I just... wow. I get why some readers didn't stick with this; I don't think it will be for everyone. But this is masterful speculative fiction and alternate history at its very best. His research into the art/history/thought of the regions he's writing about, his presentation of believable views--believable *people*--from various sides of a wide variety of divides: religious, ethnic/national, gender, point in history they lived...they all feel real. (And I can't believe this is still a thing, but writers who are men but manage to write believable characters that are women as people, not members of an alien species defined by sex, are still way too few and far between. Even more so when writing women living in ages/contexts that worked to define them by their sex and biology--Robinson nails it.)

This book did have me pausing every few seconds to look things up, but not because I needed to in order to follow what was going on (though it made for a richer experience); it just made me want to know more about a lot of things that were outside my experience/prior reading, and I adore books that do that. I thought the excerpts from Sanskrit and Chinese works, some of them poetry, were an absolute treat and I have a list of poets and classics to read now. The only real weak point in the book, as far as I can tell, is the portrayal of indigenous Americans, and much of what we've learned about indigenous land management and cultivation wasn't available before 2002, when this was published. This is a thoughtful philosophical novel, not a gripping page-turner, and that's worthwhile to know going in. But the complexity, nuance, and depth he put into this is frankly staggering. I borrowed the copy I just finished reading and will be getting my own in physical book form.

Really, really cried at the end of this one, not at any specific passage but just at the enormous feeling that was in me. A lot of sadness, more hope than I’ve felt in a while, and immense admiration at the scope of this book.

I think I stumbled upon this when I was thinking of what the world could have been like if other cultures colonized it instead of Europeans, and it delivered in a dry, educational, awkward way that I still liked, maybe even loved, it a lot, though! I wish there were a thousand books attempting this very thing, reimagining what the world could have been, partly to try to re-envision what we could be, still, if we give up the Euro centric, white supremacy, brainwashing culture we inherited. There were a few problems with the book, such as no attention paid to the entire African continent, and a wish that some history could have turned out better (for a while the Iroquios were possibly going to emerge as the world power which was amazing) but overall I really enjoyed it.

My interpretation is that the author is proposing a new Golden Rule, a new way to live that can apply to all of us and it is perfect and something I have felt for a very long time. It is to live as if everything is a miracle, to practice mindfulness, and rejoice in the daily life. “Looking around at all the faces, Bistami thought, Oh why don’t we live like this all the time? What is important enough to take us away from this moment? Firelit faces, starry night overhead, ripples of song or soft laughter, peace, peace: no one seemed to want to fall asleep, to end this moment and wake up the next day, back in the sensible world.”

As a connoisseur of wisdom traditions, this book was a treasure chest, and I appreciated the attention paid to the beauty of both Buddhism and Islam, and how the best of each could lead us to a more loving and ecological path. His character’s analysis of some of the downfalls of religion felt very authentic to me, but I am not sure if believers would feel that way. He has a strong feminist message which felt authentic, even as he details the misogyny still present in this alternate world. The author takes the tapestry of human progress and tries to discern the European thread and remove it but keeps true to broad outlines in am imaginative way.

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.

…they hiked over the hills on their hunt, seeing great numbers of peaceful beaver, quail, rabbits, foxes, seagulls and crows, ordinary deer, a bear and two cubs, a slinky long-tailed gray hunting creature, like a fox crossed with a squirrel—on and on—simply a whole country of animals, living together under a silent blue sky—nothing disturbed, the land flourishing on its own, the people there just a small part of it—Kheim began to feel odd. He realized that he had taken China for reality itself.

“What I saw of your people astonished me. Everywhere else in the world, guns rule. Emperors put the gun to the heads of sachems, who put it to warriors, who put it to farmers, and they all together put it to the women, and only the emperor and some sachems have any say in their affairs. They own the land like you own your clothes, and the rest of the people are slaves of one kind or another. (In Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) societies,) sons are brought up through their motherline, and cannnot inherit anything from their fathers, so that there can be no accumulation of power in any one man. There can be no emperors here. I have seen how the women choose the marriages and advise all aspects of life, how the elderly and orphans are cared for. How the nations are divided into the tribes, woven so that you are all brothers and sisters through the league, warp and weft. How the sachems are chosen by the people, including the women. How if a sachem were to do something bad they would be cast out. How their sons are nothing special, but men like any other men, soon to marry out and have sons of their own. It is, in all this world, the best system of rule ever invented by human beings.”

This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.

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.

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, 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. That idea itself was God.

The way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind…

They were all strongly patriarchal, replacing earlier matriarchal polytheisms, created by the first agricultural civilizations, in which gods resided in every domesticated plant, and women were acknowledged to be crucial to the production of food and new life.

“Islam was therefore a latecomer, and as such, a corrective to the earlier monotheisms. It had the chance to be the best monotheism, and in many ways it was. But because it began in an Arabia that had been shattered by the wars of the Roman empire and the Christian states, it had to deal first with a condition of almost pure anarchy, a tribal war of all against all, in which women were at the mercy of any warring party. From those depths no new religion could leap very high.

The hadith overgrew the Quran itself; they seized on every scrap of misogyny scattered in Muhammad’s basically feminist work, and stitched them into the shroud in which they wrapped the Quran, as being too radical to enact.
But this perversion of Islam lost us the war. It was women’s rights, and nothing else, that gave China and Travancore and Yingzhou the victory. It was the absence of women’s rights in Islam that turned half the population into nonproductive illiterate cattle, and lost us the war.

The tremendous intellectual and mechanical progress that had been initiated by Islamic scientists was picked up and carried to much greater heights by the Buddhist monks of Travancore and the Japanese diaspora, and this revolution in mechanical capacity was quickly developed by China and the New World free states.

“They turned out to be right. Earth congealed out of cosmic dust, life appeared and evolved until a certain ape made more and more sounds, and off we went. Never any God involved, nothing supernatural, no eternal souls reincarnated time after time. Only the Chinese really faced that, leading the way with their science, honoring nothing but their ancestors, working only for their descendants.

Most of the women in Idelba’s lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks. Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it—the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato’s tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.

She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, creating a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law.

In so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy…
“We must find the most Buddhist parts of Islam, perhaps. Cultivate those.”

“Yes,” Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the café they were sitting in that day, “they may be the hope of all humanity. But I don’t think we understand them well enough to say for sure. When they have completed their takeover of the world, then we will learn more.”

Storm sunlight cast a silver sheen on the wet street. Budur felt happy. The world was beautiful. She was so hungry that the milk in her coffee was like a meal inside her. The storm’s light was a meal. She thought: now is beautiful.
She dropped in on many more sessions, and this impression of people’s endless struggle and effort, endless experimentation, of humans thrashing about trying to find a way to live together, only deepened in her.

Then as these kinds of matters are all universalized, or made standard all over the world, when the time comes that governments begin to put pressure on their scientists to work for just one part of humanity, they can say, I’m sorry, science doesn’t work that way. We are a system for all peoples. We only work to make things so that they will be all right.”

“What Muhammad began was the idea that all humans had rights that could not be taken away from them without insulting their Creator. Allah made all humans equally His creatures, and none are to serve others. This message came into a time very far from these practices, and the course of progress in history has been the story of the clarification of these principles of Islam, and the establishment of true justice. Now we are here to continue that work!

Everything took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and yet every few years everything was also somehow entirely different. The pulse of history’s long duration was much slower than an individual’s time.

In his first lecture he outlined his plan for the course, which he hoped would be a series of conversations on history, discussing how it was constructed, and what it meant, and how they might use it to help them plot their course forward through the next difficult decades, “when we have to learn at last how to inhabit the Earth.”

That came on the heels of the Year One effort, standardized measurements, and all the rest, to form what has been called the scientizing of the world, or the modernization, or the Hodenosaunee program, among other names for it. Our time, in effect.” “In Islam they don’t like all that,” one student pointed out. “Yes, this has been a problem for them, how to reconcile their beliefs with the scientizing movement. But we have seen changes in Nsara spread through most of Firanja, and what a united Firanja implies is that they have agreed there is more than one way to be a good Muslim. If your Islam is a form of Sufism that is Buddhist in all but name, and you say it is all right, then it is hard to condemn the Buddhists in the next valley. And this is happening in many places. All the strands are beginning to weave together, you see. We have had to do it to survive.”

Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one’s life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life. Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marveling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before.

“It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.”

An alternate history story told using reincarnation. The concept is very interesting – what if the plague killed almost all Europeans? The story runs from the time of the plague to what might be the present day (it’s an alternate history without the Gregorian calendar, so I was never sure how it lined up with our actual history). In the early parts of the book, there is a trio of characters that keep getting reincarnated and meeting up sometime in their lives. They show up as Chinese sailors and Chilean villagers, as American Indians, as Muslim academics, as Chinese businessmen, as African slaves. All at different points in time. I have enjoyed many of these reincarnation/time travel books, and they seem to all have their own spin on what being reborn or time traveling is. Here, the souls are held in the bardo until they are all ready for rebirth. While in the bardo, they can reflect on all their lives, but the bardo appears to be the only place they have full memory of those past lives. They have lively conversations discussing this. The souls seem to be building toward something, being reincarnated as higher social status as time goes on, starting as slave and ending as a world leader, but I didn’t catch the specific goals of the souls. While walking the earth, the souls occasionally had memory of their past lives, and flashes of déjà vu, but this was only occasionally. I found this take on reincarnation to make this long book fun to read, at least in the beginning.

The other thing that made this interesting was the author’s view of technology advancement. The author assumed that many of the scientific discoveries we have today would have been found, but there were also many that were not. One whole lifespan in the book (i.e., a chapter) was dedicated to the discovery of atomic weaponry and the scientific community’s response. In another, airplanes were more like powered dirigibles. Interesting, but not in the depth I would have liked. This is not a sci-fi hardware kind of a book – this is more about ideas.

You really understand this is a book about ideas when you get near the last quarter or so. By this time, the souls we are following have entered into the academic and political worlds, and here the author uses lecturing and political arguing as a way to describe the state of the altered world. Learning by lecture in a fiction book gets old quick, so this detracted from the flow of the book. I understand that it was far easier to present his ideas this way, but it wasn’t as interesting to read as the earlier sections. Overall, I found this worthwhile for the spiritual ideas presented and on the taste of the alternative future the author provides. This is one of those books that will stick with you.

Friends, I think this book can end racism and spread empathy in all of mankind!

So many aspects to praise about this book. The focus on the underdog peoples, the breadth of nations, and the depth of cultures and civilizations, the profound epiphanies the characters have about history and future.

This is going into my all-time favorite shelf.

All the stars!
And in the same breath I have to say that I can understand why a part of the readers couldn't even finish it.

Kim Stanley Robinson does not only write an alternate history he literally invents the whole of human history anew, starting in the time of the great plague spanning the generations til the era of atomphysics. In his story Christianity is nothing but a footnote in the annals, the fate of humankind is orchestrated by Muslim empires, China and Buddhism.
To bring this large span of time to life he uses the structure of independent novella-like parts with reincarnations of the same set of souls giving us snapshots of the respective times. Those tales are linked by shorter interludes in the "bardo", where the souls stay after the death of their previous and the birth of their next incarnation.

Since it is KSR the emphasis in the different tales lies heavily on science, social structure/politics and religious philosophy. Once more I'm astounded at the holistic (if this is the correct word here) interest and knowledge of this author. He is utterly brilliant in his way of re-inventing human history.
Simultaneously this is the point where this books isn't for everybody. The reader has to be interested in philosophy to appreciate what KSR is doing here. Otherwise it might end as a rather dragging, uneventful read.

For me it was perfect, both in structure and prose. I could have gone on for another 700 pages without any complaint.

Quite different from his Mars-trilogy, but equally outstanding.

We had people over for the Fourth for the fireworks and, of course, the house had to be cleaned and by that, I mean all the books sprawled about the floor in lazy, often surly piles, crowding every available planed surface had to be reined in and brought to order. Rice & Salt got rammed into a corner atop the largest bookshelf in the living room and I'm looking at it now -- it balefully staring back at me.

I do not like this book. In fact, I've been trying to dump it for the last -- however long I've had it since after I read it, which, I think, is a good three years. Plot, character, story development, etc, I just didn't enjoy but, BUT there is so small part of me that refuses to add it to the Salvation Artm/Sell @ the Strand bag in the kitchen. Dunno why. The book is as if Steven Spielberg and Umberto Eco did movie together and this book is the adaptation of that film.

The fucked up part? I've read it twice. A book I don't like, I've read it twice.

What's it about? *Sheesh* Come to the house and get it out of here if you want to know that...

~cpd

* I like the way we follow the same few souls throughout history
* Not a real spoiler since it doesn’t pertain to the plot at all but there’s one small conversation about how pointless it is to discuss what might have been if history went a little different which is hilarious since that’s the whole premise of this story
* More philosophical than I expected

.??? 2000s guilty pleasure: while i think his extrapolations are often too utopian to be probable, i really like this completely different world, a world without influence of europeans, a world where the major players are islamic and chinese with some interweaving of japan and india. it covers about 700 years in 700 pages, so the device of constantly reincarnated characters is helpful, if you need characters to follow. this is truly an ideas book. that the world would progress technologically according to a similar timeline, that cultures would become equally aggressive, war would happen about the way we have in our history, is well described. that the americas would develop so differently, that the iroquois would introduce a working version of democracy and export their matrilineal society, this might be implausible… but, oh, so different...

i want to read details of the japanese diaspora come to north america, stories about this and that character, stories about how they all resist the forces of europe and asia, these i wish were written. i would read them even if it meant a series of books… there are so many story possibilities here. someone take them up...

One of the greatest science-fiction novels ever. An impressive achievement in terms of size, depth, ambition, visionary power. A contemporary classic.

A slow but worth while alternative history story.

Tik gari un tik garlaicīgi prot rakstīt tikai neliels skaits slavenu rakstnieku, un sociālās zinātniskās fantastikas autors Kims Stenlijs Robinsons ir viens no tiem.
"Rīsa un sāls gadi" ir kaut kāds šķidrs īru sautējums, kur KSR centies sajaukt uz konkrēto brīdi viņam aktuālas idejas vienā intensīvā un bagātīgā kokteilī, taču galā iznākusi šķidra balanda. Alternatīvā vēsture (ļoti neizteiksmīga un neinteresanta), klišejiski iestrādātas idejas par reinkarnāciju un garlaicīgi gari stāsti, kuros vēsturiskie notikumi un varoņu domas un darbības atspoguļo (jau atkal) garlaicīgas un klišejiskas pārdomas par to, kā būtu, ja būtu. Ja eiropieši būtu iznīkuši mēra laikā un Eirāzijā paliktu tikai islams un ķīniešu impērija. Izlasot šo blāķi ir skaidrs, ka nekas jau nemainītos. Būtu citas valstis, šeit dzīvotu citi cilvēki, bet kopumā visa vēsture būtu daudzmaz līdzīga. Izgudrojumi tie paši un tādā pašā izskatā, tikai lielu daļu būtu izgudrojis un atklājis viens cilvēks, nevis tie nejaušību un eksperimentu rezultātā rastos vairākās pasaules vietās, būtu pasaules karš (ok, lai būtu dažādība, izstiepsim to uz 67 gadiem). Galvenais neaizmirst reinkarnāciju. Katrā no 10 grāmatām (var saukt tās par daļām vai nodaļām) darbojas vieni un tie paši pārdzimušie varoņi, kuri nodaļas un parasti arī savas dzīves beigās gudri spriedelē par pārdzimšanu un attīstību, bet kādi bija savā dabā, tādi arī paliek, varbūt pat vēl stulbāki savās darbībās, tāpēc šī bardo līnija šķiet vislielākais mīnuss, kas vienkārši garlaicīgo romānu padara par diezgan dumju draņķību, jo samiksēt nejaucamas un atšķirīgas idejas un žanri tomēr ir jāprot.