The Years of Rice and Salt

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

A bit of a doorstop, I read this one in fits and starts over a month. The novel is set up as historical speculative fiction and concerns what the world would be like if European culture had been eradicated by the plague. The reader experiences this world through the centuries in the voice of different characters who are the same reincarnated souls.

I wish I could read it again for the first time.

[...] what we call history has at least two meanings to it, first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in time – and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.

The Years of Rice and Salt

The Years of Rice and Salt

Second reading in a 12-month period. It’s such a deep novel. Truly inspired and inspiring.

Really enjoyed the worldbuilding here, and how real the personal stories Robinson takes us throughout the centuries were. Also liked how the style of writing would change as the stories reflected different cultures and time periods. A bit of a slow read at times but overall a really good book.

That was a very long book, but we are rewriting the history of the world. So what if we took Europeans out of the historical equation? What things happen the similarly or differently? Robinson uses reincarnation and a linked group of souls to tie the episodes together, through times of change and continuity.

Abandoned after about 60+ pages, after first part.

Frustrated by slow and then radical turn of story, with author seemingly abandoning protagonist, first for a another character, and then for an entirely different setting and set of characters.

Liked prose, and characters well enough (even if they weren't brilliantly written), but so turned off I will likely not plan to try the author's Mars Trilogy anytime soon, if ever.

I'm frankly shocked that editors let an apparently good author put this out in this state.

Detail [SPOILERS]:

Author abandoned protagonist, apparently killing them off, with no conclusion, closure, resolution, or clarity with what happened. Frustrating to invest in characters, and then have this happen. Also, protagonist (Bold) slowly robbed of agency, as driving force of story became another character, who was a bit unsavory, and basically took over the story. Death/reincarnation sequence particularly difficult and frustrating. Not really enlightening, but instead confusing. Unclear of it was just random images, real religious imagery, or symbolism going on, and frankly at that very point after suddenly losing the protagonist I was frustrated and not really caring about the plight of the secondary character in the afterlife.

Put the book down at first page of second part when author basically started the story over with new setting and characters. No thanks. I won't subject myself to frustration and disappointment for another part after investing my time.

Also: I endured entirely awful and graphic depictions of castration with the hope that it would still be a good book. I'm sorry I did.

[Edit: spelling]

A clever alternative history epic that is very delightful, very dense, and VERY KSR. And I very love KSR, though to be fair YMMV. The book has two big ideas:
1. It imagines a world where ALL Europeans (not just 33%) die off from the bubonic plague.
2. It imagines a world where Tibetan Buddhism is literally true (like I did once! like George Saunders did once!).

I had heard of this book, and Idea #1, long ago, and was always intrigued about how KSR would play it out. I didn't know about Idea #2 until like three months ago, and I was less intrigued by it. My post-read thoughts are: Idea #2 is strangely delightful! Enough to overshadow Idea #1 often!

Plot summary: So this book is LONG. It's DENSE. By design, it covers multiple lifetimes of multiple characters. Or just a handful of characters, if you count the whole reincarnating-souls business. The two main characters are the क (“ka”) and ब (“ba”) characters - YES I WENT THERE, I WENT ALL DEVANAGARI UP IN THIS REVIEW. But when KSR started dropping his gigantic meta explanations of the Book You Have Just Read in the final chapters of the book, and he mentioned the “ka” and “ba”, I was like, “OMG ROBERTO CALASSO'S KA! THE MYSTICISM OF KA!” (I have not actually read Roberto Calasso's book yet.) Anyway, point is, I think KSR is a smart dude and so was very intentional in the consonants he chose for his angry/indignant firebrand “ka” and his salt-o-the-earth, easy-going “ba” protagonists. Also, fun fact: ka is the first letter you learn when learning Hindi! Or the first one I did anyway.

Okay, ANYWAY, so the book opens with a friendly Mongolian warrior, Bold ( ब/ba!), coming down the steppes to find all the Magyar kingdom (Hungarians) dead, many lying ghoulishly dead in the middle of their Budapest square. Bold is horrified and, after wandering down through the Balkans, gets captured by Arab slave traders, where he meets Kyu ( क/ka!), a young African who's been enslaved. They get carted off to China, Kyu is castrated and turned into a palace eunuch, eventually shit hits the fan (hey, this book IS Buddhist).

Bardo intermission 1.

The rest of the book is much of the same structure, as we hop through the centuries, and as the “ka” and “ba” souls are reincarnated again and again: as pirates, as widows, as Sufi mystics, as scientists auguring an Age of Reason in Samarkand, as generals, as samurai, as a tiger (!), and so on. There are a few other reincarnating souls who always pop up too, and this group form the “jati” (caste?! I read it more as a “jodi”/जोड़ी/multi-lifetime pairing). After every lifetime, they all rendezvous in the bardo, where they usually argue and bicker, remembering every past life, lamenting the samsara (cycle of death/rebirth) and vowing to get better.

So this book is fun and imaginative and super smart. It is also marred by imperfections - in other words, it's classic KSR!! Gosh, I love KSR books. Anyway, the smart bits:
- I had a major dharma awakening moment of myself reading this when I was like, omg, reincarnation == living many lives == empathizing with many lives == compassion for all, omg.
- The inevitability of history. Much of the major notes of our history (a world war, an Age of Reason/Enlightenment, colonialism, industrialization, a Karl Marx analog, an Isaac Newton analog) are the same, and feel inevitable.
- The above made me think of how scientific breakthroughs often coincide: as two great minds from a generation, pushing against the same boundary of contemporary scientific knowledge, break through in the same way. Inevitable!
- Most interesting, and heartbreaking, of course, was the NON-destruction of the New World, and the counterfactual of Incas and Haudenosaunee societies surviving, thriving and being powerful playersin a 21st century analog. I read this book over Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day, and thought a lot about Charles Mann's book during this, and... yeah. It was interesting, and devastating.
- Like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I consider one of the best alt histories of ALL TIME (both real and alt!!!), KSR does a fun/interesting job of weaving in the styles of each alt historical period (Victorian seances, Mughal court intrigues, dadaist post-war cafe culture) into the chapters. This is not AS meta and brilliant as Clarke, but it was there and fun.

Okay, now the dumb/not so great stuff:
- Oh man, the portrayal of Islam was... well, FRAUGHT sometimes. I mean, I just felt a bit uncomfortable when the post-war Islamic states are suffering under huge reparation payments, causing hyper-inflation, and I was like, “oh snap, KSR, do not make Islam the alt history Nazis!” And there's looots of stuff about the veil and poor oppressed Muslim ladies and stuff, and Akbar is portrayed as NOT an enlightened multi-faith tolerant ruler but kinda loose-cannon despot. I dunno. The positive/best notes of Islam are the Sufi mystics, esp. Rumi (a fave of earth mothers such as myself), and even then KSR calls Rumi “Buddhist in all but name”, which - again - fraughtness?
- KSR looooooves angry, indignant ladies. See: Maya from Red Mars, Swan from 2312, that one lady from Aurora. It's like, okay, fine. He likes ladies who are basically walking “if you're not mad, you're not paying attention” bumper stickers. I, personally, find that personality type a LITTLE TIRESOME. And so, the “ka” character - who often shows up as an angry lady - was, ooooof.
- TALKY! KSR also loves intellectual discussions, where characters talk through BIG IDEAS, about capitalism! oppression! history! Basically I imagine these to be KSR's #showerthoughts, which is fine, and mostly interesting, but also sometimes indulgent, and OKAY OKAY WE GET IT WE HAVE NOT YET BEEN SUBLIMATED INTO THE POST-CAPITALIST UTOPIA.
- Yo, I found the “War of the Asuras” chapter - about the “long war”/WW1 analog - oddly lazy!?! That was a major turning point in the book's alt history, and it felt so sloppy?!
- Also, some of the middle bits went VERY INFODUMPY, but I survived.

Overall, not perfect, but generally wonderful.

I started to read this book around 2002 or so but for whatever reason I stopped reading it. Finally, after such a long time, I picked it up again and finished it and I can't really find a reason why I never finished it in the first place.

It is a wonderful alternative earth history story book following several characters interconnected through time. It has some a bit more dull places, but overall it is a very engaging story about a what if scenario. What if Europe was ravaged by diseases and therefore the middle east and china become the so called super powers.

Wonderful book, wonderful story.

Et si 99% de la population européenne était morte au Moyen-Âge lors de l'épidémie de peste ? L'histoire aurait été différente, et le monde aurait été dominé par les civilisations arabe et chinoise. C'est le point de départ de cette uchronie plutôt réussie. Certains passages sont un peu longuets, mais l'ensemble du roman est plaisant, parfois passionnant, et la fin m'a bien plu.

Alternate history is one of the most fascinating and, when done right, enjoyable fiction genres available today. Writers who pose themselves a “what if?”, and then proceed to answer that question, seem to be rather few and far between, so whenever I come across a novel that claims to be alternate history, I often pick it up - more so if it deals with a particular period of history, or the history of a particular nation, that I am especially fond of.

This is how I came to pick up The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. The “what if” question posed by Robinson was, in many ways, the clincher for my picking it up: what if the plague, instead of killing a third of Europe's population, instead wiped out an overwhelming 99% of that population? What would happen to the world then, with Christianity reduced to a mere historical footnote, and the grand European civilizations wiped completely off the map?

Some of the answers were immediately obvious to me before I even opened the book. It was clear to me that, with Europe and Christianity eliminated, that left only China, India, and the Middle East as the top contenders for what remained of the rest of the world. While I knew India had the potential to be an important power in such a scenario, I wasn't entirely sure how it would be that. I only knew that the Middle Eastern powers would most certainly expand into Europe, especially since they already had a foothold in Spain, and China had the potential to be a powerhouse of knowledge and technology, and with that it could attempt to dominate the rest of the world.

The Years of Rice and Salt certainly answered those questions. The Middle East does indeed expand into Europe, easily taking over both Western and Eastern Europe to create a collection of emirates, but they take another century to make their way to the British Isles. China continues to trade as before, but then, through some miraculous stroke of luck, a fleet of Chinese ships manages to discover North America - by landing on the West Coast, not the East. However, the Industrial Revolution is not sparked by either of these nations - it is sparked, and set into motion, by India. The effects of all these incidents upon the world are explored up until the twenty-first century.

As has been noted, that is a very large swathe of time that needs to be covered, and could potentially require several volumes and a great many characters just to get right. Robinson, however, manages to condense all that time into the contents of one book by employing a unique narrative strategy: the main characters are reincarnated into various lives scattered throughout the entire timeline covered by the novel. Early in the novel, the end of a previous life and the beginning of another are separated by a brief moment in a place called the bardo, a Tibetan Buddhist term referring to that transition state between one's previous life and one's new reincarnation. Since this has the potential for deeply confusing the reader in terms of identifying characters, especially since given names change with each incarnation, Robinson uses a simple mnemonic to keep things tidy: the main characters all have names that start with the same letter. Certain personality traits also stay the same throughout incarnations, and this is an additional aid in identifying characters.

This has the interesting effect of giving the novel a slightly chopped-up feel, as if it were more a collection of stories than an actual novel. While some might view this as a bad, thing, it seems more like it is the best way to tell the story, given the amount of time and place that Robinson wants to cover. This slight imperfection in terms of cohesiveness might alter the way the book is perceived, but it is the only way the story can be told.

However, while the premise for the novel is incredible, to say the least, the execution and content certainly leave much to be desired. The world-building - something which I always look forward to in novels dealing with history or alternate history - is not very well done here. Certainly, Robinson gives glimpses of the world his characters inhabit, giving enough detail to remind the reader that this is not the history they know, but I would like to have read something far more substantial than just those glimpses. Of course, this would most certainly have made squeezing in the entire timeline Robinson used practically impossible, but I would have been quite content with a book that focused intensively on only one or maybe two points in time, but which are then explained thoroughly, with enough room for the reader to go exploring, so to speak.

And then there is the very narrative device that Robinson employs. While it might allow for a great stretch of time to be explored in the story without making his characters immortal, it does get in the way of getting to know the characters better. Instead of lingering and exploring a character's life, what the reader gets are flashes of who they are and what they think and what they do given the circumstances. It is, quite frankly, not long enough a time to spend with them in order to get to know them better, and then get attached to them - and attachment to a character or a set of characters is rather crucial in so episodic a narrative.

I also have issues with the use of reincarnation in this story. While I have no quarrel with believers of the concept, or even in the concept itself (some of my beliefs regarding life after death involve reincarnation), it is the way it is used here that really irks me. Reincarnation is not a time machine, and while Robinson really does try to make sure none of the spiritual value of the concept is lost, there is simply something about its use in the story that bugs me to no end. I attribute this to the fact that it allows Robinson to skim over a period in time in this narrative, since it permits him to kill off the characters, give them a brief moment in the bardo, and back to living they go, in a different time, with different names, and under different circumstances. This prevents the intensive world-building that I so crave in this particular genre, and prevents me from getting to know the characters well enough to get attached to them before they die and are plugged in a different body entirely, with a somewhat different personality.

These flaws, which I found were a hindrance to my total enjoyment of the novel, are really a pity, since the themes of this novel are particularly strong and very relevant. I find it especially interesting what Robinson implies about women: he seems to think that if women were granted more power and were allowed to run the world, then humanity would not be as messed-up as it is now. I think a lot of women believe this might be true, and Robinson explores the idea fully.

But interesting as this idea might be, and interesting as the premise for the novel might be, the flaws I mentioned earlier might get in the way of full appreciation of the novel. The warning “Proceed with Caution” certainly applies in this case, because this book has the potential to make the reader either enjoy it somewhat, or hate it entirely.

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, 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.