The book does at least avoid most of the pitfalls of alternate history. It's not entirely successful-- you can sometimes see the hand of the author manipulating events to get something similar to our own history, even if he does avoid the cutesy tactic of having major real-world historical figures make cameos in the vastly changed later stages of the history (mostly by virtue of having wiped Europe and European history off the map...). Still, there are occasional slips-- he makes reference at one point to Tokugawa Ieyasu and the closing of Japan to the outside world, which I'm pretty sure was at least partly due to the presence of Christian missionaries in Japan. In a world without Europe, I would've expected the Tokugawa shogunate to have a different form.

A somewhat different problem is that Robinson is fundamentally an optimist, even if he does drag his WWI analogue out for sixty years. His belief in the better angels of our nature (as it were) leads him to throw in a couple of plot points that strained my ability to willingly suspend disbelief.

Ultimately, I think this book goes into the damning-with-faint-praise category of "impressive achievement." I'm deeply impressed with the care Robinson lavished on developing his alternate history. He's obviously done a careful job researching the major cultures appearing in his tale, and some quibbles aside, he plots out a reasonable history of how they might have interacted in the absence of European powers. It is, as I said, an impressive achievement, but not a novel I'm likely to read again.

(John Novak also has a booklog sort of review of this, and I would've sworn I read comments about it from Trent Goulding, but I don't see it in his archives. Trent should definitely read it, though, because he knows a whole lot more about Chinese history and culture than I do, and is thus in a better position to assess Robinson's presentation of them.)

(Originally posted to The Library of Babel.)