Kim Stanley Robinson

Hailed by "The New York Times Book Review" as "eye-opening, " this alternative history of the last 600 years begins as the Black Death kills nearly everyone in Europe, and China, India, and the nations of Islam now control the world.

The Years of Rice and Salt

The years of rice and salt

Rjyan C Kidwell

Quite hard to decide if I "liked it" or "really like it"! For a ~760-page epic, it seemed to fly by-- the beginning and middle have wonderful momentum, with the regular change of setting making it real easy to keep diving back in. Robinson's basic ethical argument is awesome and I really enjoyed how he gradually introduces it into the book. However, by the second half, once he's laid his philosophy bare and starts really hammering away at it, certain aspects of the book started to seem really curious... It seems strange that someone with his level of compassion and respect for other cultures and burning desire for truth would seem to believe that modern science has struck at basic, fundamental truths of the universe, and that in a world without any serious Christian/Western power, everything would have inevitably ended up with the exact same scientific belief system (barring a few cosmetic changes-- "heartknots" instead of nuclei, etc.) Is science an objective path to the "ultimate reality," or is it a specific way of organizing and explaining what we perceive? Robinson seems to throw in with the former, even though much of what he writes will appeal to those reluctant to buy such a claim. 

This sticking point extends beyond the scientific beliefs of his alternate Earth-- once he gets a good way into the new timeline, events that mimic events of our own history seem to crop up more and more frequently, only slightly modified. "Their version" of the renaissance, of WWI, of atomic bomb research... as the book proceeds I found myself constantly questioning whether a world without whitey would really resemble our own as much as Robinson seems to indicate. Now, I suppose it is obviously his mission to critique our own situation, to hold a funhouse-mirror up to our current situation and understanding of history and talk about it by tweaking things ever-so-slightly, but at times I found myself wishing that he had broken with actual history a little more radically. 

Regardless, the writing is excellent, the characters are compelling, the questions raised are ambitious-- easily enough here to recommend the book to anyone intrigued by its premise.

As Bold Bardash, a military horseman, rides west across the steppe and on to the Magyar Plain, he comes across a town in which everyone lies dead. Long dead. Plague has struck Europe. So die the ancestors of Da Vinci, Newton, and Shakespeare. A novel of the past 700 years as it could have been.

The Years of Rice and Salt

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