Customer Reviews

The Years of Rice and Salt

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4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(32)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

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.)

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.

This is a mixed review, because the book was so dualistic in nature I can't think of any other way to approach it.

For the first 3/4'ths of the book, Robinson tells an interesting tale of the world if the Black Death had wiped out all of europe's people in the 7th century. The entire planet gets turned on its head: the chinese discover the americas, the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution occur simultaneously, and Christianity becomes nothing more than a historical footnote. I'm a history buff, and I just ate this stuff up.

Even better he finds a wonderful way to recount hundreds of years of history through the eyes of three souls "K", "B" and "I" who die, are reborn into the world, and then give us a glimpse of the next generation. This is a creative and gripping way to show us history filtered through three attitudes: revolutionary, protector, and intellectual. And for 500 pages Robinson delivers a wonderful story.

And then on page 506 ("Nsara"), the Black Death visits the book itself. The book's dialog comes to a grinding halt. Social change skitters and stops. News of the world just sort of peters out into nothingness. The author stops telling a story through the characters and plot. Instead we're informed that stuff happened, and here's how the characters feel about it.

To use the book's description, we're treated to 158 pages of coffe-shop talk. I can't tell you what a disappointment the last two chapters were. A storyline certainly unfolds, but it drowns in pages and pages of social commentary. The author seems to have saved his entire life's worth of preaching on the futility of religion, horrors of war, and the evils of racism for this lengthy diatribe. Any editor worth a tinker's damn would have told him to make his point in the story (which he did fantastically throughout the book) and save the dense, unrelenting commentary for his memoirs or the Op-Ed page.

I'm upset because I spot-read the book in a bookstore to make sure that I'd be getting my money's worth. Of course, I carefully avoided the ending to not spoil the story. I needn't worry, the author did a fine job of that himself.

As I read this fine book by Stan Robinson, I was struck by the fact that this is a "love-it/hate-it" book. Those who refuse to look past the surface are going to have a hard time with it. Yes, it does get pretty intense at the end, but personally I like the philosophizing.

This isn't just about the reincarnation aspects, or the alternate history aspacets, those are just surface effects. It's about the acceptance of age and grace and growth and advancement. It's about how the world has grown with the growth of the people, the jadi's, that live in it. And it's about how one person and/or one group can make a real change in the world, and how these changes might be reflected throughout one's existence. It covers how the growth of the "jadi" changes from it's wild impetuous, and nearly self-destructive youth up until the jadi has reached it's nirvana. The ultimate quiet and happy acceptance of the reality that what there is "here and now" is what is important, and it's what one does with this that makes a difference. There is really no debate on whether reincarnation is real, it's a debate on the interpretations the living have on the afterlife and how this changes from superstitious and confused belief systems, imposed by the "powers that be", to a more scientific and distant relationship with the universe and with the Spirit, name it what you will. A belief structure that is common in todays world.

Stan is talking about OUR universe here, and is talking about the human place within reality. If people find it preachy, then perhaps they are in need of a good preacher, especially of the Koran and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The fact that most of the technologies, etc., all get invented in more or less the same time period, to me, indicates a belief in historical predilection, ie we are here because this is the ultimate endpoint of our evolution up to this point. It also indicates that his reality isn't intended to be that much different than ours, ie, more or less the same, only without the European/American influences. If everything happened in a different order and at a radically different rate, then the parallels he tries to draw would have been lost.

Could he have been more precise on how they got to where they ended up? Yes, but the book is rather long already. Could he have fattened up certain sections, such as the Japanese reconquest, and the time among the Native Americans? Again, yes, but to what purpose? Was the section of the Great War depressing and almost too realistic? Yes, but isn't that war? War is NOT glorious and exciting, it is slogging through mud and finding everything beautiful being destroyed while some nameless bureaucrat decides who will fall next. It's endless hours of boredom, punctuated by sheer moments of terror. Our modern fascination with TV wars and smart bombs makes all seem glamorous, but war is destructive to society and humanity, nevertheless. The gates of delirium.

So, like all books it isn't, and doesn't purport to be, perfect. There are things I would probabaly do differently. There are slower sections and faster sections, but when I see someone taking "weeks" to read it, I am surprised, I found it a page turner that I couldn't put down for several days, while I focussed on it.

If the ending could have been different, the action figure sci-fi lovers would have been happier, but that would have missed the point of the parallel between the life of the jadi and the life of the individual. Both slow and become more thoughtful and reflective as old age approaches. But in the end, the Universe continues on as it always has and always will, and the cycles continue.

This is highly recommended for people who like to contemplate and discuss and delve into what are quite deep topics. You'll be in the "love-it" category. If you don't like reading other people's philospohies on life and history, or are expecting action-adventure or classical sci-fi, you'll be in the "hate-it" category. Not much room in the middle.

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.

While I can see why some found this book boring, and everyone is entitled to his or her own taste, I think that dismissing this book as 'boring' is missing the point.

Though billed as an alternate history, I found Robinson's book to be more about the power of the human spirit to endure and evolve despite itself, and with much more attention to philosophical and theological questions than to plot-driven adventures. I found it inspired me to want to know more about actual history, and about the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I enjoyed seeing what incarnations the characters were to take on next - Robinson spells it out for you at first but then he gives you less and less and lets you figure things out on your own. I particularly loved the evolution of the 'K' character and at the moment I would have to say my favorite was the Widow Kang, who inspired at the right time by 'I' character Ibrahim goes on a fascinating intellectual journey. I like the fact that the recurring characters do not always relate to each other in the same way in their many lives and inspire each other in different directions.

Robinson presents a sweeping vision which sometimes moves forward as a narrative about two or more recurring characters, other times slows down into philisophical musings. He presents brilliant alternate scenarios of how technological, social, and political movements may have evolved. Yes, the characters always die, but don't we all eventually? I found the ending uplifting because it shows that the cycle goes on. If you're looking for everything to get wrapped up in some whiz-bang conclusion, you will be disappointed. The book is much more sophisticated and subtle than that.

The only thing that saddened me at the end was that the book was over and I almost started from the beginning again (instead I passed the book along to my husband who also enjoyed it greatly).

I don't think Robinson did anything by accident in this book. Some have pointed out that the style and tone changes from chapter to chapter, which I'm sure was deliberate. Some episodes are more plot-driven and others more philosophy-driven. This worked well I think because he was trying to convey so much history and really this is a huge book to get your head around - I feel like the spots where the plot took a break were a chance for the reader to relax and sink into a different groove.

The only real flaw I think was that the author did not include an index of names, places, etc. at the end that one could refer to, because there are so many of them! I would have also liked to see more detailed maps to help better understand exactly where some of the events took place in relation to today's world. I would love to see this in a future edition.

There are few things more disappointing than a book with a great concept that fails to gel into an interesting story. Unfortunately, this is one of those books. And at 650+ pages, it's one of the more tedious doorstops I've ever forced myself to read all the way through. The great premise is that the Black Plague kills 99% of Europe, relegating it to historical oddity and leaving the rest of world for Chinese and Muslim empires to conquer. With that as the jumping off point, Robinson sets himself the ambitious task of recounting the next 700 years of history in ten chapters. To try and lend some structure to this sprawling construction, he uses three characters who continually experience reincarnation and are at the center of each chapter/story. One is ambitious and rebellious, one is sensitive and humane, and one is curious and intellectual. It's a nice idea, but never really works.

The problems are many. Foremost is just a general longwindedness on Robinson's part, with lengthy descriptions of landscapes, cities, dress, and custom that simply aren't that fascinating to read, and in any event, don't add much to the stories. Another big flaw, especially in the final hundred pages, is his distinct tendency to sermonize and sprout theories through his characters. There comes a point where one wonders if the whole book is just an author's trick at avoiding writing a serious work of nonfiction. Clearly Robinson has some strong ideas about history, religious and social movements, and Samuel Huntington's famous "clash of civilizations thesis", so why not [absorb it all]and write about reality instead of cloaking it in pseudo alternate history. And I say pseudo because despite the erasing of white folks from the story, Robinson's history runs parallel to reality. The same scientific discoveries are made at roughly the same rates, with cutesy alternate names (the Chinese qi = electricity, the Arabic alactin = uranium, etc.), colonization of the world by the great powers still occurs, there's a "Great War", complete with trench warfare, and hey, guess what? Africans and Australian Aboriginals are absent from the story except as slaves!

Another problematic aspect to the novel is that without a fairly decent knowledge of Bhuddism in all its flavors, Islam in all its flavors, the real life development of both up until the 14th century, and indeed, world history up until that point, one is unlikely to fully appreciate a lot of Robinson's arguments and themes. I don't know anything about Robinson, and have never read any of his work, but I'd be willing to bet he has some sort of PhD. in history or comparative religion, cause many many parts of the book read like transcriptions of bad grad school seminars in both fields. And one has to conclude that he willfully jettisoned some of what he knows in order to make his broader sermonizing work. For example, throughout the book, Tibetan Bhuddism and Sufi Islam (let's not even get into the very real argument over whether Sufism is Islam!) are much-praised throughout the stories. While he's perfectly happy to take on Islam's treatment of women, he ignores Tibetan Bhuddism's oppression of women. Similarly, he treats Sufism as a monolithic celebration of poetry, wine, and mysticism, failing to acknowledge the real breadth of Sufi sects, for example the Sufism practiced by Chechen freedom fighters, which is hardly all dancing and joy.

Ultimately, the book is an ambitious but greatly flawed mess, and simply isn't a good read.

This is a complex and challenging novel, covering a group of related characters through multiple lifetimes, over centuries from about 1400 to the present, in an elaborate alternate history in which the black plague almost completely wiped out the population of Europe, preventing the rise of European culture and religion to world dominance. Definitely not a lite read; it takes effort to follow Robinson's alternate history, accompanied by alternate geography and chronology. But readers who have a taste for serious and thoughtful SF will be rewarded for their efforts.

Some highlights from the alternate history: (Contains some spoilers for early sections) about 1400, a mutated and incredibly potent version of the black plague wipes out most of Europe, eliminating it as a political or military force. Christianity is eliminated as a civilization, and the later events are dominated by Chinese and Islamic culture. Muslims, some of them refugees from mainstream Islam, gradually repopulate Europe. Meanwhile, a Ming expedition, outfitted to invade Japan, gets caught in a strong Eastern current, misses Japan entirely, and winds up in San Francisco Bay. The expedition is still very much a success, especially when it travels South and discovers the rich mines of Peru. A later Chinese fleet succeeds in conquering Japan.

A group of reformist Muslims, chased by more traditional sects, sails west from Normandy and discovers Manhattan. The Iriquois federation, becoming aware of the presence of alien cultures on both the West and East coasts, forms the North American tribes into a great union, capable of keeping the outsiders largely restricted to the coasts and holding the interior of the continent.

There is more, covering alternate histories of the Industrial Revolution, WWI, and the dicovery of fission, up to an age that look like roughly the present, with increasing global cooperation and, presumably, an alternate Francis Fukuyama to announce the End of Alternate History.

At key events in this timeline, we meet repeatedly the same group of people, recognized by keeping the same initials. The key figures are:

B - A spiritual seeker, frequently a Buddhist clergyman.
I - A scientist or intellectual, fascinated with acquiring knowledge.
K - The activist of the group, at first seeking revenge, at other times power, and ultimately social transformation.

All of these are followed through various lives and deaths, meeting up repeatedly in the Bardo, the between life area of judgment from Tibetan Buddhism. There are some minor accompanying characters, such as S, which is generally a feckless or irresponsible person, often of considerable authority, but these are the main ones.

Robinson has created numerous striking characters from these broad templates: a soldier in Tamerlane's army who ultimately becomes a slave in China, a protective tiger, a servant boy caught in the floods of a Chinese California, a young woman growing up in post-war Islamic France, and many more. It's really a virtuoso trick to fit 600 years of alternate history into one book while still having real characters to live the history, something Robinson has accomplished superbly.

This book was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be an easy read (it is about 600 pages or so long) and, as I said above, the plot interested me; what would the world have been liked if Caucasian Europe had been wiped out in the Plague?

The author constructs an alternative universe where China and Islam fight for global supremacy with Hindu India and the North American Indians showing the world how to exist more peacefully. The book was very instructive about world religions, particularly Islam and Buddhism. There are two main characters in the book, "Ka" and "Ba" who are continually reincarnated over a period of 800 years as they try to reach nirvana. Using this technique, the author demonstrates how the world might have evolved.

At times the narrative seemed to meander and there is a lot more theology in there than I had anticipated. I have to say that Islam emerges from the novel with a bad report card; he seems to view the practice of this religion (but not the tenets of the Koran itself) as violent and misognist; in the book, Islam is doomed to failure for this reason. Ultimately it is the Asian cultures which gain supremacy.

A provocative book for sure - it was not the brain relaxant that I was looking for but equally, it got me pondering. I finished the book about a week ago and I am still thinking about it - not many books get that sort of reaction out of me.

Subject-wise, _The Years of Rice and Salt_ pushed all the right buttons for me - opening with a Journey to the West pastiche was always going to score it points, then there was a section set in Samarkand, quotations from Ibn Khaldun, and some deftly-drawn portraits of medieval China. I'm a sucker for a) cleverness, and b) well-crafted settings outside the pseudo-medieval fantasy norm, and this book hits both markers. So I wanted desperately to like it. In some ways, I did.

But there are two fundamental flaws, in my opinion. Firstly, the device of reincarnating the same set of characters fails; none of said characters are distinctive or memorable enough from life to life, and so end up being effectively 'new' in every section/time period. There's little chance for the reader to develop any emotional investment before the section ends and the whole thing starts again, and it becomes difficult to truly care.

Its second problem is, curiously, its lack of scope and vision. While the novel's stage is an entire world over six or so centuries, the device of keeping the characters together in each incarnation means that each section concentrates on one small area, robbing the narrative of the benefits of multiple, varied viewpoints. The scale is narrow rather than epic, and the action tends to get bogged down in details. This would be fine if the details were used to build character or illuminate the larger picture - the themes of this alternate, Europe-less world - but a lot of it reads like navel-gazing.

Many of the truly interesting implications are skipped over in favour of scientists ahead of their time discovering exactly the same things at almost exactly the same time their counterparts did in the non-fictional world, as if Robinson feels that certain universal boxes must be checked along the road to 'development', whatever the structure or imperatives of a society. (Meanwhile, literature, drama and art get short shrift). Often even the same words are used - I know little about the history of scientific thought, but would a world whose development was shaped by Arabs and Chinese still have used so many Greek and Latinate constructions to label their deeds? (okay, so he can get away with Greek, Islamic scholars were big on Greek. but still).

While there are glimpses of greater things - Buddhist attitudes and beliefs are used very well, and the different trajectory of American history is intriguing, but frustratingly underexplored - Robinson seems to be more interested in following a pretty conventional path. Perhaps dictated by his reincarnation device, he surrenders to the temptation to work towards a conclusion, as if human history could have ultimate purposes or goals. (I imagine one could argue that this reflects the world-view of those he writes about, but intentional or not it doesn't work!). Ultimately, this is too big a topic for one novel, and in trying to cover everything the author spreads himself too thinly, and ends up short-changing a fascinating world.

Despite these caveats, this remains a hugely enjoyable and memorable read, a rich tapestry of cultures and ideas rarely explored in genre fiction. Worth a look.