Bookshot #75: The Years of Rice and Salt

I've read my fair share of alternate history books over the years and this magnificent, beautiful gem from Kim Stanley Robinson might be the only one that truly lives up to the notion of a history that is really 'alternate.'  Counter-factuals and 'what-ifs' have spawned a whole sub-genre over the years:  What if the south won the Civil War?  What if Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Britain and France had decided to fight?  What if, instead of America, they discovered the lost continent of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic?  What if Spain had conquered Britain in 1588 and the Armada had not sunk?  I could go on and on and on- there's bookshelves of these things.

But what they all have in common is that none of the break free from the mold of history that's already existing:  they tweak existing events and change the outcomes, but stay within the framework of events that have gone before- Kim Stanley Robinson apparently wasn't satisfied with that, because he set himself probably the biggest challenge I've ever seen in this genre and pulled it off with his usual deeply engrossing, carefully literate style:  What if the Black Plague had wiped out Europe?  What kind of world would have then?

You could have a lot of fun with a concept like that just by setting in it in the present day, but Robinson goes big or goes home by laying out a world history that stretches over centuries by dividing the novel into ten books- with characters are are loosely connected throughout the narrative by reincarnation (everyone gets to spend sometime in the Bardo at the end of each book), with each character having the same letter of their first name throughout the book.

The world that Robinson draws looks very different from our own:  Islam dominates the Middle East, Africa and pushes up into Spain and then France as they start to repopulate what was Europe before the plague.  In the east, China becomes the primary world power- discovering the New World, but deciding against conquest and leaving the native populations largely unmolested- but not before introducing new diseases into the population.

We see early concepts of feminism emerge in the progressive Emirate of Nsara, which Utopian-minded Muslims marched north from Spain to found in southern France-  it also stirs in the writings of a Chinese Widow named Kang Tongbi.  The scientific method is founded by an Alchemist in Samarkand.   Industrialization starts in the Indian State of Travancore and completely changes the game- and a Japanese refugee, fleeing from the Chinese domination of his people reaches the Iroquois people and tells them to make guns and fight to preserve their independence and way of life- and they do.

The inevitable clash of civilizations comes between the Chinese and Islam- a Long War lasting nearly sixty years and everything that follows that is just recovering, learning and growing from such a titanic disaster.

Overall: Robinson brings his usual literary genius to the proceedings- his characters are well drawn and believable- and the world he builds in The Years of Rice and Salt is believable, fascinating and packed to the gills with subtle details (they use air ships, not airplanes- and the units of measurements are different- Robinson covers every angle.) Meticulous, beautiful in structure, haunting in the questions that it raises and the world it imagines snares the reader in a beautiful book.   I had given up on Alternate History as a sub-genre.  This book vaults to the head of the class- you could probably slot it right in next to Phillip K. Dick's Man In The High Caste.  **** out of ****