The Years of Rice and Salt (Hardcover)

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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

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; First Edition edition (February 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553109200
• ISBN-13: 978-0553109207
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (159 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #712,654 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

77 of 86 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 (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.)

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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.

85 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Last two chapters completely ruin a very good book. Skip it., June 18, 2002

By	C. Pierce "SciFi Junkie" (Ferndale, MI United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.