It has taken me a week to get round to writing this review, for two reasons. First, a sudden and intense TV obsession (Word of Honour, highly recommended) and second, concern about not doing 'The Years of Rice and Salt' justice. I first tried to read it as an undergraduate student, I think, and gave up pretty quickly. I was too impatient to appreciate Kim Stanley Robinson when I was younger, but now I'm in my thirties he's one of my favourite authors. This novel is different in setting to his sci-fi, while retaining the same themes that make his other books so satisfying: the pursuit of scientific understanding, the alleviation of human suffering, the pursuit of justice and equality, and management of the environment. The depth and nuance he brings to these topics really stands out. His novels are long and full of thoughtful detail; they repay careful reading. As soon as I started reading 'The Years of Rice and Salt' this time, I was enthralled. Both the concept and its execution are fascinating.

'The Years of Rice and Salt' is an alternate history in which, essentially, the Black Death killed all white people. Aside from a few isolated Scottish islands, Europe is completely depopulated. It is gradually reoccupied by people from the Middle East, becoming a loose network of Islamic city states. History proceeds without the West, along a different yet analogous path. Colonisation and world war aren't avoided, but occur differently. The main powers are China, India, and a league of Islamic states. The North American east and west coasts are colonised, but indigenous people retain control of the interior. Religion and resources still drive conflict, yet capitalism takes a somewhat different form without Christianity as its moral armour. The whole thought experiment is highly thought-provoking and impressively wide-ranging.

I would have happily read this counterfactual told in the style of a non-fiction history book. Instead, the narrative follows a small group of characters through a series of reincarnations, spread across 600 years and the whole world. Each section evokes a different time and place, using a range of stylistic conceits like inset text. These variations serve to distinguish the sections, while the continuity of characters ensures the narrative coheres. Between lives, the characters briefly unite in the Bardo and discuss their progress. These conversations and the nature of the Bardo give the book a powerful spiritual dimension. When aware that they've lived many times and will live many more, the characters ask: what is the aim of our lives? What should humanity be striving for? How can we do better next time? I really liked the detail that the Bardo changes over time. The most haunting section for me was during the Long War, when the characters couldn't tell whether they were still alive or dead in the Bardo. The war seemed to have collapsed the barriers between life and death. This section evoked a terrifying vision of trench warfare bisecting the whole of India, from coast to Himalayas.

War does not predominate in the narrative, however, as the characters are reincarnated as explorers, scientists, political activists, writers, teachers, and wild animals. Their relationships and experiences vary accordingly, while retaining an essential bond of community. Kim Stanley Robinson shows a completely new world history through their eyes and presents his essentially optimistic and progressive view of humanity. None of the political thinkers and leaders we know exist in this world, yet egalitarian ideas arise:

"This is the world we want you to help us make," he said. "We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullas or ulema, no more slavery and no more ursury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, arms, armies, or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are."

Unsurprisingly, I found 'The Years of Rice and Salt' a happier and more hopeful reading experience than Kim Stanley Robinson's more recent novels The Ministry for the Future and New York 2140. In those, he seeks to write humanity a way out of climate change catastrophe, whereas this has the comfortable distance of alternate history. Still, the characters' philosophical and political debates encourage the reader to reflect on how history could have happened differently. 'The Years of Rice and Salt' doesn't claim that without white Europeans none of the atrocities of colonialism, slavery, and industrialised war could have happened; that would be an unconvincing cop-out. Nonetheless, the history of North America in particular would have been very different and the alternative here is considerably less destructive. I don't have enough historical knowledge to judge the overall plausibility of events. The details were nonetheless convincingly imagined: the music, clothing, attitudes to drugs, units of measurement, names of technology, and metaphors that developed without Europe and Christianity. This is an incredibly ambitious book that succeeds in telling an alternate world history that is both engaging and challenging. It was both escapist to read and a reminder of the huge impact that plagues have on the course of history.

Rather than a novel, this is more like a series of short stories/novellas. It follows the same characters through various incarnations. In some of them the connections are easy to make, in others it's not so easy. The alternate history aspect is interesting, and couldn't have been fully explored without this device, I suppose, but I found it jarring to be jerked from time period to time period, culture to culture, and I never really fell in love with the characters as continuations of the previous characters. There were characters I found interesting in each separate story, but I didn't necessarily like them in their other incarnations, I mean. If I had, maybe I'd have cared more.

As it is, I ended up abandoning this book for a while, and almost skimming to finish it. I really liked "The Alchemist", and kind of wanted more of it than that -- that and the first story especially stick in my head.

An interesting idea, but the execution didn't work for me. I might reread it someday.

Some of the parts in the book were really great, engaging characters and exciting or interesting storylines. Some of the stories were too short, a few slightly too long and then there was the last. Did wonder where Robinson was going with this, even felt like he'd run out of steam and wasn't sure how to end it.
However over all I thought it was a good premise, but would have liked to have more on those venturing into Europe. What did they find?, feel?, see?.

Wow, what a journey! I really started to get into this book once I started imagining it come to life in an HBO TV show, probably about halfway through. Which is actually quite funny, bc the reason I started reading this book was bc one of the kids I tutor recommended it. Well, idk if he recommended it so much as talked a lot about it and made it sound very interesting. But it's funny bc his whole thing is that he wants to turn it into a tv show too! I had totally forgotten about that when I started visualizing it that way.

Anyways the kid talked about how this was a book of alternate history where the characters are reincarnated into different lives throughout the book, and it explores a vision of history if the Europeans/Christians were completely wiped out by the plague. So it explores a world history where Buddhism and Islam are dominant religions, and by the end of the book the dominant powers seem to be China and a large Islamic State, as well as India and the Haudenosaunee league of North America being less dominant but wielding a high level of power.

Throughout the book, the same souls are reincarnated as different characters. You can track because their names start with the same letter. The three major characters are the B character who represents good faith, the K character who represents rebellion and action, and the I character who represents science and thought. I kinda wanna go thru all the incarnations because I think they're interesting and I couldn't find a website where they are all lined up like this. I will put them at the bottom bc it is a lot it turns out.

Okay, reasons I liked this book: reading a book with the premise of reincarnation and how each person has a 'jati', or group of souls that their destinies and lives are intertwined with definitely helped with my existential dread. And being able to see how history goes on and on, and has been doing so really forever. Like for sooooo long. It was trippy to get to know the characters and their lives and then watch them die. I really liked this aspect of the book, it was comforting in this sense.

Reasons I didn't give 5 stars: a little bit boring. I read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and that book was soooooo boring (no offense), like the amount of detail is a little too much. This book is much more interesting to me, as I am much more interested in religion and history than I am in space travel. But there was definitely the same style of over-describing minute and niche details. But instead of details for a how a space ship works, this was details of geography and political/cultural power structures that I am unfamiliar with. There were lots of words I had to look up. It's very jargon-y! Yeah it was definitely dense at times.

Also in between reincarnations, we would sometimes see the characters in the Bardo. And I was a little confused in these parts because the characters would literally fight the Gods sometimes? I wished that part was a little fleshed out more. Because in the beginning they are like "It's all a figment of your mind, what you see isn't real but how you react will determine your next incarnation." But then that is never really re-addressed. And the K character keeps fighting the Gods because he doesn't want to be reincarnated because he feels like it is cruel and life on Earth will never get better. And then in book 7 there is the Long War which is a huge 60-year world war that decimates the Earth, and that book really blurs the lines between the bardo and real life. Like literally, the characters can't figure out if they're in the bardo or not. And I really liked how the war on Earth was connected to a war of the Gods (the Asuras), but it was also a bit confusing. Because you never get a scene with the bardo or with the Gods after that, so it's like, what was happening there? A quote I underlined was "Never had it been more clear to Bai that they had gotten caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own," (Robinson, 565). But my question is, what was that war?? I guess we'll never know. Or tbh maybe I just haven't developed the reading skills to understand this part yet and it will click in a few years.

And in the final pages I liked the direct commentary on reincarnation. I found that these ideas of reincarnation are ones I have thought about before. After a student argues that reincarnation is true after Bao denies its scientific eligibility, he thinks, "But still--how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions?" (Robinson, 755). SO real. That's exactly how I feel! How much I long for eternal cosmic companions. Bao doubles down on how science does not support the idea of reincarnation in the sense that we normally think of, but continues "Indeed you have to think again what reincarnation might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real," (Robinson, 756). Then he gives some ideas on reincarnation, such as how having children passes on DNA and traits and habits. The student disagrees and states that this is not reincarnation of consciousness, which is what she is thinking of. Bao says, "No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. [...] Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey--no," (Robinson, 756). I thought the last line was super eye-opening because it distinguishes between the ego being reincarnated vs essence. Like of course that's true. Of course it is! Lol I say that in the way that it just resonates and makes so much sense to me.


Okay here are the main characters:

B:
Bold - Mongolian warrior, wanders desert alone for months until captured by Chinese slavers and becomes a slave
Bihari - young Indian orphan, befriends Kokila and eventually gets pregnant and dies during miscarriage
Bistami - Sufi mystic, goes with Katima to find a new land after being kicked out of the royal palace due to tensions with his birthplace
Butterfly - Miwok girl who the Chinese fleet take with them to 'save' after accidentally infecting her tribe with pox
Bahram - Sufi blacksmith working for Khalid
Busho (Fromwest) - Japanese man who ended up in the Americas and made his way to the Haudenosaunee tribe near the Great Lakes to help them defend against incoming threats and imperialism
Bao - homeless Buddhist monk who Kang lets stay in her compound until the guards eventually take him away
Bhakta - Indian abbess who studies and teachers medicine in a Buddhist compound
Bai - Chinese soldier during the Long War
Budur - Muslim girl who escapes her harem with her aunt Idelba to pursue science and scholarship, makes integral discoveries in the field of archaeology.
Bao - young Chinese boy who meets Kung and follows his activism, eventually becoming a father and history teacher in Northern America

K:
Kyu - young African boy who is forced to become a Eunich slave after being captured by Chinese slavers
Kokila - young Indian girl, friends with Bihari and gets married off, poisons the man who got Bihari pregnant
Kya - tiger who saves Bistami from attackers but then is killed because she killed Bistami's evil brother
Katima - wife/sultaness, women were not allowed to be sultans in Islam at the time, goes with her husband to found a new society in Al-Andalus
Kheim - Chinese military admiral whose fleet of ships gets waylaid by the winds on the way to Japan, ends up traveling across the sea to the Americas for the first time
Khalid - Alchemist in the Middle East, radically shifts from pursuing alchemy to science after getting his hand cut off for deceiving the king with fake alchemy
Keeper - Keeper of the Wampum of the Haudenosaunee tribe (high ranking official)
Kang - Chinese widow who eventually marries _ and becomes one of the first feminist literary anthologists of China
Kiyoaki - young Japanese indentured servant in China who escapes on accident during a huge flood and becomes a revolutionary for Japanese sovereignty [That's another thing! This story ended randomly and way too early! I was excited to read this one. I wonder what the purpose of such a small and singular chapter was]
Kuo - Chinese military Major during the Long War
Kirana - Algerian woman who teaches history in Nsara (Muslim-run France)
Kung - young Chinese revolutionary who fights to get rid of work units and make a more fair China for all

I:
I-li - wife of the owner of a popular restaurant in China where Bold and Kyu are working
Insef - midwife who teachers Kokila and Bihari
Ibn Ezra - historian who goes with Katima and husband to found a new society
I-Chin - doctor and navigator on Kheim's ship
Iwang - Tibetan mathematician working for/with Khalid and Bahram
Iagogeh - wife of Keeper of the Haudenosaunee tribe, helps Fromwest fit in
Ibrahim - Muslim scholar and doctor who marries Kang after they traverse through past lives together in ritual trances and eventually inform each other's scholarly activism
Ismail - Armenian judge who studied law and medicine, travels to India after his city is attacked and becomes a prominent medical scholar
Iwa - Chinese soldier during the Long War
Idelba - Muslim scientist and atomic physicist who escapes her harem to live in a freer muslim city to study nuclear weapons and to ensure they don't fall into the wrong hands
Isao - Chinese/Japanese official who fought for more fair treatment and was deemed a revolutionary, his work inspired Kung and Bao

Modern historians continue to struggle with Eurocentrism, the idea that somehow, Europe is the center of the historical universe. It did do a lot of important things, but we often overlook important events elsewhere. This book challenges the reader to see history through a different lens. KSR’s alternative history begins with the Black Plague not just decimating Europe, but completely wiping it off the map. As a result, history becomes a strictly Islamic and Chinese affair. Many similar inventions and discoveries occur, and sometimes the characters even resemble their historical counterparts. But KSr really considers how different things would be, and offers plausible historical alternatives. The chapter with a Galileo-like character is equally as horrifying for very different reasons. I should say here that I actually don’t know enough about any of the cultures involved to be sure that KSR does justice to them. But to my limited Anglo-white boy perspective, they seemed pretty plausible. (And I guess he researched a lot of stuff about Islam for his Mars trilogy.)

The book moves slowly, and sometimes the narrative drags for a few pages, but it almost always picks up with some fun development or character building. This is rivetting in a different way than your average sci-fi/fantasy novel. It’s fun to see how this alternative world progresses. There is a chapter on the discovery of the New World, one on the enlightenment, and the chapters after this have a more rational mindset in which characters start considering social issues and the philosophy of history. This was a really nice touch that made the book’s message even stronger. The later chapters also reveal a familiar narrative of social progress in feminism and worker’s rights, but also remind us that this progress is not predestined nor is it permanent. Earlier chapters show people who try to fight for social progress and fail. It’s a heavy book, but one full of wisdom.

Because all of the major discoveries are made by non-Western people, familiar objects and concepts sometimes have different names, for example “electricity” is now “qi.” This made it seem odd that the French word “cigarettes” was kept, when in this universe there were no French after the plague years. There are a few other slips like this, but perhaps the most unpleasant carryover from our world into KSR’s alternative history is the marginal status of Africa. Neither Africa or nothern Asia (AKA Russia) play any major role in this new world. Africa is simply swallowed by the Islamic world the way it was swallowed by Europeans. I would have liked to see Africa be capable of more, but I think the author can be forgiven for choosing two superpowers to focus on. It’s a familiar enough scenario.

4 1/2 stars. Now rounded up to 5


Alternative history, a very believable tale of how the world's civilizations would have (could have) developed if, in the fourteenth century, the plague that killed 30-60% of the people in Europe had instead killed virtually 100% (including almost all Christians and Jews), while being less virulent in the middle east and Asia. The subsequent six plus centuries (up to roughly the present day) are dominated by an Old World population predominantly Taoist or Muslim, with generous contributions from Buddhism. From the latter the belief in reincarnation is appropriated as a central theme of the novel.

Most of the “Books” of the story, which deal with various crucial developments or turning points in these centuries, end with a short section set in the “Bardo”, that state of existence in between two incarnations of a soul. In this section the main character(s) (usually more than one) of that Book relates their feelings about the life just concluded; often, we also have suspicions confirmed that these characters are reincarnations of characters from previous Books. (This sounds hokey the way I am describing it, but for me it added another dimension to the story.)


The Books deal with the following :

1. Awake to Emptiness – the discovery by Mongol invaders that western Asia/Eastern Europe are no longer inhabited by living humans.
2. The Haj in the Heart – taking place in Al-Andalus (Spain) in the 16th century, with no interference from the Spanish Inquisition
3. Ocean Continents – the discovery of the Americas by China
4. The Alchemist – the development of the scientific method in Samarkand
5. Warp and Weft – a Japanese samurai warns Native Americans of the threat they face from the Chinese on the West Coast, and the Moslems on the East Coast
6. Widow Kang – a Muslim scholar attempts to form a synthesis of Taoism and Islam, in order to bring peace to the increasingly hostile major religions
7. The Age of Great Progress – the rise of a civilization and leader in southern India, which attempts to right the wrongs of the Chinese and Islamic hegemonies
8. War of the Asuras – a 70 year world war between China and the Islamic states, with the leagues of Books 5 and 7 drawn in.
9. Nsara – the aftermath of the war, in Muslim France
10. The First Years – civilization in our own time, with many of the same problems, and some different ones


I found the book’s references to the beliefs of the religions involved extremely interesting. The best of these was the 5th section of Book 2, The Road to Mecca, which I found to be a very convincing evocation of the Islamic haj. (Of course, whether it really is an accurate view, I know not.)

I also have to admit that what seem to be the views of Robinson on many of his characters’ deeply considered issues are similar to my own views. For example, in the last section of Book 6, one of the main characters writes “Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities”, in which he identifies these as follows:

… With this division of labor the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized … This was the first inequality … the second and the third inequalities (were) of men over women and children … (and finally) added to the subjugation of farmers, women and the family was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.

In fact this quote brings out a major theme of the book, and a major concern of many of the characters – that of the subjugation of women throughout history.

Altogether one of those works of fiction which I think I’ll dip into in the future, just to remember what Robinson said about certain things.

ADDENDUM

I recently finished reading and commenting on State of the World 2013 for our Transition Group.

Mr. Robinson wrote the final chapter of that book. (The synopsis can be seen here.)

He constructed a narrative in the chapter to the effect that science could still provide a way out of the crises we face. But he wasn’t talking about technology fixes or silver bullets, he seemed to be referring to a moral dimension of science; and he posited that science and capitalism could be viewed as in conflict. A rather extraordinary idea, I thought. In trying to figure out what exactly he was saying, I eventually ended up at his Wiki page where in a section called major themes (Here) I learned that Mr. Robinson is very concerned with (1) Ecological sustainability, with (2) Economic and social justice (and with alternatives to capitalism), and with (3) the idea of scientists as citizens. The second of these (and to some extent the third) is a rather major theme of the book here under review.

Hence I now know that not only is Robinson a great teller of tales, a good writer – he is also, from my point of view, a good man. That’s nice I think. I’m certainly going to read more books by him.

But I haven't yet.
8/

This one's going right in the category of OMG this is epic SF of a very serious nature and scope.

It goes well beyond the "normal" subgenre of alternate histories to throw us into a vast and very impressive exploration of China and India as they completely dominate the culture and space of the entire world under the slight alteration: that most of the Caucasian world died off in the Black Plague.

It's really gorgeous and it flows really well. Expect many short novellas giving us snippets of time from the plague and progress it forward until we have a fully technological world. Christianity is a footnote. Muslims are dominant, as are Buddhists, but what really fascinated me was the poetry, the history of science and different terminologies, the odd similarities to our own history, including population pressures, various warcraft and a world war, the suffrage of women, medicine development, and so much more.

But what works best for me was a really brilliant thread of reincarnation. As in, tying all the novels together in a later scholarly work that reconciles a few great souls from incarnation to incarnation through history. We get the lives of those characters in the whole novel, and it really is gorgeous. A Buddhist SF that not only focuses on being self-referential and consistent, but it does it in a very detailed and academic way that feels almost too gorgeous for words.

Brilliant doesn't really do the work justice.

I'm not going to say it doesn't get slightly overburdened by the science bits as if it was just a vehicle for some particularly juicy fundamental discoveries, but I also like that kind of stuff. I didn't mind. It did make the text a bit large, however. :)

I was reminded very favorably of some other epic SF tomes like Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years. We have all of Time to work in and the idea exploration is breathtaking.

This one might become one of my favorite KSR novels. Easily.

First I must say this book is "historical fiction" in the same vein as counter-factuals (essentially "what if?" scenarios), but could also be looked at as speculative fiction. Either way, it is entertaining and rather interesting.

The basis for this story revolves around the Black Death, instead of killing 20-30%, had a mortality rate, in Western Europe, of 99.9%. In this counter-factual, we look at the development of the world without the "Western" world ever contributing.

The story starts with Bold and Psin, two scouts for Timurlane, who return with news of the devastated lands out west. Timur falls to the plague as well and the story develops through Bold's eyes.

The story then turns a bit strange. KSR takes us on a spiritual journey as the characters of Bold and Psin are reincarnated. This is the method through which KSR travels through time-each character is a re-incarnated form of the previous characters.

Using this process we are taken through the "history" of the world-wherein China, India, and the Islamic states vie for dominance. While I enjoyed the counter-factual history, I did not care for the entire "spiritual reincarnation" stuff. KSR delves into many facets of this concept and it is the driving underlying theme of his story.

If you're looking for an interesting "what-if?" scenario-then you will appreciate this tale of a world that developed without Western influence.

I dug into The Years of Rice and Salt with much gusto, for its premise was an intriguing example of why alternate history can be so seductive. Yet almost immediately, my expectations were completely torn apart and shoved in my face. Sometimes this can be good; other times it ruins a book completely. In this case, while I quite enjoyed some of the philosophical aspects of the book, it failed to sustain my interest for its 760 pages.

In this version of history, the Black Death decimates the white Christian population of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire vanishes. Columbus never makes his infamous "discovery" of the New World. The Renaissance never happens. Shakespeare is never born. Robinson takes the discoveries our history often attributes to dead, white, male Europeans and transfers them to Muslim and Buddhist Chinese and Middle Eastern men and women. Muslim alchemists invent calculus while trying to measure the speed of light; a Chinese fleet ordered to invade Japan gets blown off course and winds up, eventually, in North America.

Given the fact that the back cover copy promises "a look at history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries.... Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars," perhaps my expectations were too simple. Robinson uses reincarnation as a plot device to carry his characters across eras and around the world. Although the characters don't retain their memories of past lives (except for a few instances) while living a new one, this device forces the reader to interpret their actions as part of a great karmic cycle. This is particularly the case for the first part of the book, where the narration reinforces the idea that each life is a chance to "embrace the Buddha-nature" and move on to the next plane of existence. Later in the book, the emphasis shifts from the characters to the necessity for society as a whole to come to grips with its own existence and embrace peace before it's too late.

And therein lies my problem with the book. Although the reincarnation device was not what I expected, I tolerated it. This isn't the first book I've read with reincarnated main characters; it probably won't be the last. However, the narrative style of The Years of Rice and Salt is demonstrably inconsistent in a way I can't reconcile with any dramatic purpose.

In the first "book," each chapter is numbered but untitled but has a short snippet that described what would take place: Chapter 1, "Another journey west, Bold and Psin find an empty land; Temur is displeased, and the chapter has a stormy end." I liked those. Each chapter also ended with a fourth-wall-breaking remark, such as, "What happened in there we don't want to tell you, but the story won't make sense unless we do, so on to the next chapter. These things happened." I hated these; they were annoying, and I was glad when they stopped after the first book. So did the chapter descriptions though. In Book 2, the chapters had numbers and titles but no descriptions. In Book 3, the chapters had neither numbers nor titles. In Book 4, the chapters had titles but no numbers! And so on, changing apparently on whim, with neither rhyme nor reason. This irked me even more than the book's story—it distracted me from the story, which is a cardinal sin. Robinson's editor should have stepped in, either to standardize this practise or make sure there's an evident reason for it.

Suppose I'm just a complainer, though, who's way too obsessive over meaningless design decisions that don't actually pertain to the plot. Does The Years of Rice and Salt redeem itself in its story, in its heart-warming characters who struggle against centuries of adversity to advance the plight of humanity? Not really.

Reading this book, I was reminded of Umberto Eco, whose novels don't even try to pretend they're anything other than didactic philosophical treatises wrapped in a fiction taco shell. And I know some people find that unforgivable; I, on the other hand, don't mind it—if the author can pull it off. Robinson, at least in this book, falls short of the mark. He flirts with the concept of parallel history, chronicling the development of science in an order suspiciously similar to our own history's, just via Muslim and Chinese scientists. Oh, and there are airships, naturally. This flirtation undercuts the differences explored in the development of moral philosophy, governance, equality, power equity, etc. Once and a while we're treated to an interesting chapter in which one of the reincarnated characters shares a theory on the role of women in government or whatnot, but then we get page after page on the development of the law of universal gravitation (or later, smugly veiled references to relativity versus quantum mechanics).

I loved the sense of difference created on a macrocosmic level, watching China and Islam duke it out for control over the world. I liked how the indigenous peoples of North America actually prevent wholesale takeover of the continent by other of those two factions; indeed, their egalitarian style of government influences much of Europe and West Asia. For all of these broad strokes, however, Robinson neglects the minutiae of his characters' various lives. The detail he adds to the settings, many of which would be unfamiliar to Eurocentrically-educated readers like myself, doesn't quite compensate for this lack of characterization. Overall, The Years of Rice and Salt stretches itself too thin.

A classic of speculative fiction. This one has really stuck with me, and continues to inform my thinking on any number of topics, not least the clash of civilizations, the impermanence of human culture, the non-inevitability of European historical domination, how indigenous American societies might have survived and thrived, and more.

The book starts somewhat slowly, but is worth sticking with. Terrific circular structure to the storytelling becomes more and more powerful as the various tales and the trip through alternate-history intertwine. Robinson's ability to fully imagine an alternate timeline in which a bipolar world evolves that is dominated by Islam and China is truly amazing.

There is a kind of filmmaking I’ve always been fond of, but which I nonetheless refer to as “endurance cinema.” Endurance cinema is not entertaining—it is grueling, often uncomfortable, and frequently boring: ten-hour depictions of labor camps and a failed escape (Masaki Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition”), forty-five minute zooms across a room (Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”), still photographs catching fire on a hot plate (Hollis Frampton’s “Nostalgia”), or deeply subliminal sensory freakouts (Stan Brakhage’s “Dog Star Man”) are typical. These films are not fun to watch. But if the viewer is able to get beyond the challenge of the experience, a different experience reveals itself, one that is revelatory and sublime. These films take us out of ourselves in a way standard narratives never can, and introduce the viewer to levels of investment and profundity as a direct result of their form, not in spite of it. These films are worth it.

Kim Stanley Robinson's work is often similar. (His Mars trilogy nearly killed me; no matter how much I delight in his scientific veracity, spending a hundred pages living through a general assembly after a revolution was taking the Gedankenexperiment a bit far.) He crushes us with detail. He makes us wait for the payoff. And wait. And wait. Yet in the waiting, we forget what we were there for in the first place, worn down as we are by the stream, and it is in this space that the reader may discover that there is something else entirely taking place—an emergent property, perhaps—that can only be observed in the totality. In this sense, his writing is a lot like life.

The Years of Rice and Salt pretends to be an alternative history. It sets up a clever premise (what would history from the Dark Ages forward look like without Europeans?) and the reader gets to play detective, sniffing out clues to how the world we recognize and this other world may overlap over time. So that we don’t need to form new emotional attachments with characters generation after the next, he employs a neat trick of reincarnation, which is by turns comforting and exhausting. But this is not what the book is about.

This book is about why we are the ways we are. Like the best novels of ideas, Robinson is able to locate the big questions in the minutae of daily life. What is science? Are these paradigms social constructions of cultures, or are we scraping against the surface of universal truths—so that the revelations and inherited wisdom attributed to one great man or another were really just inevitabilities, and only time was required for a technology to surface? One way or another, the world ends up with lenses, rules of thermodynamics, telephones. What is justice? As civilizations rise and fall, we watch the complexities of interest, resources, and accident collide, often with eerily familiar results. Islam gives birth to feminism; the Americas are devastated by contact with other peoples, but give birth to democracy nonetheless. What is revolution? At what point will we know we have succeeded? What is progress? As choice after choice leads to joys and traumas both new and repetitive, the reader is forced to confront their own life as a product of history.

Most importantly, this book is about mistakes. It is about seeing our patterns and challenges, our road blocks and frustrations and addictions and pain as a deep and holy inheritance, as gifts from the gods, given so that we may work these things out, life after life, with the same set of teachers and lovers and enemies. Our roles shift, but our souls remain intact, recognizable to one other over the centuries as we lift one another through our failures and push each other to carry on. For this reader, at least, this is a comfort: those members of my jotty who have been lost in this life, well—I will see them again in the next, where we will no doubt pick up where we left off.

I'd seen this heavily recommended by others with similar reading tastes, so I had high expectations for it. The premise - what if the Black Plague killed 99% of Europe's population - was intriguing. For the first two or three sections, the reincarnation system of recycling the main characters even worked for me. But after a while, I started to feel like I was reading a textbook. "This happened in this era. This happened in the next era." Half the time, I didn't see the characters long enough to form any interest in their fates or accomplishments. I don't normally read books concurrently, but this one was so underwhelming that while I wanted to finish it, I couldn't stick to it for days at a time. It certainly could have been about 200 pages shorter than it was. I'm hoping it is just this novel, but I fear it's Robinson's style and will be moving his Mars trilogy much further down my reading list than earlier planned.