улова. По завершении остается вопрос - зачем?

This is the fourth KSR book I've read so far. The previous 3 were his "Science In The Capitol" series. In "The Years Of Rice And Salt" KSR travels back to the past, to a world where Europeans play no role. Thanks to the 14th Century Black Plague. No, this time it's about "what if the world would have been dominated by the East, under influence of the Islamic and Buddhist religions, ...".

As you can imagine, beliefs, religion, spirituality all play a key role in this novel. It's such an epic work (763 pages), that maybe, yes, it would have been better to split it into several novels. But on the other hand, it's not about all those specific stories in each proper era and setting - the book is divided into 10 books, so to speak, 10 stories in which the same characters play a role and meet each other again through reincarnation, but they don't recognize themselves until very late - but rather about the message behind it, about creating a better world for all and yourself. About growing as a human being. About equality. And yes, there's thus also political influence in this novel.

You can read about each of the ten books on KSR's website: click here.

KSR must have done a tremendous amount of research to come up with this kind of story/ies and combine them so that they make sense, somehow, that you see an evolution in how the main characters respond to the happenings in each of their 10 lives. How they act as the person they incarnated as - be that a warrior, a slave, a doctor, a scientist, an emperor, and so on - and how afterwards (in the bardo / afterlife where our fellowship regroups each time) they understand (or don't and act foolishly) their behaviour and how to change it in the next life, until the circle is round. It's also nice to see how KSR sends each group back, but in a future life. However, to me the descriptions of the future weren't always clear. It was sometimes hard to visualize it.

"The Years Of Rice And Salt" is certainly not an accessible work. It takes time and focus to grasp it all, not only because of the writing style, but also the cultural terminology. Luckily, KSR added blocks of info in Book 6. but why only there? Still, it takes definitely one (or more) re-read(s) (which I should do, but not now) to understand, to see the bigger picture, to see the complete puzzle.

The book (also) contains a lot of food for thought, be that spiritual or political. In addition, when reading these stories, you can try to apply them to how the West conquered the East, the Native Americans, Africa, etc... was it that different? Money, power, religion, ... also play(ed) a big role.

In any case, this is a eye-opening masterwork and kudos to KSR for having undertaken this gigantic quest.

Torn about this, much like other KSRs I've read. Yes, his vision is incredible. Yes, his ideas are sometimes brilliant. Yes, when he digs into one aspect of this world, it's endlessly fascinating. Yet so often I find myself feeling like I don't get enough of either the macro nor the micro. He's so busy doing philosphy and theory of history that we don't get to sit in the actual storytelling often enough - especially when the history, as far as we can tell, doesn't really change beyond recognition. There's always a Columbus, always a Leonardo, always an Einstein, and KSR's utopianism feels like a teacher's edition a little too often.

And yet, when it is good, it's really good. This is one I imagine will stick in my head. I'll probably recommend it to people. Just with caveats.

Let me start by saying that I'm not generally a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson's work. I loved Red Mars, then stumbled through Green Mars and gave up in disgust at Blue Mars. I found they were filled with exposition and endless descriptions of landscapes, and I really didn't like the fact that the main characters stuck it out through three novels instead of allowing more interesting characters to take their place.

I felt drawn to The Years of Rice and Salt, even though the same annoyances seemed present. That being said, if like me you were burnt by Blue Mars but are intrigued by the premise of this book - do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's a work of staggering immensity, yet such a personal and touching novel that one wonders how historical scope and intimate drama could ever be weaved together so finely. The "immortality" of the main characters, while a mere plot device in the Mars trilogy, is at the core of the theme of Years of Rice and Salt : it speaks of the role of individuals in History, of how individual actions and lives weave the tapestry of History, and how the dramas of daily lives influence and are influenced by the unfolding twists and turns of Humanity. The individual lives it depicts are poignant, and play superbly against the backdrop of this alternate history where China and Islam are the two major powers of the world. More than a plot device, reincarnation is used here to paint deeply personal portraits of each period of history. Of particular interest is the role that Native Americans play in this alternate history : the way their culture grows and envelops other nations is, I felt, the true tragedy at the heart of Rice and Salt, speaking of squandered opportunities when the West conquered the New World.

The novel builds like a puzzle through 11 stages of human history, and what finally emerges is a humanist, ecologist and even feminist tale of compassion, tolerance and hope, something that transcends its alternate history roots to speak of the Heart of Mankind. If it were just for its historical scope, The Years of Rice and Salt would have been an interesting anecdote in the alternate history genre. Instead, this novel is a major achievement that transcends science-fiction, and should stand at the very top of the alternate history genre for years to come, and as Robinson's crowning achievement.

23rd book for 2020.

An immensely enjoyable, if a bit too long, alternative history of the World, told as if European civilisation had been destroyed by the plague and the World had continued under the two poles of Islamic and Chinese civilisations. As always with KSR novels character development is paper thin, but ideas keep the narrative rolling forward at a good pace. My biggest regret is that KSR's future history develops along very similar trajectories to our own, which ultimately feels a little boring and safe.

4-stars.

Now there is nothing left to do
But scribble in the dusk and watch with the beloved
Peach blossoms float downstream.
Looking back at all the long years
All that happened this way and that
I think I liked most the rice and the salt.

The Years of Rice and Salt is a thick, dense alternate history spanning continents and centuries. Its vast cast of characters includes, as the blurb puts it, "soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars". Through their eyes we see the forces that shape their world, which develops in strange and yet intriguingly familiar ways through the centuries.

That description to me sounds like a roadmap to Boredsville, and though I'd heard good things about this one, part of me was expecting a plodding, dry tome focused more on history's big machine and prominent personalities than on any relatable human drama. Normally I'd avoid that sort of thing like the plague -- which, incidentally, is where the book diverges from our reality:



Here, instead of killing a third of Europe's population, the Black Death kills 99%. White people are more or less nonexistent, Christianity is a footnote, and China and the Muslim nations have become the dominant powers shaping world history.

In ten sections, the book takes us from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, and from China and India to the European wastelands and the New World. It is not only emphatically unboring, it's one of the most ambitious and stunning novels I've read in a long time.

The book is structured around its Hindu/Buddhist conceit, following the same set of characters through several incarnations as they struggle to evolve and pursue nirvana. Though their races and genders (and occasionally species) morph through time, they fill similar roles in every avatar. The character whose name starts with K is disaffected, angry, an iconoclast - often tortured or martyred for hir idealism, whether as a mutinous slave, a radical feminist, or a hotheaded scientist. K's foil is B, hir friend or partner (but rarely lover) who is the more hopeful, pragmatic and effective of the pair - it is B who is usually the POV character. Then there is I, who is usually a scholar or a mystic, and romantic partner to either B or K. And S, who is a dick, always antagonizing the other characters (which they get pretty pissed about in the bardo between incarnations, when they remember who they have been in other lives: "And you!" [K] roared. "What is your EXCUSE! Why are you always so bad? Consistency is no excuse, your CHARACTER is NO EXCUSE!")

In this way, the book avoids one of my main frustrations with sprawling epics like this - the lack of developed characters with an arc to get really invested in. Though the setting changes, here we're essentially following the same handful of people throughout history. And they do develop as themselves, but they also stand in for all of us. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, the story of humanity is the story of generation after generation striving to avoid the mistakes of the past and achieve the closest thing to perfection it is within our power to attain. And none of us ever gets there, but every new generation picks up the baton and gives it a shot anyway.


B: Come on, you can't deny it. We keep coming back. We keep going out again. Everybody does. That's dharma. We keep trying. We keep making progress... Here we are. Here to be sent back again, sent back together, our little jati. I don't know what I would do without all of you. I think the solitude would kill me.

K: You're killed anyway.

B: Yes, but it's less lonely this way. And we're making a difference. No, we are! Look at what has happened! You can't deny it!

K: Things were done. It's not very much.

B: Of course. You said it yourself, we have thousands of lifetimes of work to do. But it's working.

K: Don't generalize. It could all slip away.

B: Of course. But back we go, to try again. Each generation makes its fight. A few more turns of the wheel. Come on-- back with a will. Back into the fray!



And so, through genocides and world wars, injustice and devastation, these characters reveal their world to us as they endeavor, in small ways, to improve it. They make scientific discoveries, write influential books, build egalitarian societies, thwart wrongs large and small. Each section is told in a different style, which brings to mind  Cloud Atlas (something several people pointed out to me when I described the book, though the two actually strike me as very different -- Cloud Atlas is about the repetition of themes across time, the connectedness of everything; Rice and Salt is about the impact of history on human lives and vice versa, and the will to evolve). Strangely, it also reminded me of Neal Stephenson's  Anathem, another unexpectedly engrossing, satisfying philosophical SF tome - alternate universe rather than alternate history, though really, there's not much difference between the two. I felt the same way reading both books -- that thrill of having discovered something precious and perfect.

There's plenty in here to satisfy different interests: a vast and well-developed alternate history, an intriguing cast of characters, a crash-course in some tenets of Eastern spirituality, a meditation on the human condition, an array of metafictional highwire tricks, and ten ripping good stories.

Highly recommended.

This rating is for the audio book.

This is another of those books I tried to read two or three times previously and never could do it despite knowing I would like it once I got involved in it. I would read a bit, then my mind would take off on its own little jaunt, and, well - look! A squirrel!
Sometimes a book is meant to be read out loud to me while I knit..

"The Years Of Rice and Salt" posits a world where Christianity is for all intents wiped out by the plague, leaving Europe nearly uninhabited for hundreds of years. The Eastern cultures are not as hard hit, or are spared. The religions of Islam, Hindustan, Buddhism thrive, alternatively struggling with each other and coexisting.
The story follows a cohort of souls that continue to progress together throughout many different lifetimes, trying in each existence to figure out what it is all for.

"The Years Of Rice and Salt" is one of 4 books I am listening to narrated by Bronson Pinchot, and he shows a depth of skill and vocal quality that amaze me. I actually picked up 3 of the books he narrates without knowing they were by him. He does a lot of speculative fiction, which I read, and now I will admit to being more inclined toward purchasing the audio book vs. the ebook if the price is similar and he is the narrator.

Alas, is not samsara like the sea? Drawing as much water as one pleases, it remains the same without abating.
-Milrepa, Sixty Songs of Milarepa

I love alternate history. I love thinking about how seemingly simple things can change its course, and thinking about all the butterflies that would ripple through based on them. What if Julian the Apostate hadn't died fighting the Persians? What if the plagues in the Americans had been spread by the Vikings and the inhabitants had been resistant when the Europeans showed up centuries later? What if Zheng He's expeditions had been allowed to continue? What if Captain Patrick Ferguson had shot George Washington in the back?

If the Romans had won at the Battle of Adrianople, would I be writing this in Latin? If the Plague of Justinian hadn't destroyed the Byzantines' dream of reuniting the empire, would I be writing this in Greek? If Zheng He had discovered the Americas, would I be writing this in Chinese? If William the Conquerer had lost at Hastings, would I be writing this in Ænglisc? If the Native Americans had been resistant to smallpox, would I be writing this in Hocąk?

When I initially heard about it, I thought that The Years of Rice and Salt was an alternate history, and in the technical sense it is. The Black Plague is much more deadly here than it was in the real world, and the death of essentially the entire European population causes plenty of ripple effects. The Industrial Revolution begins in India. Republican government is popularized by the Iroquois, and their matrilineal system is later used as inspiration for a feminist movement in Islamic lands. The first world world lasts sixty years, is called the Long War, and is fought between an alliance of Islamic states and the Chinese Empire.

That's not really what the book is about, though, it's just the backdrop. The main conceit of The Years of Rice and Salt--and this isn't really a spoiler, because you learn about it within the first couple of chapters--is that every set of characters in the successive time periods and places the book moves through are the same people, reincarnated again and again by the wheel of Saṃsāra. As you might expect with that as the framing device, the book is incredibly fatalistic. It's true that there is progress, though I think the book's depiction is hampered by its reliance on the Great Man theory (about which more later), but there's a lot of recognition that life is suffering and pain, punctuated by moments of joy, but you keep living because what else can you do?

This is pretty much my exact view of the world, so that made me well-disposed to the book right off the bat. You probably won't make any difference and the whims of fate will probably ruin your endeavours, but if you don't try, there won't be anything to fail or succeed at all. You may only succeed ten percent of the time, but ten percent of 0 is 0.

At the same time, the focus on a single group of characters through successive lives doesn't make it quite as bleak as I'm portraying it (that's just me being dour). The characters have the same letter in their names each life and they tend to have similar thematic roles, so S is often a ruler and usually kind of a dick, I is a rationalist and often a scientist, K is a revolutionary eager to overturn the established order, whether social or intellectual, and B is the yin to K's yang, helping to keep K grounded and to disseminate and practicalize their discoveries.

The problem here is that it often seems like basically every major discovery in the world and the impetus behind many of the major events come from this group of people, like the Great Man theory of history on steroids. Sure, there are social trends that are also taken into account, but when those social trends were begun by the characters' previous incarnations I start to wonder whether anyone else in the world comes up with anything meaningful. It isn't entirely a fair assessment, since there are innovations mentioned that do arise from external sources. It's just that they aren't provided any special emphasis. For example, the first indication you have that flintlocks have been invented is when K pulls one out and shoots someone with it. Though then again, emphasizing the discoveries the characters make and playing down all the others just reinforces the Great Man theory again. There's even a passage where one of the characters brings up the Great Man theory and it gets dismissed, so it's not like Robinson was unaware of this problem. I'm not really sure that it's possible to use the reincarnation framing without falling prey to that, but it still bothered me.

One theme Robinson returns to over and over is the subjugation of women. The Islamic alliance lost the Long War because they refused to grant women rights and mobilize them for the war effort. The argument made by separatist communities that the hadith have been perverted by later clerics and the text of the Koran is feminist. Foot-binding and concubinage in imperial China. The way women can remove chiefs from power among the Iroquois. There's an argument that one of, or perhaps the, major issues holding cultural development back is the refusal to allow women to participate as anything other than lesser, and this is one of the aspects that actually seems to improve over the course of the novel. People are still killing and cheating and stealing all throughout the course of the book without any real end, but the status of women does measurably improve, albeit it in fits and starts.

Unfortunately, I think "life is terrible, especially for women, but maybe we can make it better" isn't a strong enough theme to sustain the book over its entire length. In addition, as a multi-life story of the various characters with a strong fatalistic tone, many of the sections end in everyone dying and whatever progress they made being lost, to the point where eventually I stopped caring what happened to the characters and was reading it for the alternate history, which made it worse because the end of the book is much more character-focused. If The Years of Rice and Salt had been 100 or 200 pages shorter, I probably would have given it four or five stars, but it was seriously dragging at the end and I kept putting it down as my mind wandered. "Life is hard, mostly awful, but could be made better" is true, but just like it's not fun to listen to someone talk about at length, it's not that fun to read over the long term.

Even the last chapter, which finally delves into some of the overarching themes of history and a cyclical view vs. a teleological view, didn't pull it up for me. If there had been more of that kind of philosophical discussion in the book instead of the what seemed like the same story repeated over and over, I might have liked it better, but as it is I think The Years of Rice and Salt is about 50% too long.

In retrospect, it's surprising that there aren't MORE fantasy novels about a group of people being reincarnated multiple times, with lives sprawling through a centuries-long alternate history. But, if there were, most all of them would not be as good as this.

The reincarnation plot (complete with matter-of-fact scenes set in the "bardo" between lives) is an excellent way of tempering what would otherwise be a sometimes depressing plot. Basically, the novel starts shortly after the Black Plague kills everyone in Europe, so world history is dominated by the interactions between China, Japan, Muslim cultures based in north Africa and Europe, and an alliance of Native Americans.

It's certainly long, and the arc of history sometimes dominates the arc of narrative, and towards the end we get some multiple-page lectures about theories of history. But, overall, an excellent job.

The most impressive Robinson I've read since, since.... well, ever, I guess. This is Alt Hist played with the net up, and the writing and characterization are just about as good as it gets. The opening episode -- just after the point of divergence, when the Black Death exterminated humanity in Europe -- is nightmarish, chilling.

I recommend The Years of Rice and Salt to your attention, with the caveat that it has the usual KSR strengths and weaknesses, and so will alternately thrill and annoy you. At least some of the annoyances will make you think. This is a very good piece of work by an author who knows where he's headed, and just how to get there. His best novel, I think.

Sometimes a 5 star sometimes 3 or maybe less. So many intriguing ideas that bounce around with a sorta kinda plot.

lesson to be learned: just because you like one book (or in this case, three) by a particular author doesn't necessarily have to imply that you will have to like all books. This, my darlings, is a blatant case in point.

Thy premise: The black plague knocks out 99 percent of Western Europe - so far, so good. However, instead of focusing on the immediate after effects of such an event, as is the case with the first chapter, albeit in somewhat of a too stylistically poetic fashion, the novel instead embarks on a parallel (note, parallel, not alternative) history of the world as the rest of the world matures in the void of the white man's burden... which is also an interesting notion, except for one small snatch - each and every single story focuses on the reincarnated souls of approximately 4 individuals, all with similar names who are somehow or another responsible for, oh, basically EVERY major invention and innovation in the history of mankind, and somehow in the thick of it all, nearly always end up being massacred at the end of their respective chapters... by about the third chapter, oh my children, the proverbial jig was, oh, just kindasorta up and I was officially bored... and only reading the novel for a.) hope of improvement and b.) lack of any idea as to what i wanted to read next.... ho hum.

Back to the parallel history aspect - just slightly weak. especially with regard to temporal events. somehow, nearly every major invention in the novel coincided with its temporal occurrence in our respective tomes - the telescope and gravity in the 17th century, an industrial revolution with trains and steam ships in the 18th, a world war in the mid-20th, etc. Many apologies, but being a history buff, I know how it all happened - if i want to read about alternatives, I'd hope that it would be something other than just a word scramble of proper nouns as to the wheres and whats that form the specifics of said alternication... not to mention that one single Sufi alchemist somehow manages to claim the merits of Newton, Gallileo and Kepler all in one... erm, mildly suspect, ja?

eh, just thought I'd share...