The Years of Rice and Salt
by Kim Stanley Robinson
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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 the plague had 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 show more famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds-in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world. show lessTags
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It has taken me a week to get round to writing this review, for two reasons. First, a sudden and intense TV obsession (Word of Honour, highly recommended) and second, concern about not doing 'The Years of Rice and Salt' justice. I first tried to read it as an undergraduate student, I think, and gave up pretty quickly. I was too impatient to appreciate Kim Stanley Robinson when I was younger, but now I'm in my thirties he's one of my favourite authors. This novel is different in setting to his sci-fi, while retaining the same themes that make his other books so satisfying: the pursuit of scientific understanding, the alleviation of human suffering, the pursuit of justice and equality, and management of the environment. The depth and show more nuance he brings to these topics really stands out. His novels are long and full of thoughtful detail; they repay careful reading. As soon as I started reading 'The Years of Rice and Salt' this time, I was enthralled. Both the concept and its execution are fascinating.
'The Years of Rice and Salt' is an alternate history in which, essentially, the Black Death killed all white people. Aside from a few isolated Scottish islands, Europe is completely depopulated. It is gradually reoccupied by people from the Middle East, becoming a loose network of Islamic city states. History proceeds without the West, along a different yet analogous path. Colonisation and world war aren't avoided, but occur differently. The main powers are China, India, and a league of Islamic states. The North American east and west coasts are colonised, but indigenous people retain control of the interior. Religion and resources still drive conflict, yet capitalism takes a somewhat different form without Christianity as its moral armour. The whole thought experiment is highly thought-provoking and impressively wide-ranging.
I would have happily read this counterfactual told in the style of a non-fiction history book. Instead, the narrative follows a small group of characters through a series of reincarnations, spread across 600 years and the whole world. Each section evokes a different time and place, using a range of stylistic conceits like inset text. These variations serve to distinguish the sections, while the continuity of characters ensures the narrative coheres. Between lives, the characters briefly unite in the Bardo and discuss their progress. These conversations and the nature of the Bardo give the book a powerful spiritual dimension. When aware that they've lived many times and will live many more, the characters ask: what is the aim of our lives? What should humanity be striving for? How can we do better next time? I really liked the detail that the Bardo changes over time. The most haunting section for me was during the Long War, when the characters couldn't tell whether they were still alive or dead in the Bardo. The war seemed to have collapsed the barriers between life and death. This section evoked a terrifying vision of trench warfare bisecting the whole of India, from coast to Himalayas.
War does not predominate in the narrative, however, as the characters are reincarnated as explorers, scientists, political activists, writers, teachers, and wild animals. Their relationships and experiences vary accordingly, while retaining an essential bond of community. Kim Stanley Robinson shows a completely new world history through their eyes and presents his essentially optimistic and progressive view of humanity. None of the political thinkers and leaders we know exist in this world, yet egalitarian ideas arise:
Unsurprisingly, I found 'The Years of Rice and Salt' a happier and more hopeful reading experience than Kim Stanley Robinson's more recent novels [b:The Ministry for the Future|50998056|The Ministry for the Future|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586372180l/50998056._SY75_.jpg|75844661] and [b:New York 2140|29570143|New York 2140|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471618737l/29570143._SY75_.jpg|49898123]. In those, he seeks to write humanity a way out of climate change catastrophe, whereas this has the comfortable distance of alternate history. Still, the characters' philosophical and political debates encourage the reader to reflect on how history could have happened differently. 'The Years of Rice and Salt' doesn't claim that without white Europeans none of the atrocities of colonialism, slavery, and industrialised war could have happened; that would be an unconvincing cop-out. Nonetheless, the history of North America in particular would have been very different and the alternative here is considerably less destructive. I don't have enough historical knowledge to judge the overall plausibility of events. The details were nonetheless convincingly imagined: the music, clothing, attitudes to drugs, units of measurement, names of technology, and metaphors that developed without Europe and Christianity. This is an incredibly ambitious book that succeeds in telling an alternate world history that is both engaging and challenging. It was both escapist to read and a reminder of the huge impact that plagues have on the course of history. show less
'The Years of Rice and Salt' is an alternate history in which, essentially, the Black Death killed all white people. Aside from a few isolated Scottish islands, Europe is completely depopulated. It is gradually reoccupied by people from the Middle East, becoming a loose network of Islamic city states. History proceeds without the West, along a different yet analogous path. Colonisation and world war aren't avoided, but occur differently. The main powers are China, India, and a league of Islamic states. The North American east and west coasts are colonised, but indigenous people retain control of the interior. Religion and resources still drive conflict, yet capitalism takes a somewhat different form without Christianity as its moral armour. The whole thought experiment is highly thought-provoking and impressively wide-ranging.
I would have happily read this counterfactual told in the style of a non-fiction history book. Instead, the narrative follows a small group of characters through a series of reincarnations, spread across 600 years and the whole world. Each section evokes a different time and place, using a range of stylistic conceits like inset text. These variations serve to distinguish the sections, while the continuity of characters ensures the narrative coheres. Between lives, the characters briefly unite in the Bardo and discuss their progress. These conversations and the nature of the Bardo give the book a powerful spiritual dimension. When aware that they've lived many times and will live many more, the characters ask: what is the aim of our lives? What should humanity be striving for? How can we do better next time? I really liked the detail that the Bardo changes over time. The most haunting section for me was during the Long War, when the characters couldn't tell whether they were still alive or dead in the Bardo. The war seemed to have collapsed the barriers between life and death. This section evoked a terrifying vision of trench warfare bisecting the whole of India, from coast to Himalayas.
War does not predominate in the narrative, however, as the characters are reincarnated as explorers, scientists, political activists, writers, teachers, and wild animals. Their relationships and experiences vary accordingly, while retaining an essential bond of community. Kim Stanley Robinson shows a completely new world history through their eyes and presents his essentially optimistic and progressive view of humanity. None of the political thinkers and leaders we know exist in this world, yet egalitarian ideas arise:
"This is the world we want you to help us make," he said. "We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullas or ulema, no more slavery and no more ursury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, arms, armies, or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are."
Unsurprisingly, I found 'The Years of Rice and Salt' a happier and more hopeful reading experience than Kim Stanley Robinson's more recent novels [b:The Ministry for the Future|50998056|The Ministry for the Future|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586372180l/50998056._SY75_.jpg|75844661] and [b:New York 2140|29570143|New York 2140|Kim Stanley Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471618737l/29570143._SY75_.jpg|49898123]. In those, he seeks to write humanity a way out of climate change catastrophe, whereas this has the comfortable distance of alternate history. Still, the characters' philosophical and political debates encourage the reader to reflect on how history could have happened differently. 'The Years of Rice and Salt' doesn't claim that without white Europeans none of the atrocities of colonialism, slavery, and industrialised war could have happened; that would be an unconvincing cop-out. Nonetheless, the history of North America in particular would have been very different and the alternative here is considerably less destructive. I don't have enough historical knowledge to judge the overall plausibility of events. The details were nonetheless convincingly imagined: the music, clothing, attitudes to drugs, units of measurement, names of technology, and metaphors that developed without Europe and Christianity. This is an incredibly ambitious book that succeeds in telling an alternate world history that is both engaging and challenging. It was both escapist to read and a reminder of the huge impact that plagues have on the course of history. show less
I’m a big fan of KSR’s fiction, because of the subjects he tackles and his treatment of them just as much as the stories he tells. He doesn’t just make use of common sf tropes, he interrogates them. A lot more sf authors should do that.
The Years of Rice and Salt may be an alternate history, but it’s not a story set in a world which differs from ours due to some change in the past; it is in fact several stories - ten of them. Nor is it the book promised by its back-cover blurb, which posits a story set in a present-day world in which the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed 99% of the population of Europe instead of one-third. As a result, other civilisations flourished. Obviously, they flourished in real history - but in show more KSR’s novel they ended up dominating the world. The Years of Rice and Salt is not that either. It’s not a history of the world following on from the jonbar point. Which I suppose would be almost impossible - and huge! - to write. Like Laurent Binet’s Civilisation, it is a series of vignettes which skip forward through the centuries, and around the world, from the Black Death to the present day.
The linking conceit is that there is a group of people, connected eternally as a “jati”, who are repeatedly reincarnated. They die, spend time in the bardo, and are then reincarnated - as humans, or as animals. Allowing KSR to provide a focus point from which to hang to ten different stories taking place over the centuries in his alternate history. Sometimes the members of the jati remember their earlier lives, but usually they don’t.
The Black Death wipes out Europe. The Islamic Empire is never dislodged from the Iberian Peninsula. The Chinese continue to war on their western border, but also explore east and eventually settle the western coast of North America. A progressive empire develops in southern India. A league of American nations in central North America form a federation and keep their independence. There is a decades-long war which involves all three of the major world powers - the Indian empire, the Islamic empire, and the Chinese empire. Once the dust has settled, a new world order prevails. The various members of the jati are present, or pivotal, in some of the more important events in this 700 year history. They also take place all over the world - Samarkand, Beijing, the Great Lakes, an Islamic city in western France, a Chinese San Francisco…
It’s fascinating stuff. The linking text is a, to be honest, not especially interesting mechanism to give the novel structure, but the ten “books” in The Years of Rice and Salt would be equally fascinating without them. KSR’s research is impressive - but not perfect: at one point, he described the Islamic punishment of cutting off the right hand of criminals is worsened because it forces criminals to use their left “unclean” hand when eating. That’s the whole point of the punishment. But the invented history KSR has created is amazing. It feels all too real, which I guess is the point of the novel. Recommended. show less
The Years of Rice and Salt may be an alternate history, but it’s not a story set in a world which differs from ours due to some change in the past; it is in fact several stories - ten of them. Nor is it the book promised by its back-cover blurb, which posits a story set in a present-day world in which the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed 99% of the population of Europe instead of one-third. As a result, other civilisations flourished. Obviously, they flourished in real history - but in show more KSR’s novel they ended up dominating the world. The Years of Rice and Salt is not that either. It’s not a history of the world following on from the jonbar point. Which I suppose would be almost impossible - and huge! - to write. Like Laurent Binet’s Civilisation, it is a series of vignettes which skip forward through the centuries, and around the world, from the Black Death to the present day.
The linking conceit is that there is a group of people, connected eternally as a “jati”, who are repeatedly reincarnated. They die, spend time in the bardo, and are then reincarnated - as humans, or as animals. Allowing KSR to provide a focus point from which to hang to ten different stories taking place over the centuries in his alternate history. Sometimes the members of the jati remember their earlier lives, but usually they don’t.
The Black Death wipes out Europe. The Islamic Empire is never dislodged from the Iberian Peninsula. The Chinese continue to war on their western border, but also explore east and eventually settle the western coast of North America. A progressive empire develops in southern India. A league of American nations in central North America form a federation and keep their independence. There is a decades-long war which involves all three of the major world powers - the Indian empire, the Islamic empire, and the Chinese empire. Once the dust has settled, a new world order prevails. The various members of the jati are present, or pivotal, in some of the more important events in this 700 year history. They also take place all over the world - Samarkand, Beijing, the Great Lakes, an Islamic city in western France, a Chinese San Francisco…
It’s fascinating stuff. The linking text is a, to be honest, not especially interesting mechanism to give the novel structure, but the ten “books” in The Years of Rice and Salt would be equally fascinating without them. KSR’s research is impressive - but not perfect: at one point, he described the Islamic punishment of cutting off the right hand of criminals is worsened because it forces criminals to use their left “unclean” hand when eating. That’s the whole point of the punishment. But the invented history KSR has created is amazing. It feels all too real, which I guess is the point of the novel. Recommended. show less
This novel covers about 650 years over the course of approximately as many pages, ending in 2002 when it was first published. It is set in an alternate history where the Black Death of the 14th century eliminated the prohibitive majority of the European population. It is a necklace of ten novellas carrying out a thought experiment regarding world history in the absence of Western modernity. Author Kim Stanley Robinson is known for investing his fiction with both the sort of grand scope present in this book and also a presentation of political concerns embracing socialism and environmentalism. These are also on hand in The Years of Rice and Salt. After working through analogies for the ages of discovery, rational enlightenment, and show more industrialization, the great wars of our 20th century are reflected in the Long War, sixty-six years of global military conflict between a Chinese empire and a worldwide Muslim alliance. The last two sections of the book take place in a post-war world with challenges very similar to our own.
Although Robinson's style is often very cerebral, whether philosophical, scientific, or mystical, this book is still one that insists that the reader attend to bodies, and consider the libidinal cathexes that seem to drive both civilization and its discontents. His characters are often informed by deliberately-inflicted injuries: the castration of a young slave, a man's hand cut off in punishment, a woman's bound feet.
The title The Years of Rice and Salt appears in the book as a Chinese phrase denoting the stage of a woman's life between motherhood and widowhood. Metaphorically, Robinson seems to be suggesting that the entire modern period (whether our own or that of his conjectural parallel history) is such an interval for our species, and his characters often contemplate the arc of history and wonder about possibilities for human society. Typically, these thoughts arise in the context of the "Four Great Inequalities" theorized by his character Ibrahim ibn Hasam al-Lanzhou, one of which is the domination of women by men (406-411). Ibrahim appears in the section called "Widow Kang," which features this world's version of modern spiritualism, with a subversion of received gender codes just as in our own 19th century.
The "Widow Kang" episode is one that most highlights the fact that the ten stories are explicitly linked through the function of metempsychosis: Robinson re-purposes the Buddhist term jati (Skt, Pali "birth," but also "clan" or "sub-caste" in non-Buddhist Indian usage) to represent a persistent association of reincarnated individuals, who are also periodically reunited in the disincarnated bardo state. Although the novel presents reincarnation and the bardo as narrative facts, some of the book's last passages reflect on them more philosophically, observing: "Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation" (654). The epigram and first paragraph of the book imply that the two principal characters in the jati represented through all the stories are identical with the monkey Sun Wukong and monk Xuanzang of Chinese lore.
On the whole, this book is ambitious, profound, and often beautiful. show less
Although Robinson's style is often very cerebral, whether philosophical, scientific, or mystical, this book is still one that insists that the reader attend to bodies, and consider the libidinal cathexes that seem to drive both civilization and its discontents. His characters are often informed by deliberately-inflicted injuries: the castration of a young slave, a man's hand cut off in punishment, a woman's bound feet.
The title The Years of Rice and Salt appears in the book as a Chinese phrase denoting the stage of a woman's life between motherhood and widowhood. Metaphorically, Robinson seems to be suggesting that the entire modern period (whether our own or that of his conjectural parallel history) is such an interval for our species, and his characters often contemplate the arc of history and wonder about possibilities for human society. Typically, these thoughts arise in the context of the "Four Great Inequalities" theorized by his character Ibrahim ibn Hasam al-Lanzhou, one of which is the domination of women by men (406-411). Ibrahim appears in the section called "Widow Kang," which features this world's version of modern spiritualism, with a subversion of received gender codes just as in our own 19th century.
The "Widow Kang" episode is one that most highlights the fact that the ten stories are explicitly linked through the function of metempsychosis: Robinson re-purposes the Buddhist term jati (Skt, Pali "birth," but also "clan" or "sub-caste" in non-Buddhist Indian usage) to represent a persistent association of reincarnated individuals, who are also periodically reunited in the disincarnated bardo state. Although the novel presents reincarnation and the bardo as narrative facts, some of the book's last passages reflect on them more philosophically, observing: "Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation" (654). The epigram and first paragraph of the book imply that the two principal characters in the jati represented through all the stories are identical with the monkey Sun Wukong and monk Xuanzang of Chinese lore.
On the whole, this book is ambitious, profound, and often beautiful. show less
I found the premise of this book fascinating: what would have happened if the Black Plague had wiped out 99% of the European population? This massive novel didn't quite play out the way I expected, but it was really interesting nonetheless. The novel is basically a series of vignettes connected by the idea of reincarnation. That's right, the main characters in each story are the same "souls" -- conveniently sharing the same first initial in each life -- struggling to progress karmically (is that a word?) through each lifetime. The between-lifetime bits annoyed me a lot at the beginning, but slightly less as the novel progressed.
(...)
Robinson shows himself to be an idealist, having written yet another “romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being.”
But, as always with Robinson, it is more complex than that, because Zhu Isao, the fictional founder of the League of All Peoples School of Revolutionary Change, continues that passage. It is probably the most explicit formulation of Robinson’s own poetics, so any Robinson aficionado would do well to read this carefully, more so, it show more should be of any interest to any student & lover of literature.
“It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana succesfully achieved. (…) The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to (…) people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born. These two modes of emplotment represent end-point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. (…) two other modes of emplotment (…) tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers (…) they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan – this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring. Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. (…) they tell the story of humanity face-to-face with reality itself, therefor facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, their is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be. (…) Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists’s yin-yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of the tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness. The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn’t take up the challenge, it isn’t life speaking. But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will. This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy. (…) Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.”
A bit later, might Robinson talk about himself? “Zhu Isao’s own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature.” Whatever the answer, it is clear that, as a species, we need more weaving indeed, more cooperation, more family. Isn’t that as good a meaning as any – especially if you consider Robinson’s one line version of human history: “Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings.”
Highly recommended – except chapter 9.
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less
Robinson shows himself to be an idealist, having written yet another “romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being.”
But, as always with Robinson, it is more complex than that, because Zhu Isao, the fictional founder of the League of All Peoples School of Revolutionary Change, continues that passage. It is probably the most explicit formulation of Robinson’s own poetics, so any Robinson aficionado would do well to read this carefully, more so, it show more should be of any interest to any student & lover of literature.
“It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana succesfully achieved. (…) The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to (…) people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born. These two modes of emplotment represent end-point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. (…) two other modes of emplotment (…) tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers (…) they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan – this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring. Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. (…) they tell the story of humanity face-to-face with reality itself, therefor facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, their is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be. (…) Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists’s yin-yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of the tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness. The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn’t take up the challenge, it isn’t life speaking. But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will. This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy. (…) Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.”
A bit later, might Robinson talk about himself? “Zhu Isao’s own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature.” Whatever the answer, it is clear that, as a species, we need more weaving indeed, more cooperation, more family. Isn’t that as good a meaning as any – especially if you consider Robinson’s one line version of human history: “Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings.”
Highly recommended – except chapter 9.
Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less
Kim Stanley Robinson, best known for his Mars trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars, is a fascinating author, capable of challenging readers to think not about what it means to be human, but what it means to exist altogether. In The Years of Rice and Salt, he rises to majestic heights and delivers a story worthy of much praise.
The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history unlike any other. Re-imagining how the world would have progressed if Europe had been wiped out by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The most amazing aspect of the novel, however, is how it tries not to present itself like an alternate history. Instead, Robinson allows readers to live in an entirely different world, where Europe has different names, show more like Firanja and Al-Andalus, instead of Spain, England or France. He also allows readers to easily understand the locations of a story by using names that are familiar from ancient history, like Mecca, Inka, Burmese and Arabia. But the world Robinson has created is entirely believable, and educational.
In The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson challenges his readers to reexamine their viewpoints on many topics: life and death, reincarnation, religion, philosophy, science, and even the place of women in society. Rarely does a work so thought-provoking come around.
Robinson uses a different method for conveying his story throughout the novel, which consists of ten ‘books’. We are introduced to many ‘characters’ which all share the same souls throughout multiple lives. His jati, meet up with each other in life after life, which he details in the novel.
Though their names all begin with the same letter in each life, their situations rarely mirror their previous incarnations. Readers are treated to living the life of a tiger through the eyes of one, and on the effect humans have on the nature surrounding them. It’s an interesting storytelling method seldom seen working so well. Though confusing at times, especially at the beginning, Robinson’s use of the bardo separates the lives nicely.
Nevertheless, this novel takes time to ingest. Spanning over 750 pages, and having no true climax--an interesting theme in Robinson’s books--the novel is not a huge page-turner. In fact, readers may find themselves rather confused in the early pages, and not very interested until the birth of science in Samarqand. The development of weaponry and combat is especially interesting, since it mirrors our own history so well. Indeed, it’s intriguing to see how many things could be so very similar. Several times, readers may find themselves thinking of a character as the equivalent of our Einstein, or understanding that scientists are working on a nuclear bomb, though the terms are all different.
Robinson does an excellent job weaving together an interesting, thought-provoking journey through history, beginning with the death of a warlord, and moving through the discovery of the ‘New World’ by the Chinese, who land on the west coast--which seems decidedly odd. Also interesting is the development of China into the largest power in the world.
Overall, The Years of Rice and Salt has something for everyone, but commands great respect from all. This is one of those novels that can cause some very long, very heated and opinionated discussions. It may also cause some good to come, if people act on the messages it conveys. It challenges readers’ ideas of religion, society, government, and even our daily views of the world.
This book cannot be more highly recommended, and sits beside Kim Stanley Robinson’s other work as continuing the very best in science fiction. show less
The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history unlike any other. Re-imagining how the world would have progressed if Europe had been wiped out by the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The most amazing aspect of the novel, however, is how it tries not to present itself like an alternate history. Instead, Robinson allows readers to live in an entirely different world, where Europe has different names, show more like Firanja and Al-Andalus, instead of Spain, England or France. He also allows readers to easily understand the locations of a story by using names that are familiar from ancient history, like Mecca, Inka, Burmese and Arabia. But the world Robinson has created is entirely believable, and educational.
In The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson challenges his readers to reexamine their viewpoints on many topics: life and death, reincarnation, religion, philosophy, science, and even the place of women in society. Rarely does a work so thought-provoking come around.
Robinson uses a different method for conveying his story throughout the novel, which consists of ten ‘books’. We are introduced to many ‘characters’ which all share the same souls throughout multiple lives. His jati, meet up with each other in life after life, which he details in the novel.
Though their names all begin with the same letter in each life, their situations rarely mirror their previous incarnations. Readers are treated to living the life of a tiger through the eyes of one, and on the effect humans have on the nature surrounding them. It’s an interesting storytelling method seldom seen working so well. Though confusing at times, especially at the beginning, Robinson’s use of the bardo separates the lives nicely.
Nevertheless, this novel takes time to ingest. Spanning over 750 pages, and having no true climax--an interesting theme in Robinson’s books--the novel is not a huge page-turner. In fact, readers may find themselves rather confused in the early pages, and not very interested until the birth of science in Samarqand. The development of weaponry and combat is especially interesting, since it mirrors our own history so well. Indeed, it’s intriguing to see how many things could be so very similar. Several times, readers may find themselves thinking of a character as the equivalent of our Einstein, or understanding that scientists are working on a nuclear bomb, though the terms are all different.
Robinson does an excellent job weaving together an interesting, thought-provoking journey through history, beginning with the death of a warlord, and moving through the discovery of the ‘New World’ by the Chinese, who land on the west coast--which seems decidedly odd. Also interesting is the development of China into the largest power in the world.
Overall, The Years of Rice and Salt has something for everyone, but commands great respect from all. This is one of those novels that can cause some very long, very heated and opinionated discussions. It may also cause some good to come, if people act on the messages it conveys. It challenges readers’ ideas of religion, society, government, and even our daily views of the world.
This book cannot be more highly recommended, and sits beside Kim Stanley Robinson’s other work as continuing the very best in science fiction. show less
What would happen if the black plague had killed nearly everyone in Europe? Fascinating premise for a story, but a difficult story to tell as a historical epic. You could tell it zoomed in to the very time period it happens, and that's how this book begins. But Robinson wants to tell the entire story from the black plague to the modern day, so no one protagonist will do. Instead he uses the conceit of reincarnation and the bardo to string a line of characters together to tell the tale across centuries.
This works for about three cycles in which he seems genuinely interested in his characters, and their new incarnation. Then he seems to grow bored with that idea and begins speeding things up and more of the story ends up as a historical show more outline being told to you.
A secondary problem is that little of this book feels thematically appropriate, in that it's clearly a western view of the east, and a western historical bias driving how the alternate history develops. Robinson uses Islam and Buddhism in his stories, and spins off of actual history, but it's like events are drawn toward the same evolution and beats as western dominated actual history. There needs to be a "new world" encounter, a rise of religious reformers, feminism, a battle for individualism, a "WWI" and ultimately a race for the bomb. Having set up such a massive divergence from actual history, and such a long time span, it was ultimately just disappointing to see the narrative converge on regular history, with an "exotic" flair. show less
This works for about three cycles in which he seems genuinely interested in his characters, and their new incarnation. Then he seems to grow bored with that idea and begins speeding things up and more of the story ends up as a historical show more outline being told to you.
A secondary problem is that little of this book feels thematically appropriate, in that it's clearly a western view of the east, and a western historical bias driving how the alternate history develops. Robinson uses Islam and Buddhism in his stories, and spins off of actual history, but it's like events are drawn toward the same evolution and beats as western dominated actual history. There needs to be a "new world" encounter, a rise of religious reformers, feminism, a battle for individualism, a "WWI" and ultimately a race for the bomb. Having set up such a massive divergence from actual history, and such a long time span, it was ultimately just disappointing to see the narrative converge on regular history, with an "exotic" flair. show less
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ThingScore 75
If there is a weakness in Robinson's work, it is perhaps this; his characters are so intelligent that they never shut up and often have fascinating conversations for page after page about the engineering of fortifications or the reconciliation of Sufism and Confucianism or, most extendedly, the ways that history works. It is always good talk, in which everyone speaks in character. For show more Robinson, science fiction is not only a literature of ideas, but a literature whose characters have lots of them. show less
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Author Information
140+ Works 49,222 Members
Kim Stanley Robinson was born in Orange County, California on March 23, 1952. He received a B. A. and Ph. D. from the University of California at San Diego and an M. A. from Boston University. His first trilogy of books, Orange County, collectively won a Nebula Award and two Hugo Awards. His other works include the Mars trilogy, 2312, and Aurora. show more He has won an Asimov Award, a World Fantasy Award, a Locus Reader's Poll Award, and a John W. Campbell Award. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards
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Pocket (5850)
Science Fiction Book Club (50723)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Years of Rice and Salt
- Original title
- The Years of Rice and Salt
- Original publication date
- 2002
- People/Characters
- Bold; Psin; Kyu; ZhenHe; I-Li; Ibn Ezra (show all 39); Bistami; Bithari; Katima; Kya; Kheim; I-Chin; Butterfly; Bahram; Khalid; Iwang; Busho; Keeper of the Wampum; Iagogeh; Bao Ssu; Pao; Ibrahim; Kang; Kerala; Kiyaoki; Bhakata; Peng-Ti; Bai; Kuo; Iwa; Budir; Kirana; Idelba; Piali; Boa Xinhua; Kung; Zhu; Pan Xichun; Kali
- Important places
- New York, USA; China; Provence, France; San Francisco, California, USA (San Francisco Bay Area); India; Middle East (show all 7); Tibet
- Important events
- Black Death (1348 | 1350)
- Epigraph
- TRIPITAKA: Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?
WU-KONG: You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you become young again; and even after g... (show all)oing through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your will, the Buddha-nature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain. -- The Journey to the West - First words
- Monkey never dies.
- Quotations
- The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water.
Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"Hello," the young woman said. "My name is Kali."
- Original language
- English
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- Reviews
- 118
- Rating
- (3.66)
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- 5 — English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 23
- ASINs
- 14