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What if the White European Christians had almost all died out in in the fourteenth century?

Kim Stanley Robinson has written an Alternative History that isn't steam punk, nor Nazis winning WW2.

This is a smart, well constructed, work of historical inquiry that spans seven centuries without the assumed Caucasian and "Christian" historical domination. There are a small cast of well constructed thoroughly "human" characters who live through those seven centuries in a very different Eurasia, Africa, and eventually the two Americas than the ones with which we, today, are familiar.

These seven centuries are seen in the context of a traditional Buddhist cosmology. This means that a handful of characters live, die, and are reborn through many lifetimes in different cultures, religions, genders, races, and even species. They are almost always unaware of their past lives or their souls' recurrent intentions. And, most times, the reader is also left unaware of these links. These individual karmic paths are not essential to the main intent of this book. They are, however, fascinatingly traceable for the attentive reader. And these paths very frequently and subtly reassemble groups, friendships, and love attachments through the centuries according to Buddhist karmic law. If you read to love characters, you will be well rewarded following the labyrinths of karmic paths that separate souls and reunite them in new cultures and contexts.

These seven centuries of Earth's history rewritten are presented to us in a manner that loves us as humans (and "souls") while walking us through our seemingly eternal karmic traps of wars, domination, disappointments, betrayals, and redemptions.

Of course, those historic scientific discoveries "we all know" are now reworked in new cultural contexts with different results. This is the beauty of Alternative Histories. But with this handful of sleepwalking "souls" reborn repeatedly in their own karmic cycles, this vast history of civilizations reconfigured takes on an unexpected intimacy.

Enjoy this one.

Actual rating - 3.5/5 stars.

I read this author's Mars books and it was obvious he did a lot of research into what it could take to terraform Mars. Honestly fascinating but the series was bogged down with politics.

Since Years of Rice and Salt was one book instead of a trilogy, I decided that if I was going to read more KSR, I should read this next although a couple of his other series looked pretty interesting to me. After all, as a history buff, I found the idea of this novel intriguing. Instead of wiping out anywhere between 1/4 to over half Europe's population (varied from location to location, with the overall estimate being about 1/3 of the total population), the famous plague of the 14th century wiped out 99 percent.

Such an intriguing premise! Only... sigh... KSR weighed this down with a bunch of spiritual stuff cobbled together from the civilizations that remained - Islam, Buddhism, etc. I don't have an issue with discussion of spiritual/religious matters in books, but there was too much of it here, where the book should have focused more on practical matters.

The British Isles managed to avoid being decimated by the plague, but KSR barely mentions them. This book would have benefited greatly if all the spiritual stuff had been replaced by the people on the Isles developing their own society without the influences from the Continent - what would England have been like if cut off from the rest of the world after the Plague? As the Muslims settled through the continent, there could have been intermarriage between the royalty and nobility of Britain and the Muslims that settled through Spain and France (for peace and political stability) And so on.

Then we have the Native Americans of North and South America... obviously without white Europeans coming to their shores and decimating these peoples and forcing their language/laws on the people that were left, the Native Americans have a different path in history. But KSR doesn't explore this enough.

I think this book had SOME good parts, and some food for thought. Research has been done, and it shows in certain parts of the book, but I feel KSR lost his way and this book becomes one meandering mess.

Imagine all of the European population dying in the Black Plague, not just a third. Basically, Christianity and Jewish religions wiped out, becoming a historical footnote. How would the world have developed under Eastern religions and philosophies, mainly Islam and Buddhism ? Pretty interesting premise and loaded with potential as an alternate history of the world.

Problem is, as one of my Goodreads friends once opined, "the more I read the longer it got". Divided into 10 books over 750+ pages it just became a real slog, bogging down in philosophical musings and little action as the story progressed via the clever idea of having the main characters reincarnate over the years.

Alas, I gave up about a third of the way through and this became one of my rare "dnf". Others I noticed enjoyed the book and rated it highly, just not to my taste.

This was a really great premise, but I just... you know...

I almost DNFed this a few times, but decided to stick with it. In the end, I wouldn't have missed much with a big fat DNF slapped on it...

Take the time to read this one. It's a mindblower.

The Years of Rice and Salt follows a group of characters through reincarnations into new lives over the course of centuries. By the end of this gruelling novel, I felt very powerfully that we are too selfishly attached to our lives. Our attachment to our friends, to indignation, to nationality, and to gender starts to soften after living through so many lives. Robinson also connects this group of characters into a jati, which rises and falls together. For the most part, they fall due to one character's selfishness, a metaphor for human society that I think about very often, even years later.

“TRIPITAKA: Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?
WU-KONG: You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your will, the Buddha-nature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.”

After reading this novel, I believe that KSR can stand proudly among the great philosophers of our time - I already included him among the most erudite writers ever lived. If I ever hear one more saying that speculative fiction is not literature, I will smack them on the head with this book.

In Red Mars trilogy I was astounded by his knowledge in physics, genetics, biology, politics, sociology, economics and a great deal of other fields. Here, his knowledge of history, geography, culture and religion blew my mind. The amount of research he does for every book he writes is enormous. And to take all this knowledge and adapt them to an alternate history which gives you the creeps how accurate it feels, is just amazing.

The blurb is precise in outlining the setup in which events are taking place. But in all these years of turmoil, we follow a few souls which reincarnate repeatedly, as different persons in different ages, always meeting but almost never knowing that they know each other since the beginning of times. The only time when they recognize each other is in the bardo, when they realize that soon there will be another rebirth and they try to do something different and meaningful in the next life.

To recognize them, their names begins with the same letter. There are several characters more or less important, but three of them are the main ones:

K – the revolutionary one, the Yang, the Water element as I saw them, always trying to change the world;
B – the faithful one, The Yin, the Earth element, always trying to temper K and aiming to Nirvana;
I – the scholar, the Wind element, which usually acts as a binder between the K and B.

Technically, this is not a novel; it consists of 10 stories, chronologically following each other on the timeline, each with its own set of characters which are different but all the same. We have no plot, no action and not exactly an ending. What we do have are lots of philosophical debates on Buddhist and Muslim precepts, extensive descriptions of cultural, social and political environments throughout the epochs and most of all, a vision of how the world would have looked like if Christianity disappeared and Islamic states and China would have ruled the world. There are also other nations which made their significant contribution in this alternate history, such as the historical state Travancore (India) and the Haudenosaunee (North-American natives). It may sound boring, but it isn’t; and keep in mind that this is not a favorite subgenre of mine. There are, as in every book, fragments more interesting than others or some which could have been shorter. But in every of the ten stories there is something to keep your interest going and I savored every word – Book 6 is my favorite; it has the best debates I ever read on any given subject. As to quote the author: “Certain moments give us such unexpected beauty”.

Although I mentioned that religion is an important part of the book, KSR brilliantly juggles through different point of views – atheists, fervent religious and agnostic. One example below and one of my favorites:

“The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that [who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to], to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.”

There are also concepts which today sound inconceivable, such as the Islamic Queen Katima, the founder of Nsara (Nantes), which later will be an important city in Firanja (Europe). Here’s the modern map for a better picture of the world:



Bottom line is, it’s a book you’ll either love or hate, that’s how I see it. It’s not an easy read and you have to be in the right mood to enjoy it. In the end, it is the story of the human species: no matter the setting or who rules the world, humans will always be greedy of power, always fighting for supremacy and money but there will also be genius, selfless minds to drive us forward. The question is how much we will last.

There is a lot more to say about it, but I will just leave you with some of my favorites quotes and hope you’ll give it a try some day.

There was no need to speak in this singing world, so huge, so knotted; no human mind could ever comprehend it, even the music only touched the hem of it, and even that strand they failed to understand—they only felt it. The universal whole was beyond them.
And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don't know we have, glimpses of that larger world—vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling—this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

“It doesn't work like that,” Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. “I've seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it—and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”

“It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! It's staying in love that's the hard part.”
Khalid waggled his left hand. “All very well, but it only matters if the truth is faced and fought. I'm sick of love and happiness—I want justice.”

“To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests created by all has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues. […] All the world's various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al-Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality—the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell—is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts laboring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of hell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.
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.”

“Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter. Indeed they were known to be prodigious benzedrine eaters and opium smokers, pursuing the entire war in a jerky drugged dream state that could include bestial rage.”

Versus
n

“Every sura of the Quran reminds us by its opening words—Bismallah, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Compassion, mercy—how do we express that? These are ideas that the Chinese do not have. The Buddhists tried to introduce them there, and they were treated like beggars and thieves. But they are crucial ideas, and they are central to Islam. Ours is a vision of all people as one family, in the rule of compassion and mercy. This is what drove Muhammad, driven by Allah or by his own sense of justice, the Allah inside us. This is Islam to me! That's what I fought for in the war. These are the qualities we have to offer the world that the Chinese do not have. Love, to put it simply. Love.”

“Against all that, certainly, but for what? What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was . . . clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, with only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a GOD if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships.”

And I end up with this prescient quote:

“They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.”
“Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.”

More info on it you may find here: http://kimstanleyrobinson.info/node/345

I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to read the book on its premise alone: What if Europe had been wiped out by the plague, how would world history have been shaped without a European influence?

The book is a series of different short stories that catalogue the lives of people at different points in the alternate history, from the time after the plagues in Europe until the modern era. Each story is an alternate history different important points that coincide with history :- The Islamic renaissance, discovery of the Americas, the advent of steam power and the industrial revolution, world war, post world war era with advances in technology and globalization. Each story has a main cast of characters who are in essence the same group of characters reincarnated over different lives.

Generations spanning epic with a pleasantly intimate touch throughout. Wonderfully comprehensive and easy-flowing, philosophic rumination on the annals of humanity, and individual consciousness, in a way of re-imagining history.

KSR's inspiringly thorough grasp of the myriad of subjects really gets to build and drive the narrative all by itself, undisturbed and impressively effortlessly-seeming.

Brilliantly intellectually captivating; an inviting stream of thoughts to wade in. (And nicely narrated by Pinchot).

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Reading updates.

This is a sprawling and ambitious alternate history that describes what the world would look like if the Black Death had wiped out European civilization. It is told through the eyes of a set of people who are reincarnated over and over through the generations, and gradually become aware of the process. I told you it was ambitious :-) This is actually the first book I've read by Robinson, and plan to read more, since there were some truly beautiful moments in the book, and I love his sense of what it means to be human, and his appreciation for scientific imagination.

Whew! I think this is the least polished and most ambitious Kim Stanley Robinson novel I've read. Also excellent. A structurally and thematically unwieldy read, I find myself amazed that such a sprawling story resolved with clarity and cohesion.

This was a challenging one, mostly for sheer length, but also for its quantity of historical information. Considering it's an alternate history story, it contains quite a lot of recorded history. History that I was largely unfamiliar with and spent a number of (usually satisfying) hours googling. As I mentioned in my Aurora review, KSR is not for everyone. In fact, if you consistently enjoy his writing you're probably a nerd.

The book is essentially 10 novellas, intertwined well enough to serve as long chapters in a single novel. Each novella has a different vibe and some even have unique typographic formatting, but they are arranged chronologically and tell one story; an alternate history in which the European population was eradicated by the black plague, circa ~1350 AD.

The alternate history is well executed, but takes a few hundred pages to ramp up. Luckily, the characters are engaging from the start, and they held my interest while the plot slowly took form. KSR's writing hews toward realism, so for a decent chunk of the story the alternate timeline consists of relatively grounded events. Many of the stories show familiar scenarios (e.g. the development of Newtonian physics) reimagined in nonwestern contexts, through the eyes of well-crafted characters.

Eventually we get more into more contemporary feeling topics like modern warfare, feminism, environmentalism and speculative social systems. We even get a glimmer of future-tech. Throughout this 700 year long story, we follow a rotating cast of very solid and somehow-familiar characters.

Ultimately, I understand The Years of Rice and Salt to be a story about the positive and negative feedback loops that bind religion, social systems, and technological progress. It is a meditation on the forces that create and undo civilizations; explaining social progress as a layering of emergent phenomena not exclusive to particular cultures or belief systems.

4.6/5

Enough people have recommended that I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt that it’s surprising that it’s taken me as long as it has to finally get around to it.

This was my first of his books, I hadn’t read the Mars Trilogy, so as with any new author I wasn’t sure what to expect from it; especially since I’d been warned that in style it was fairly different from his other work, and that it also had slow parts that would take a bit of getting through.

All the reviews and recommendations were glowing though, praising the re-invention of a world without the influence of Christian Europe and the epic scope of the story across the ages.

Unfortunately mine isn’t. I can’t recall a novel that I’ve struggled through as much as this one. I kept at it hoping for a grand denouement that would explain the praise lavished on it, but that never happened. As ridiculous as it sounds, the book’s grand ending was a chapter explaining the style the book was written in, and the grand reveal was a cute schtick it had used throughout and that anyone with half a brain would have figured out within the first hundred pages.

Yes, the world building was clever and thorough; but I read a lot, especially Science-Fiction and Fantasy, and good world building is de rigour in the best works of those genres. A novel needs some other story or message beyond the world itself.

And if Kim Stanley Robinson had a point or message with this book, it was entirely lost on me. A novel set in a world without Western culture would provide ample opportunity to take a critical look at that culture, and say something about ourselves, but instead it ignores it and focuses itself on Islamic and Chinese culture and finds many faults therein.

A novel in which reincarnation plays such a significant part would provide ample opportunity to consider mortality, or the eternal struggle to better ourselves, but the book doesn’t go there either and instead if anything suggests futility as the central characters manage to be responsible for every significant scientific breakthrough throughout history without ever changing in themselves.

Maybe the central message was just supposed to be that all people and cultures are ultimately the same, that we all make the same mistakes and share the same victories, but even then it tries hard to avoid saying any such thing.

Honestly, as far as I could tell, the only significant point the author wanted to make was that San Francisco should have been built on the North side of the Golden Gate and not the South. He makes that point a lot!