The Years of Rice and Salt
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| The Years of Rice and Salt | |
.jpg/200px-TheYearsOfRiceAndSalt(1stEdUK).jpg) Cover of first UK hardcover edition, published by HarperCollins in 2002. |
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| Author | Kim Stanley Robinson |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Alternate history novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
| Publication date | 2002 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 660 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-553-10920-0 |
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is an alternate history novel with major Buddhist and Islamic religious elements written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world in which neither Christianity nor the European cultures based on it achieve lasting impact on world history. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2003.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The book is set between about A.D. 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira, by the Islamic calendar used in the book), and A.D. 2002 (1423 after Hegira). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99% of the population of Medieval Europe is wiped out by the Black Death (rather than the approximately 30-60% that died in reality). This sets the stage for a world without Christianity as a major influence.
The novel follows a jāti of three to seven main characters and their reincarnation through the centuries in very different cultural and religious settings. The book features Muslim, Chinese (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucianist), American Indian, and Hindu culture, philosophy and everyday life. It mixes sophisticated knowledge about these cultures in the real world with their imagined global development in a world without Western Christendom.
The main characters, marked by identical first letters throughout their reincarnations, but changing in gender, culture-nationality and so on, struggle for progress in each life. Each chapter has a narrative style which reflects its setting.
Within the novel's re-imagined world, many places are given unfamiliar names, mostly of Chinese or Arabic origin. For example, Europe becomes Firanja, Great Britain and Ireland become the Keltic Sultanate, and Spain becomes al-Andalus; while the Pacific Ocean and Australia are called by Chinese names Dahai (大海) and Aozhou (澳洲), respectively, and North America becomes Yingzhou, a land from Chinese myth.
The ten chapters (theme) are:
- Book One - Awake to Emptiness - plague in Christendom; the Golden Horde; Zheng He's explorations and imperial China. This chapter is written in a style reminiscent of the Chinese classic, the Journey to the West.
- Book Two - The Haj in the Heart - Mughal India and colonization of empty Europe.
- Book Three - Ocean Continents - discovery of the New World by the Chinese military.
- Book Four - The Alchemist - Islamic renaissance in Samarqand.
- Book Five - Warp and Weft - Native Americans align with Samurai.
- Book Six - Widow Kang - the Qing dynasty meets Islam in western China.
- Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress - beginnings of industrialism in Southern India; Japanese diaspora to North America.
- Book Eight - War of the Asuras - a world-wide Long War, fought with 'modern' weapons.
- Book Nine - Nsara - science, urban life and feminism in Islamic Europe's post-war metropolis.
- Book Ten - The First Years - globalisation and sustainability.
Robinson infuses the novel with a poetic style which readers of his other works will find familiar, and also fills it with accurate historical trivia to delight the careful reader. Quite a few historical characters make large and small appearances in this world, including Tamerlane, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Akbar the Great, and Japanese Kampaku and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
In the last chapters the book becomes increasingly reflexive, citing fictional scientists and philosophers introduced in previous chapters as well as referring to Old Red Ink, who wrote a biography about a reincarnating jati group.
[edit] Key issues
Key issues of the novel are multiculturalism; progress and science; alternate history; philosophy, religion and human nature; politics; feminism and equality of all humans; the quest for freedom; and the struggle between technology and sustainability.
Not only because of the long time scale, but also because of its frequent reflections about human nature, The Years of Rice and Salt resembles Robinson's Mars trilogy.
[edit] Quotes
- "Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it is the story itself that is the reincarnation."
"But I don't want that to end," she said.
"No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can't change it by desire."
"...The Buddha says we should give up our desires."
"But that too is a desire!"
"So we never really give it up...What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting."
- "My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist."
- "This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing..."
[edit] Other Alternate Black Death Worlds
- In Robert Silverberg's The Gate of Worlds (1965), another alternate history's divergence point originated from a more virulent version of the Black Death c 1348. Here, as in The Years of Rice and Salt, Islam was an early chief beneficiary of the demise of European civilisation, although the survival of the Aztec Empire, Chinese Empire, African Kingdoms of Songhay and Dahomey and a Maori-centred Polynesian empire based in Aotearoa (New Zealand) are the dominant world powers in this timeline.
