The Years of Rice and Salt [Mass Market Paperback]

Kim Stanley Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 3, 2003

With the incomparable vision and breathtaking detail that brought his now-classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author KIM STANLEY ROBINSON boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know....

The Years of Rice and Salt

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.

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson delivers a thoughtful and powerful examination of cultures and the people who shape them. How might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow. The credible alternate history that Robinson constructs becomes the framework for a tapestry of ideas about philosophy, science, theology, and politics.

At the heart of the story are fundamental questions: what is the purpose of life and death? Are we eternal? Do our choices matter? The particular achievement of this book is that it weaves these threads into a story that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. This is a highly recommended, challenging, and ambitious work. --Roz Genessee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Having revolutionized the novel of planetary exploration with his Nebula- and Hugo-winning Mars trilogy (Red Mars, etc.), Robinson is attempting to do the same to another genre with this highly realistic and credible alternate history. It's the 14th century, and the Black Death has swept through Europe, killing not 30% or 40% of the population but 99%. With Europeans now no more than a historical curiosity, the empires of China and Islam spread rapidly across the world. India, caught between superpowers, struggles to maintain its independence until, fueled by a scientific renaissance, its forces besiege and conquer the great city that in our world would be called Constantinople. The New World is discovered by the Chinese, who rapidly settle the west coast, while an Islamic fleet lands at the mouth of the Mississippi. Eventually, the enlightened Indian nation of Travancore comes to the aid of the beleaguered native people of the New World. New technologies appear as the centuries go by and, as often as not, are applied to military ends. Adding a mystical balance and a human note to this counterfactual history is a small cast of recurring characters who live through each episode of the book as soldiers, slaves, philosophers and kings. Dying, they spend time in the afterlife, only to be reborn into the next era, generally with no knowledge of their past lives. Robinson, who has previously demonstrated his mastery of alternate history in the classic short story "The Lucky Strike" and his Three Californias sequence, has created a novel of ideas of the best sort, filled to overflowing with philosophy, theology and scientific theory. (Mar. 5)Forecast: The restrained jacket art, not at all typical of SF, suggests the publisher is aiming to attract intelligent mainstream readers as well. Certainly the depiction of how a moderate or even a liberal Islamic state might evolve couldn't be more timely.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 784 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (June 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553580078
• ISBN-13: 978-0553580075
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.4 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (191 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. He is the author of eleven previous books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Fifty Degrees Below, Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Antarctica--for which he was sent to the Antarctic by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of their Antarctic Artists and Writers' Program. He lives in Davis, California.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#94 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

#94 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 113 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Has it's flaws but a good concept overall... July 25, 2002

By Michael P. Clawson

Format:Hardcover

I really enjoyed this book. The concept (the Black Plague is 99% lethal and entirely wipes out Christian Europe in the 14th century) is very intriguing. Though the book spans 600 years of alternative history from the early 1400s till present day, the author ingeniously makes use of reincarnation as a device to maintain the same basic characters throughout the book ("B" the romanticist nurturer/protector, "K" the rebellious idealist, "I" the warm & inquisitive but detached intellectual, and "S" the self-centered troublemaking jerk.) The book details how China discovers the new world, how a Japanese Samuri teaches the Iroquois tribes to resist the Muslim and Chinese incursions into the New World, how the scientific revolution occurs in Samarkand, how a socially progressive industrial society develops in southern India, and how the entire 20th Century is spent in a massive World War between the Muslim and Chinese halves of the world. All of this is seen through the eyes of the characters, so it becomes a story of individuals caught up in the story of the world rather than just a historical outline.

The book does get a little preachy towards the end, with Robinson spouting off his theories of historiography. It was also a little confusing by the end when he seemed to be trying to undermine his own theory of reincarnation with the secularist/materialist dogma of his characters. I wasn't sure if Robinson was advancing his own views or just relating the views of his characters according to what would be consistent for them during that point in his history. I also thought Robinson failed to provide a compelling ending to his book. Throughout the book he constantly set up questions of whether progress and improvement is possible and whether the actions of the characters are bringing about any larger good, but the end left these questions still dangling with nothing but a flimsy academic lecture to state the author's opinion (in short, that progress is possible for society as a whole but that each individual life is a personal tragedy).

What I found particularly intriguing about this book however, was the harshness of ethnic conflict in a world lacking a genuine pluralistic, multicultural society (as America tries to be). Even by the 20th century conflicts were much more about racial competition between Muslims and Chinese than about socio-political ideologies as we experienced in our own world. There was also no model democratic society in this alternate world, nothing like the French and American revolutions ever happened, so even by the modern day most of the world's superpowers were ruled by monarchs or military governments. Upon reflection I found this account of probable world history to be very convincing and likely. If one is familiar with (real) European history one realizes how unique liberal democratic political philosophy is, and how dependent it is on certain key concepts found primarily in the Christian traditions.

Anyhow, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes history and has a basic starting knowledge of (actual) world history over the past 600 years. (This basic knowledge is really essential to really appreciate the subtle and sweeping changes that occur in this alternate universe.)

57 of 63 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars absorbing, haunting, yet shallow April 3, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I am a sucker for alternate histories -- be it (fairly) serious literature like Dick's "Man in the High Castle", silly stuff like Stephen Fry's "Making History" or potboilers like Vaterland. When I read the Salon review of "Years of Rice and Salt", I knew this was a book for me, and I was not too disappointed.

This is an extremely thoughtful, haunting and often poetic view of an alternate world in which the population of Europe was completely killed off by the plague in the 13th century. Europe develops as a culturally stagnant, technologically backward group of Islamic states, earliest in the shadow of more vibrant Islamic societies to the East, and later in the shadow of technologically advanced India and militarily united China. China colonizes most of the New World, with Islam grabbing the eastern regions of North America. The world that develops is familiar in two ways -- first, history overall follows reasonably predictable lines, and second, the particular cultures that survive the plague develop more or less as one would expect from their counterparts in the world we actually live in.

Robinson makes the inspired decision to tell a small-scale human story as well, using the device of reincarnation to allow variants of the same three or four characters (identifiable by their initials) to sort of span 700 years. It's very sweet to see the characters lead different lives, sometimes male, sometimes female, not always human -- always friends or lovers, always engaged in versions of the same struggles and conflicts. Eventually, we figure out that it's the weakest of the central characters that is the focus of the book.

The problem with the book is its ultimate shallowness. The characters are archetypes -- a figure of struggle (initial K), a figure of thought (initial I), a servant/follower (initial P) and a figure of human kindness and charity (initial B). We get to like them in part because of the thrill of the chase -- meeting and re-meeting them in different time periods and cultures. "Ah, there's K. I was wondering when he'd/she'd show up!" But if you ask yourself what's really interesting about the characters, besides the way in which they fit (or don't fit) into the different societies in which they live, you realize that you don't actually have an answer to that question. There's just not much to say about the characters in the end. And that's a shame. You almost get the sense that the author became bored with the characters, since apart from the poetical conclusion to the book, the later chapters (starting with the India section) have much less plot than the earlier chapters, and much more preachy, pseudo-scholarly accounts of the history, and of historical theory.

Do read the book. It's pretty good. But mourn for the fact that it could have been deeper and better.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Robinson's World April 14, 2002

By Abu Amaal

Format:Hardcover

Kim Stanley Robinson has done it again. This is a beautifully conceived and written book, with charm,
humor, and considerable depth. The reviews, including the editorial review, give too much information
- it is best approached as a blank slate, and that includes not looking to closely at the material
on the dust jacket. Nonetheless, if you would like to know more:

Kim Stanley Robinson revisits the history of the last six hundred years, and rewrites it, fusing Tibetan
buddhism with a classic "what-if" scenario. For the sake of simplicity he does not allow his alternate
history to diverge too radically from our own, all the way up through World War I. There is however a
sentimental streak in Robinson, and he allows common sense just a little more scope at the end than has
actually prevailed in the modern world.

I did wonder, reading this, who the audience would be. Not everyone who was taken with the
Mars Trilogy or the Three Californias would necessarily want to swim in these depths.
Robinson does supply a detailed time-line on page 1, and the main calendar in use is the Islamic one,
beginning in our 622 A.D.
(Though it is a lunar calendar, simply adding 622 to the Islamic date gives a fair approximation to the
Christian calendar - and one can always consult the time-line on the first page.)

From this point on I'll allow myself some "spoiler" remarks, so if you want to read the book fresh, stop here.

The premise is that the European plague of 1347-1349 mutated and wiped out the bulk of Europe half
a century later. The history that follows on this is both political and
intellectual/scientific/technological, and the latter seems to drive the former. To take a specific
example: the Galilean discoveries obviously don't take place in Europe. Instead, they occur in Samarqand,
at about the same period. This is an interesting choice, and indicative of Robinson's method.
He refers to the observatory at Samarqand, founded by Ulugh Beg. This was in fact a major scientific
center; indeed, it was the birthplace back in the fourteenth century of the system of decimal fractions we all
use today. What this illustrates is that Robinson has in general taken small details of our
own history and transferred them intact to his parallel history, while transposing the main political and scientific events substantially.

Robinson has crafted his history very thoroughly. He is excellent on the relationship of Quran and hadith,
which has the same consequences in his world it has had in ours. Scientific terminology is reinvented -
since electricity is a Chinese discovery in his world, it has a Chinese name, rather than the "elektron"
of the Greeks. And so on.

The net result is that the reader will probably want to pay closer attention to the details than was
necessary in the case of the Mars Trilogy. But the story has a great deal of charm - notably the episodes
in the Tibetan after-life (oops: between-lives!). Tracking the individual characters through their
incarnations is a game I did not pay much attention to, but it's certainly one that the author invites
you to play, among others.

Kim Stanley Robinson has gone from chronicles of the near future in his California series, to the distant
future in Mars RBG, and now to our imaginary but well-remembered past. He's had a tendency in his writings
to have an unsatisfying and superficial view of history, along the lines of "It can't be known"
(Icehenge, some of the Mars episodes), and a highly romanticized view of human political relationships.
That sentimental streak is still present - particularly in the history of the New World - but his alternate
history is about as plausible as our own (which, admittedly, is not very plausible).

KSR does not want to be trapped in a genre, it seems. More power to him.
A must read for his fans, at least, as well as for history buffs.