I like the inclusion of a Muslim character

An alternate history, in which the what-if is, what if European culture had been totally eradicated by the Black Plague. Using the conceit of a group of repeatedly reincarnated souls returning again and again as the thousand-odd year saga unfolds, Robinson hits yet again with a thoroughly brilliant work that asks all of the important questions that face us concerning life on earth, most crucially: how do we get it right?

In The Years of Rice and Salt, the world ends up being divided between Islam and China for most of what we consider to be the years 622-2002 C.E. All of the great scientific advances, all of the discoveries of the renaissance are undertaken by these two civilizations. Much of the ensuing history parallels very closely what we consider to have actually happened.

A notable difference that Robinson proposes lies in the failure of either China or any of the Muslim powers to completely colonize the New World (due, perhaps to the lack of Europeans as an enemy on the Eurasian continent, leading to constant strife between the two powers), allowing the Iroquois League to expand into a major world power, with the help of the members of the Japanese diaspora. Their matrilineal succession and league-based structure becomes an inspiration for various progressive and revolutionary groups in both China and the Dar-al-Islam.

Like much of Robinson's work, this is emphatically a utopian novel, but with the author's characteristic intellectual rigor. One of the functions of the reincarnation device is to emphasize that utopia is something that is built incrementally, taking lifetimes of failure and imperceptible, minuscule progress before any possibility of change can be enacted. This is further driven home by the conversations between the principal characters during their brief spells in the bardo, as they await their next incarnations, momentarily reminded of all of their previous lives.

I think that this work is notable for a number of reasons. What sticks with me upon this first reading is Robinson's focus upon gender equality as crucial for social progress. That is, of course, obvious to most educated readers alive today, but his imagining of the rise of feminism in the monolithic cultures of Islam and imperial China is quite sharp. One character goes so far, in attempting to explain Islam's loss in the novel's analogue of WWI, as to say that Islam's greatest weakness lies within its conversion of fully half of its society to illiterate beasts of burden.

Robinson may be preaching to the choir, but this novel is a great example of the unique potency of speculative fiction to ask questions about how we fix the fucking mess we're in.

This book was not what I expected, based on the summary, but I still really enjoyed it. It may be because it is lengthy, covers specific periods in history (albeit speculative histories), and follows the narrative through the eyes of multiple characters, but this book really reminded me (positively!) of Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. Except, instead of Gothic cathedral architecture and medieval English history, The Years of Rice and Salt instead does it through the lens of reincarnation and a world history beginning with the fallout of the bubonic plague in the 600s C.E.

I can't remember how I came across this book, but I think it may have been mentioned at some point when I was reading up on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Either way, I would probably read this again! I think it would be fun to make a little cheat-sheet for myself to track the reincarnations of the B, K, I, P, and S names, if only for my own personal satisfaction in adding yet another chart to the provided world maps.

Extremely meticulous worldbuilding -- plausible if you accept the premise (i.e. a more virulent strain of bubonic plague killed off over 90% of the European population). The trajectory of scientific development in the Islamic world under Galileo and Newton analogues is especially well done.

Update: Nice to reread after watching Cloud Atlas, which goes kind of well with it.

Antes KSR era de mis escritores de especulación favoritos. Ahora es de mis escritores y pensadores favoritos. No hay sutileza que se le escape, todo pasa por una visión socialista y feminista que se adelanta veinte años a la moda actual.

3.5*
While I was intrigued by the premise of this alternate history sci fi novel, I found some aspects of it disappointing. The writing style was engaging, especially in the first few sections. But the reincarnation aspect for me was a real turn-off; it introduced a level of fantasy/speculative fiction that detracted from the book. I could have put up with it but then in the fourth book, one which I would have otherwise liked a lot, too many important discoveries & inventions were attributed to a single person/group to be believable. After that, I was disinclined to give the book/author the leniency that I might have otherwise awarded it/him...

In an alternative history, the Black Death destroys Europe and the world is divided between China and the nations of Islam, with India and the New World asserting themselves in lesser ways. It is seen through the eyes of the same group of people, reincarnated time after time, striving to make the world a better place. It's a neat premise, and it starts out fairly strong... but I honestly wish the author resisted the temptation to include page after page after page of various character musing about what history is, how Islam / Buddhism / atheism fits into all of this, how human beings can live in all that chaos and whether it's all worth it. And I further wish that the author, having set up (er... stolen) a very neat trick with the reincarnation, had resisted illustrating exactly what he's done and who was the inspiration.

This happens a bit too much, I'm afraid: an author feels so smug about being so damn clever, they can't resist wallowing in it towards the end of the book. Not directly, of course. They get a character to spell it out. It usually ruins a perfectly good book.

Over-research, over-stated, over-thought and over-impressed with itself, this book gets real old real fast. You will find yourself not being able to put it down, but once you're done, you'll be glad it's over. And if you're a writer yourself, you'd likely come away with a ton of better ideas. Just don't overdo it yourself.

Storyline: 1/5
Characters: 2/5
Writing Style: 3/5
World: 2/5

It has been a long time since a read a novel that worked so hard only to fail so utterly. When I give a book the lowest rating possible, it is not necessarily because it is without worth but because it was a dreadful read. This book was, in fact, quite an accomplishment, perhaps the single-most carefully researched and thoughtfully constructed fiction book I've ever read. The summary of the lengthy and decidedly negative review below is that it neglected both the best of the novel and the philosophical treatise. Unlike a great novel, this was never entertaining or beautiful and was seldom poetic. Unlike more serious philosophy, this was never organized, sufficiently-reasoned, or clear. What resulted, instead, was a murky and uncertain social theory that was flamboyantly uninteresting.

The timeline: This alternate history's departure point from medieval history comes early sometime in the 14th century, with the bubonic plague killing off all but a few isolated pockets of Europeans. From 1400 onward, then, various civilizations in mainland East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas are given license to develop without Caucasian influence. This gives Robinson an expansive palimpsest in which to build, explore, and hypothesize. The author is ambitious, and in the course of this single book, is going to outline how the social history of the world would have developed until now - the 21st century. As an alternate history, however, I found the story only marginally interesting. I did like how Robinson steadfastly avoided the "noble savage" exaggeration as well as "white guilt." If the alternate world history was remarkable for anything, it was in how similar the Years of Rice and Salt were to actual history. Kings still succumb to megalomania, bureaucracies are still corrupt, religious reactionaries oppress women, the poor are still impoverished, the rich aggrandize, and war is waged for indefensible ends. This similarity is, in part, Robinson's point. And I liked that point. The failings of humanity are just that: human failings. The world would not have been a utopia had the slave-trading, land-grabbing, mercantilist, colony-ruling Europeans been wiped off the face of the Earth. Though an interesting and worthwhile argument, it was not especially fun to read for hundreds of pages on end. The differences were often too minute and subtle for even someone moderately well-read and informed. The similarity between the alternate and actual history extended further as well. Even with technology the same devices get built at approximately the same time period and oftentimes in the same manner. I can understand the socio-political point, but was Robinson making a technological point as well? The same science will result as a consequence of the same general social and historical conditions? Where the socio-political point seemed at least thoughtful (though unexciting) the socio-technological point (if it was one at all) seemed to be born of a lack of creativity and a real failure to take advantage of the alternate history format.

The format: To chronicle this alternate social history of the world, Robinson needs a unifying device - some feature to link across seven hundred years and multiple civilizations. He adopts reincarnation as a tool for this purpose, letting our main characters reappear - albeit without knowledge of their previous lives - in different forms with every "book" (chapter). The chapter often ends in the Buddhist bardo where the characters integrate events from the just-lived life with their previous existence. Stylistically, this gives an exotic and definite magical-realism flavor to the story. As a way to unite the story's ten different "books," this fails. It fails in part because the very feature that would unify the different elements is flawed as a unifying device: the characters do not remember their past lives. So each reappearance is essentially a new character. Near the end of the novel there is some metanarrative exposition that explains some mnemonics for identifying the reincarnated characters and their essential attributes, but that same metanarrative also chides the format as artificial and incomplete. What we have then is essentially ten short stories  1300s Hungary, 1500s India, 1600s China/Central America, 1600s Uzbekistan, 1700s Japan/North America, 1800s Central China/Eastern Europe, 1800s Turkey/India/California, 1900s Central Asia, 2000s Alps/France, and 2100s Myanmar. It would be wrong to say that the short stories were disparate or wholly unconnected without the recurring characters. The plot arc becomes less about a particular problem, people, or civilization, however, and instead a long arc plot about world development. That sort of plot is much harder to relate to and appreciate. The developments are harder to identify and integrate. Really, it is no longer a novel but a work of social theory.

Style: Each of the ten books chapters has a different style. Unless one is versed in the myriad Oriental literary styles of the last 700 years, I don't think there is any way for you to appreciate the attention Robinson is bringing to each episode. They are distinct enough to be obvious, however, and I assumed while reading that Robinson was emulating the literary style from that period. There is something neat and obviously well-informed in that, but as a reader it too was difficult to enjoy. The problem is that the characters in each of the parts were telling their own first-person narrative. The characters, however, all sounded, thought, and seemed largely the same - whether they be 14th century African slaves or 18th century Iroquois. The writing style for each book chapter changed, then, but not the perception of events therein. Not being an Ancient Orient literary scholar I did not particularly appreciate or enjoy the different styles throughout the novel. In fact, they primarily served to emphasize the superficiality of the device and the extremely uniform characterization. Robinson could have remedied this. He could have abandoned (or added to) the literary styles and made each part more character-centric. He could have shown us how the people of that time would have interacted with their world with emphasis on how it was different from people at other places or other times. The alternative would have been to have made this an anthology of histories of his alternate history creation. Each book chapter would have been a "discovered" piece of literature or history. In that case the emphasis would have been on the change in literary style across time and how that affected or was affected by the social history being discussed. What we were left with instead was a range of inexplicably different writing styles all presenting the same characters across several centuries.

Religion: I associate leftist thinkers with hostility to religion, whether they be Marxist or Maoist. Robinson clearly has his influences in something post-Hegelian, though I know of no particular philosopher or theorist that corresponds exactly with him. In fact, even after reading the 1,957 pages of his Mars Trilogy, I'm still not exactly sure what he believes. He does seem to have an inclination for the mystical elements of Oriental religions, however. I don't know what to make of it, and he doesn't give any answers here. Through the first few books chapters in The Years of Rice and Salt, I thought that he was retelling the history of the development from the premodern to the modern; from the mystical to the scientific. The problem with that interpretation is that the magical-realism evidence in the first few chapters made it clear that the mystical elements were real - there really were Hindu gods and goddesses. Only as the modern period comes and the characters embrace scientific inquiry do the chapters start to cast doubt on the actuality of the supernatural. There's also the unifying device of reincarnation, however, that is treated as very real - even in the "modern" chapters. So the novel doesn't conclude that science is superior to the mystical. It doesn't conclude that the mystical is unreal. It doesn't conclude that the supernatural can be explained by the natural. It offers no conclusions. That might have been okay except for the fact that the work needed to be about something. It wasn't about a particular plot or characters. It devoted a lot of time to the theme of religion and particularly to the relationship between religion and progress. If there was a conclusion, then it was an undefended endorsement of the progressive mystical elements of Sufism and the worldly concerns of Buddhism.

Philosophy - For most of the work I was simply making best guesses at what it was all supposed to be about. Afterall, we get dozens of main characters with only the slimmest relationship to the last characters. We have a strikingly different alternate history that is strikingly similar in its effects. The religious and stylistic elements are exotic but seem more adornments than anything. It was not until Book 6: The Widow Kang (about 450 pages in) that Robinson makes a clear statement.

So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many and many of the world’s poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived. (474)

He would go on to add:

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. (475)

To the extent that Robinson's alternate history account to that point meant anything, I had discerned and agreed with this (though not necessarily in agreement with taking 400 pages to do it). The next book chapter, however, was titled, "The Age of Great Progress." I thought, "This is it. This is where his alternate history and our world history really diverge. This is where it becomes more than a lament that we humans always find a way to undermine others to benefit ourselves. I actually put the book down at this point, walked around, and tried to prepare myself for the treasure to come. I decided then to give up reading this as a novel and to instead read it as a philosophy text. There was no event more suspenseful in the Years of Rice and Salt than reading those final musings of the widow Kang on history's advent and previewing the succeeding chapter's title promising an age of Progress. "We're going to enter history now! I so erroneously thought. The result was a disappointment. The story turned into more-of-the-same in this particular case, it was simply a short-lived Renaissance. Robinson as a philosopher with anything clear to say doesn't appear again until the final book chapter when an elder teacher in Myanmar delivers some lectures on the practice of writing history. There were some thought-provoking ideas here and some justification for why Robinson wanted to write an alternate history, why he wanted it to be so similar to ours, and the opportunities and limits of history as a science. I was convinced that Robinson had researched the topic and made an effort to do something more than entertain with this alternate history. These musings, however, come at the very end of the novel. Any good academic presentation is going to put those ideas up front. Sound philosophy, too, is going to spend a great deal of time justifying the method instead of ticking a few points off in its favor. This wasn't a philosophy text in the normal, academic, sense. This wasn't a novel in the sense usually employed. This was an exhibition piece on the use of alternate history in scientific inquiry. Had I known that when I began the work, and I had I already read some published articles on the debates in the field, I might have found a way to enjoy this. I will not rule out doing that some day, perhaps coming back to this and thinking it one of the greatest books I've ever written.

I am on the search for quality speculative fiction, and it is a shame that Robinson engaged in so much creative fiction and speculation to such meager results. An impressive book. A wearying book.

Finishing this book was a chore. It was impressively researched, decently written, and incredibly insightful, but at the end of the day I found myself glancing at my watch and trying to remember why I was supposed to care.

The marketing of the book is quite misleading. This isn't just a straightforward alternate history book--What if the Black Death killed off 99% of Europeans and the rest of the world's civilizations survived? Rather more importantly, it is a story about reincarnation. You start in the fourteenth century just as everybody's realizing that European civilization has become completely extinct, and over the course of the book you jump forward in time a couple decades or centuries at a time until roughly the present day, all the while following the stories of a handful of reincarnated souls. These souls are quite handily identified because, whether they are a fourteenth century nomadic Mongolian warrior or a seventeenth century wealthy Chinese widow with bound feet, their names always start with the same letter. Usually two souls in particular are the "main characters" in any given section, but they are surrounded by a little crew of other souls who are trying to achieve enlightenment together. Ostensibly, the crew of souls is getting better and better at life until they finally reach their ideal state.

Except maybe not? Because despite this elaborate setup of reincarnation as a method of exploring alternate history, the whole purpose remained frustratingly unclear. The author introduced and dropped literary motifs and themes seemingly randomly throughout the book. And once I figured out that every section was going to end with the main soul-characters dying and being reincarnated, I found it very hard to give a damn about what happened.

Some sections were more interesting than others. But given the number of sections, I was surprised at how limited the scope turned out to be. There were no sections located in Africa (though African characters showed up in other sections of the book), and way too many sections located in China. The characters came from all walks of life, so that the same soul could be reincarnated as a Sultana, a literal tiger, and a simple Chinese foot soldier, which was really quite gratifying. But it became difficult to recognize the souls over time. The author started out carrying over personality traits as the souls were reincarnated, and then just decided to drop that idea, I suppose.

All that said, it would be rude not to mention just how ridiculously thorough the research on this bad boy was. It was all completely plausible--both the historical technology, events, and philosophy discussed, and how it would all have been subtly or dramatically changed without the influence of Europeans.

The idea that the Native Americans would have actually had a chance of holding their own against invaders from the Old World was extremely provocative. It made me a little sad, actually, to see how they might have progressed as a unified world power in their own right if they hadn't been wiped out by European diseases and greed.

Possibly the most interesting plot point of the alternate history was that without Christians (the religion was basically wiped out along with its practitioners), there would still be religious wars. But instead of being between the three main monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the religious wars would be between the concept of one god (Islam), many gods (Hinduism), and no gods (Buddhism). The resulting wars, as imagined by Robinson, lasted for generations, and led to rapid technological innovations as people found new and exciting ways to murder each other.

The concept of gender equality in this alternate history was also pretty fascinating. Still tied to religious ideology, the whole concept of women-as-people came into and out of fashion depending on a number of factors. You have fifteenth century woman heads of state and seventeenth century woman philosophers and twentieth century woman scientists... only for their also to be concubines, harems, and bans on the education of women. It was a depressing pattern of ups and downs.

Look, I would've enjoyed this book a lot more if the stakes were made clear at the outset, and if the main driver of the plot was action, rather than discussion. It's not a bad book, simply exasperating in its execution. If you want a really, really thorough and imaginative alternate history, and you're deeply curious about what the world would look like without European imperialism, check this shit out.

One of the few books I couldn't force myself to finish. I usually enjoy alternate histories and post-apocalpyse fiction, so I thought I would enjoy this, but....no.

First, there didn't seem to be any overarching storyline. Characters are introduced, some contrived/random events happen, some dialog occurs, then they die. A brief interlude where the characters meet in some sort of afterlife happens, then another story starts.

I spent most of the next "story" trying to figure out who the charcters were supposed to represent as reincarnations of the first story as well as what alternate time/culture was supposedly being potrayed, then the charcters would die and have another meaningless conversation in the afterlife again.

The points of view were extreamly narrow, making it difficult to infer the historical significance of what changes had occured, if any. I was unable to establish an emotional rapport with the "characters" who simply seemed to be enduring whatever was happening to them and waiting to die and get reincarnated again. Frankly, it seemed to be a collection of random short stories set in generically eastern historical settings with the "plague kills off whitey"/reincarnation trope invented to bring them together in one collection.

I grew exhausted trying to figure out what was happening to who and realized I didn't really give a shit anyway. Perhaps there is some payoff to finishing the thing, but it didn't really seem to be going anywhere and not worth the slog. None of the individual vinettes I managed to get through really engaged me on their own either.

I hated giving up on a book with such an interesting premise, but found myself actually dreading picking it up again.

Клинамен
Я сотни раз прорастал травой по берегам стремительных рек. Сотни тысяч лет я рождался и жил во всех телах, что есть на Земле
Джалаладдин Руми
Кима Стенли Робинсона буду читать еще, после "Авроры" было ясно. Сильнее всего хотелось "Годы риса и соли", на русском, кажется, нет еще. Но такой интересный посыл, смотрите: в реальности романа чума (а скорее сочетание чумы, сибирской язвы и голода, вызванного неурожаем) уничтожила на тридцать процентов населения Европы, а девяносто девять, странным образом не затронув густонаселенных Индии и Китая. То есть, были единичные случаи заражений, но эпидемию удавалось локализовать совершенно драконовскими мерами. И основной переносчик, европейская серая крыса, в том биоценозе отсутствовала. Впрочем, не возьмусь утверждать, но как-то так. Европа опустела, христианства нет, остались ислам и буддизм, между ними будет разворачиваться постоянное соперничество. Города, спустя столетия, заполняются , обживаются и перестраиваются по новым канонам.

Но главное здесь другое. Роман построен как череда реинкарнаций родственных душ, проходящих через время и пространство, воплощаясь в людей (и не только) в разное время, в разных местах. Смысл даже не во множественности рождений, но в том, что мы путешествуем группами. С самыми значимыми в нашей жизни людьми уже бывали тесно связаны в прежних воплощениях, и еще будем. Такое себе вечное возвращение. Это начнется известием, принесенным разведчиками Тимура, что городок, лежащий на пути армии, пуст - все вымерли. Приказом хана убить и сжечь их вместе с лошадьми и молнией, которая поразит правителя в самый момент, когда командир отряда должен проститься с жизнью.

Деморализованная армия распадается и откатывается в степь. А Болд скитается по опустошенным заразой землям, избегая входить в города, находит и приманивает конька, после им придется пожертвовать, когда нападут волки. В последней стадии истощения выходит к реке, подобран работорговцами и после продан на китайскую галеру, где встречает чернокожего раба Ку. Мальчишку кастрируют, Болд выхаживает его, по прибытии в Китай их продают владелице харчевни и настает сытая жизнь. Но Ку, одержимый ненавистью к китайцам, грабит и убивает хозяйку, поджигает ресторанчик (а там все вокруг бамбуковое) и старший товарищ поневоле вынужден сопровождать юного злодея. Этим не заканчивается, потом Ку, решительно ничего не боящийся, становится евнухом императорского гарема, а Болда пристраивает на конюшню. И снова убивает, поджигает, на сей раз дворцовое помещение. И чудом выходит сухим из воды.

Они встретятся в Бардо, где Ку перенесет тысячи лет адских мук, а потом снова воплотятся. На сей раз в индийскую девушку Кокилу из касты торговцев Вайшью, которая, мстя за смерть подруги, отравит мужа и свекровь, да так и будет схвачена с руками, выпачканными синим соком ядовитого растения, и казнена, как ведьма и отравительница. Чтобы воплотиться в тигрицу, которая спасет брахмана от повстанцев, после будет убита, а юноша, тоже вынужденный спасаться, прибьет ся к паломникам в Мекку, примет ислам, станет суфием, прежде любимым великим Акбаром, после, когда тот станет склоняться к буддизму - опальным. Казни избежит, но будет сослан устраивать медресе в Бараку (это в теперешней Франции), где в просвещенной султане Калиме узнает свою тигрицу по сросшимся на переносице птичкой бровям. Просвещенная овдовевшая правительница, с помощью Бахрама, создаст идеальное государство на территории одного отдельно взятого города. Она трактует Коран с точки зрения раннего феминизма. Но вскоре братья мужа нападут на город. С горсткой верных Бахрам и Калима переселятся севернее, и там устраивают город, который сумеют защитить - оплот исламского феминизма.

Весь роман такая череда перетекающих друг в друга историй. Будут японские мореплаватели, открывшие случайно путь в Северную, а затем и Южную Америку. И тогда же на американский континент проникнет европейская оспа, от которой у местных нет естественного иммунитета. Будет история арабского алхимика, который станет великим ученым, проведет опыты с вакуумом, измерения скорости звука, но под угрозой семье, взятой султаном в заложники, вынужден разрабатывать оружие, в том числе отравляющие газы. И история родовитой китайской вдовы, которая приютит монаха с сыном, роющихся в куче отбросов, внезапно под влиянием этой встречи начав прозревать предыдущие воплощения. А после, когда несчастного монаха обвинят в шпионаже и запытают до смерти, выйдет за мусульманского ученого и они вместе станут искать путей совмещения ислама с буддизмом. Она будет писательницей, и свет просвещения станет распространяться потихоньку. Но потом случится восстание, которое жестоко подавят, новый неурожай, наводнение, война.

Там будет история японского деда Мазая, Япония давно под владычеством Китая, который протянул руки в Европу - Фиранджа и Северную Америку, правда, там противостоит Лига Племен Ходенесуни. И вот парень, японский раб лавочника китайца, посланный хозяйкой за шелковичными червями, спрятанными на чердаке в залитом наводнением районе, дрейфует на своей лодчонке, то и дело прибиваясь к островкам, откуда на палубу немедленно устремляется всякая скачущая и ползучая тварь: от змей и пауков до лисиц. Он спасает молодую китаянку с ребенком, после они попадают на карантин - в районе наводнения ожидаемо свирепствует холера. А потом он вступит в ряды сопротивления и спасенная китаянка не донесет станет помогать.

В этой книге столько всего интересного, и когда ближе к концу над теорией инкарнаций станут потешаться - а что бы вы хотели, просвещенный XIX век, ниспровержение устоев, будет ужасно обидно - вы чего, есть это, есть, вся же книга о том! И такой неожиданный безнадежный обнадеживающий, грустный, прекрасный финал, описывающий примерно наше время. Дивный роман. Если переведут, обязательно перечитаю.
Конечно, мы плохие. Конечно, все идет не так. Но зачем жить только этим? Для чего притворяться, что лишь об этом история? Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story?

Rosado on the road.

Description: It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur - the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe's population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been: a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.

A carrot at the end of every chapter annoyed, yet teeth were gritted and the story proved immersive, mainly dealing with conscious re-incarnation through the eons of human social history.



Picked the right time to tackle this one as Ramadan has just started in Real Life and I learned a lot. Whilst on the subject of Rumi, he was mentioned with understandable reverence, DiCaprio is a not the best choice for that Sufi Persian poet by a long white chalk.



Book information comes from wiki and acts as aide-mémoir to the audio file:

nBook One, Awake to Emptiness, begins with Bold and Psin, scouts in Timur's army, discovering a Magyar village where all the inhabitants have died from a plague. Timur turns his army around and orders the scouting party executed to avoid the plague, but Bold escapes and wanders through the dead lands of Eastern Europe (encountering only one lone native). Upon reaching the sea he is captured by Turkish Muslim slave-traders and sold into Zheng He's Chinese treasure fleet. Bold befriends a young African slave, named Kyu, whom he cares for after the Chinese castrate him. In China, they are kept as kitchen slaves until escaping and eventually making their way north to Beijing where they find work at the palace of Zhu Gaozhi, heir to the Yongle Emperor. The vengeful Kyu hates the Chinese for what they have done to him and he incites violence between the eunuchs and the Confucian administrative officials.

Book Two, The Haj in the Heart, begins in Mughal India where a Hindu girl named Kokila poisons her husband's father and brother after discovering their plot to defraud the village. She is executed for her crime, but is reborn as a tiger that befriends a man named Bistami, a Sufi mystic of Persian origin. Bistami goes on to become a judge for Mughal Emperor Akbar, but later falls into his disfavour, being exiled to Mecca. Bistami spends one year in Mecca before travelling overland to the Maghreb and Iberia (Al-Andalus). Bistami then joins a caravan led by Sultan Mawji and his wife, Katima, who seek to leave Al-Andalus and found a new city on the other side of the Pyrenees, beyond the control of the Caliph of Al-Andalus. They build the city of Baraka (on the abandoned former site of Bayonne, France) and create a model society in which Sultana Katima is highly influential. Katima seeks to change the Islamic religion to create equality between men and women, by rejecting the Hadiths and relying only on her interpretation of the Quran. She rules the community after her husband dies (something not allowed in normal Islamic practice), but the Caliph of Al-Andalus eventually hears of their "heresy" and sends an army against them. The community flees further to the north.

In Book Three, Ocean Continents, the Wanli Emperor launches an invasion against Nippon (Japan) but the huge fleet is swept out to sea by the Kuroshio Current and they are set adrift on the unexplored Pacific Ocean. The fleet hopes to be brought back to China eventually by the great circular currents of the Pacific, but they accidentally discover the New World. The sailors make landfall on the West coast of North America and make contact with the indigenous population (the peaceful Miwok people), but quickly leave once Admiral Kheim discovers they have inadvertently infected the indigenous people with devastating diseases. They take a small girl with them (who they have taught Chinese and named "Butterfly") and sail south where they meet another civilization rich in gold. There they narrowly escape being ritually sacrificed by using their flintlock firearms, something the natives have never seen before. They eventually return to China and tell the Emperor that he could easily conquer this new land and gain its great wealth.

Book Four, The Alchemist, takes place in Samarkand, in the 17th century. An alchemist named Khalid, attempts to fool the Khan into believing that he has discovered the Philosopher's stone (which supposedly can turn Lead into Gold), but his fraud is uncovered and his hand is chopped off as punishment. Khalid becomes depressed and disenchanted with Alchemy (the prevailing belief of the scholars of the time) and decides to destroy all his Alchemical books (which come to Samarkand via the trade routes from all over the known world). However, his friends Iwang (a Tibetan Buddhist mathematician) and Bahram (a Sufi blacksmith) instead convince him to test the veracity of the claims in the books and thus see if there is any true wisdom to be gained. They devote themselves to practical demonstrations and experiments that greatly improve knowledge of various aspects of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology, and weaponry, and in the process create the scientific method. Their discoveries create interest (and alarm) amongst the religious madrasahs of the city, many of whom also go along with the new fashion of building and testing scientific apparatuses. But most of all, they catch the eye of the Khan's powerful advisor, who sees in their inventions the possibility of great military technology, to fight the rising Chinese threat to the East.

Book Five, Warp and Weft, describes how a former Samurai, fleeing from Japan (which was conquered by China along with most of the rest of East Asia) to the New World, travels all the way across the continent to meet the Iroquois people. They name him "From West" and make him a chief of their confederacy. He helps organize their society into a larger defensive alliance of all the North American tribes (the Hodenosaunee League) and shows them how to make their own guns with which to resist the Chinese coming from the West and the Muslims coming from the East.

Book Six, Widow Kang, follows the life of Chinese widow Kang Tongbi during the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. She takes in a poor Buddhist monk, Bao Ssu, and his son whom she finds scavenging, but the monk is wrongly implicated in a series of queue cuttings and is killed by Qing magistrates. Later, Kang meets a Hui Muslim scholar named Ibrahim ibn Hasam and together they discover it is possible to remember their past lives. They marry and move to Lanzhou in western China, where they undertake work to try to reconcile Islamic and Confucian beliefs. Kang creates and collects works of proto-feminist poetry and becomes a known writer. There is a Muslim rebellion in the region due to the Qing intolerance of new Islamic sects coming from the west, but the revolt is crushed with massive force.

Book Seven Seven, The Age of Great Progress, is set during the 19th century and begins during a war between the Ottoman Empire and the Indian state of Travancore. The Indians have previously defeated the Mughals and the Safavids and have developed more modern forms of warfare, emphasising surprise and mobility, they have also invented Steam engines and Ironclad warships which they sail straight to the city of Konstantiniyye and capture it with the aid of military balloons. The Ottomans are defeated easily. A Muslim Armenian doctor named Ismail ibn Mani al-Dir, who had served the Ottoman Sultan, is captured and sent to Travancore where he learns of the amazing advancements that have been made on the sub-continent such as railways and factories. He happily joins the hospital of Travancore and begins work in anatomy and physiology. Ismail eventually meets their ruler, the Kerala of Travancore, who pursues scientific and philosophical advancement (a kind of Enlightened Despot). The Kerala's aim is to drive the Muslim invaders away and peacefully unify India into a kind of democratic confederation. Later, during the Xianfeng Emperor's reign, in the Chinese colony known as Gold Mountain, major flooding in the Central Valley of California forces the evacuation of Chinese colonial towns and Japanese settlers alike. The Japanese had originally fled to the new world to escape Chinese oppression in their homeland, but find themselves once again under the Chinese yoke. A displaced Japanese slave, Kiyoaki, and a pregnant Chinese refugee, Peng-ti, manage to flee to the great coastal city of Fangzhang. There Kiyoaki joins a secret Japanese freedom movement which is being aided by Travancore, with Ismail acting as a go-between agent.

Book Eight, War of the Asuras, is set in the 20th century, during the "Long War". The world has become divided into three large alliances, the Chinese Empire and its colonies, the fractured Muslim world (Dar al-Islam), and the democratic Indian and Hodenosaunee Leagues. At the outbreak of war the Muslim states put aside their differences and unite to flight the larger threat of China (whom they fear will soon achieve global hegemony). The Indian and Hodenosaunee Leagues stay neutral at first, but eventually ally with China, as they see the Muslims as their greater enemy, however the Muslims invade northern India all the way down to Burma to stop the Indians and Chinese from linking up. The war drags on for decades causing major changes in the societies involved, with rapid industrialisation, mass conscription and mass casualties (both sides are forced to use women in the fighting to make up for manpower losses). Being the first industrial war, new devastating weapons and methods are employed, such as trench warfare, poison gas and aerial bombing. The story follows Chinese officers, Kuo, Bai and Iwa as they desperately fight in the trenches of the Gansu Corridor, where the ground has been blasted down to bedrock by sixty years of bombardments (the latest massive artillery pieces lob shells into space on ballistic trajectories). The new Chinese government, the "Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent" (the Qing Dynasty having been overthrown by a military coup during the war) orders a new offensive against the Muslim lines in Gansu. Kuo, Bai and Iwa are told to use poison gas and then frontally assault the enemy trenches. They do this successfully, but are then beaten back by the second line of Muslim defences, losing tens of thousands of soldiers and gaining nothing. However they are then told that their attack was merely a diversion for the real offensive which is being conducted by the Japanese (who have recently been freed by China in exchange for alliance in the war) through Siberia. The Muslims are in retreat but the Japanese get bogged down at the Ural Mountains. In the meantime, Kuo is killed by a shell which penetrates their bunker, Bai and Iwa are then ordered to move with their company south through Tibet to support their Indian allies. At a pass in the Himalayas they witness the Muslim artillery blasting the top of Mount Everest down so that the tallest mountain in the world will be in Muslim lands. After extreme difficulties they manage to breach the Muslim defences at the pass and the Chinese army pours through to meet up with the Indians, turning the course of the war in their favour. However Bai is plagued by visions of his dead friend Kuo, who tells him that none of this is happening and that he is already dead, killed by the shell earlier. Bai does not know whether he is indeed living real life or is already in the afterlife.

Book Nine, Nsara, follows the life of a young Muslim woman named Budur and her aunt Idelba in Europe, in the aftermath of the Long War. Budur's family is highly traditional and as there are not enough men left after the war for marriage prospects, she is forced to live in seclusion with her female cousins in the family's compound in Turi, a city in one of the Alpine Emirates. Idelba is an educated woman and was involved in physics research in Firanja before her husband's death, she is just as unhappy in Turi as Budur and wishes to return to her former work. One night, Idelba escapes and Budur follows her. Together they leave the life of captivity in the Alps and move to the more liberal and cosmopolitan city of Nsara (Saint-Nazaire in France). There they stay at a zawiyya, a refuge for women, Idelba restarts her work in physics and Budur enrols in university where she studies history. The history class is presided over by Kirana, a radical feminist lecturer who questions everything about Muslim society. Budur becomes close to Kirana who opens her eyes to the injustices that women face and how they can seek emancipation and liberation (the two have a brief affair). Life at the university allows for open debate about all issues and Kirana focuses on the nature of history and contemporary events, such as the Muslim defeat in the Long War, which she blames on the failure of the Islamic countries to properly mobilize women for the war effort (something which the Chinese did almost totally). There is also a newfound interest in ancient history as the field of archaeology is taking off (theories about how and why the plague killed off the Europeans centuries before are a popular topic).

Book Ten, The First Years, follows Bao Xinhua who moves to the west coast of Yingzou after witnessing the assassination of his friend, and revolutionary, Kung Jianguo. He marries and raises two children before accepting a diplomatic post in Bangladesh. In his later years, he moves back to Fangzhang to teach history and the philosophy of history.

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