The Years of Rice and Salt

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's been several weeks since I posted to my book log, but I'm not dead. It's just that a combination of factors worked to keep me from reading a lot of books in September: a busy stretch at work, our decision to buy a house, and The Years of Rice and Salt.

As you probably know unless you've been hiding in a cave to avoid reading any book reviews, The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history, taking off from the question "What if the Black Plague had killed 99% of the population of Europe?" In Robinson's alternate world, Christianity is essentially wiped out, leaving the world to Islam and Buddhism, and he follows the resulting history over several centuries. He maps out a generally plausible history for the rise of technological civilization over a span of many centuries, from the re-colonization of Europe through the discovery of the New World (by the Chinese), through the present day.

This wasn't an especially easy book to read, even in those rare stretches when I had time to spend on it. The story is told in an episodic manner, following the same small group of souls through a series of reincarnations, and using them to chronicle crucial moments in the history of the world. We see the reincarnated souls (conveniently identified by first initials-- one has names that begin with "K", another with "B", a third with "I") as explorers, adventurers, scientists, scholars, soldiers, and politicians, and each time at a pivotal historical moment. It's an interesting device (if maybe a hair too clever), but it makes the book a little disjointed, as you're thrown into a completely new set of circumstances every time the scene changes. It may be smoother than if he'd done it with entirely new characters in each scene, but then again, I found myself being a little distracted by looking for the signature names, and trying to match them up with previous chapters.

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.)

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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