Talk:The Years of Rice and Salt

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Not only because of the long time scale, but also because of its realistic-utopian elements, and because of the frequent reflections about human nature, The Years of Rice and Salt resembles Robinson's Mars trilogy, a utopia brought to Earth.

I don't understand this: is it trying to say the Mars trilogy is "a utopia brought to Earth"? --Sam

No. I tried to say that there are similarities between Robinsons utopian Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt in the points of:

  • long time scale
  • realistisc-utopian elements (i.e. ambivalence of utopia)
  • reflections about human nature

So, YRC is the Mars utopia brought to earth. -- till we *) 22:07, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Chronology

KSR seems to have written much of this book (excluding the Chronology at the beginning) without knowing that the Muslim calendar is lunar, and consequently he starts his story, which begins in AD 1405, in "AH 783". (The correct year 1405 can be deduced from where he diverges from actual history, having Timur travel in a different direction. The sickness that's affecting him in this book is what in fact kills him in our history.)

Later -- and this was corrected in the British paperback -- he calls the present year 2002 "AH 1381", and there are a few other places where he seems to be using solar (Persian) Muslim years. He should have gone back and corrected the entire text. I've replaced "ca. 1400" for Chapter 1 with "1405". --User:Heian-794 0:01, Jan 11, 2005

User:Ericg, Zheng He doesn't figure in part three at all. I've taken the liberty of editing your revision and putting him back in the first chapter. -- User:Heian-794 23:08, Apr 19, 2005

[edit] Utopian?

As someone who hasn't read this, I'm a bit confused. Is Robinson suggesting with this book that we would have utopia if all Europeans had died? And this is supposed to somehow be realistic? He seemed to touch on themes of this in the Mars Trilogy as I recall, but it sounds like this book was an off-the-deep-end bashing of all things Western. Perhaps not...? RobertM525 06:56, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Robert, I think the "utopian" label is not necessarily because of the death of the Europeans, but rather referring to the hopeful tone of the last chapter, where a world that has endured a horrific multi-generational war between two throroughly opposed ideologies has still managed to recover and progress towards the same positive future that we see coming about at the end of the Mars trilogy.

This book is not at all a bashing of all things western. Give it a try; you'll enjoy it! Heian-794 07:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

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