The Years of Rice and Salt
.jpg?lang=en) Cover of first UK hardcover edition, published by HarperCollins in 2002. | |
| Author | Kim Stanley Robinson |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Alternate history novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
Publication date | 2002 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 660 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-553-10920-0 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is an alternate history novel 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.
Plot summary
The book is set between about AD 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira, by the Islamic calendar used in the book), and AD 2002 (1423 after Hegira). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99 percent 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 time, 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 fictional developments, partly resembling the actual history, but shifted and reflected by different cultural settings.
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 different style, reflecting 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, the British Isles become the Keltic Sultanate, and Spain becomes al-Andalus; 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 the west; the Golden Horde; Zheng He's explorations and imperial China. This book 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 league 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 Chinese 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 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.
Key issues
Key issues of the novel are hybrid cultures; progress and science; alternate history; philosophy, religion and human nature; politics; feminism and equality of all humans; 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.
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..."