The Years of Rice and Salt

Rating:
Summary: Makes one long for the bardo
Review: An interesting idea -- non-Eurocentric world development told from an Eastern on-going perspective of continually reincarnated entities. Unfortunately, it is entirely too long and without conventional (real time) points of reference it makes it difficult to compare what happens with what really happened. It also has a disturbingly anti-Muslim bent as if without European Christianity the world would be dominated by violent oppressive Islam and existential Buddhism. The idea that half the world would be dominated by one united religious realm rather than fragment into many different religious/political sects (as in the real world) is a stretch. I would have liked also to have seen more about the North American development.

Rating:
Summary: Not exactly what was expected - yet somehow that and more
Review: Have you ever read a book based on a review and the publicity only to find out it was not the book you were expecting at all? Sometimes, this is good; sometimes it is awful; most times it is just disappointing, frustrating or annoying. This book struck me that way at first -- it was billed as an alternate history, so what the heck is all the Buddhist afterlife stuff doing in here? And yet, it works as a bridge between the generations that makes the alternate history more interesting and let's us see the many generations of the story arc without it becoming a multi-generational soap opera. And yet, on another level, the afterlife stuff turns this book on its head -- instead of it being mostly an alternate history, it is almost a religious tract. I found that part rather compelling, actually, but it was not what I was expecting and so that whole "disappointed that it did not live up to its advertising" feeling came back. Despite all this, I still found the book very well written and the story held my interest all the way to the end. In fact, I have recommended it to several others already, both because of the concepts it contains and because of the story that they are wrapped up with. Just don't expect it to be a standard alternative history/what-if story, because it aint that.

Rating:
Summary: Very intriguing
Review: Using a running thread of reincarnating characters whose incarnations conveniently always begin with the same letter, Robinson traces the history of our world as it might've been without the influence of the European worldview. Islamic and Asian philosphies instead shape the development of the world and the discovery of the New World. This is a challenging read, not one quickly read. For my own part, I split the book in half, taking a break in order to cogitate on what had happened. It's also slow to get interesting. Indeed, I didn't start getting absorbed in Robinson's history until they discovered what we call America. If you feel the same entering into this work, I encourage you to continue and finish the book as it presents a fascinating portrait of what might've been. Full of insights and philosophical discussions, this book quietly enters into my highly recommended list.

Rating:
Summary: Challenging but worth it
Review: This book was not at all what I expected. I thought it would be an easy read (it is about 600 pages or so long) and, as I said above, the plot interested me; what would the world have been liked if Caucasian Europe had been wiped out in the Plague?

The author constructs an alternative universe where China and Islam fight for global supremacy with Hindu India and the North American Indians showing the world how to exist more peacefully. The book was very instructive about world religions, particularly Islam and Buddhism. There are two main characters in the book, "Ka" and "Ba" who are continually reincarnated over a period of 800 years as they try to reach nirvana. Using this technique, the author demonstrates how the world might have evolved.

At times the narrative seemed to meander and there is a lot more theology in there than I had anticipated. I have to say that Islam emerges from the novel with a bad report card; he seems to view the practice of this religion (but not the tenets of the Koran itself) as violent and misognist; in the book, Islam is doomed to failure for this reason. Ultimately it is the Asian cultures which gain supremacy.

A provocative book for sure - it was not the brain relaxant that I was looking for but equally, it got me pondering. I finished the book about a week ago and I am still thinking about it - not many books get that sort of reaction out of me.

Rating:
Summary: A full triumph
Review: My soul is bettered for this reading. I owe a great debt.

To explain the book, a passage:
-----
They seemed to him to hold some kind of key to the human story, assuming there could be any such thing: history as a simple accumulation of lives. "After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it."

This moment, Zhu said, had become the organizing principle and perhaps the obsession of the Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink, who had collected the lives in his reincarnation compendium using something like the clinamen moment to choose his exemplars, as each entry in his collection contained a moment when the subjects, always reincarnated with names that began with the same letters, came to crossroads in their lives and made a swerve away from what they might have been expected to do.
-----

And then read the first paragraph one more time.

This is a new world, and new stories. If you hunger for that, read this. That is all I have to say.

Read more KSR. Write more, KSR. B, I, and K can live on into a new whiteness.

Rating:
Summary: Had a lot of potential
Review: Great idea for the plot, but falls apart in the execution...I felt the same way about his books on Mars...I guess if you're into his writing style, this book will work for you too...

Rating:
Summary: Too Much, Too Little
Review: The very idea of a writer so disciplined as to have done the research for this tome is withering to contemplate. But to see him produce, not some fine work of historical exposition but this soulless babble is very sad. Maybe the old 'publish or perish' dilemma made him push it out the door when it was still half-baked, I don't know. But that describes this mind number: half-baked. He shouldn't ask for customers, but go to institutions and request grants - it has no market. For one thing he forgets that storytelling is what fiction is about. But if the story is about jumping about in time, he should have put in a historical primer, even if just a good timeline, since few have his educational attainment standing by. Then he should have perhaps settled for a collection of related short stories, concentrating on some fascinating incidents in a wide world not our own. But what he gives us is one boring lecture on how nothing would have happened of interest in all of history if not for the Europeans - for that is the regrettable conclusion! He makes Europeans into the master race by a process of elimination. The world he shows us without their presence just plain SUCKS. Life is hardly worth living in it. All the interesting stuff happened in the Europe that never was, and even then he has no imaginative characters perhaps dreaming of it to keep us from falling asleep. I think the lesson here is that "what-if" speculative history must control its premises or it becomes self-defeating. I think this book pleases no one but its author - if it does even that. Back to the basics, KSR!

Rating:
Summary: Robinson explores a "world without europe"
Review: Back in the 13th and 14th centuries, Europe was moving toward the High Middle Ages. The italianate city states were just starting their roads to power. Byzantium had reached a new apogee under Basil II. The christian kingdoms of Spain were starting their long Reconquista. Europe was still a backwater compared to most of the rest of the world, but the seeds for greatness were there.

In our history, the Black Death, the plague that spread through Europe in that era was a calamity, killing an estimated 25% of the population. It changed the course of history, as, for a time, it eased the crushing lives of peasants who suddenly found themselves in fewer numbers, and able to wield some power to relieve, at least a bit, the conditions imposed on them from Nobility. More people moved to the cities, and helped to increase the numbers of the forerunners of the bourgeoisie.

What would have happened, though, if the Black Death was even worse than this? It's not a new theme in Science Fiction, Robert Silverberg's The Gate of Worlds posited a world where the Black Death killed more than half of Europe's population, leaving it open to Turkish conquest, and a world where Europe was a backwater compared to the powerful kingdoms of Africa, Asia and the Americas of the Aztecs. L Neil Smith's The Crystal Empire posited a backfiring attempt on the part of Christian Europe to export the plague to the Saracens, and thus precipiating plague on Europe far greater than in our history.

Robinson decides to do one better. His plague is far worse than either of these, his plague depopulates Europe entirely, except for a few isolated islands. Europe becomes an charnel house, empty land, and it is left for other powers to march forward in history--China, Dar es Islam, India, and the Iroquois. His narrative covers about 750 years, from the Golden Horde's discovery of the depopulated Europe, to a late 21st century (although the Christian calendar is not used) endcap. Christianity just about disappears, with Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism and a few Zoroastrians (Zotts) as the remaining world religions.

Such long time spans are something even Harry Turtledove would face with trepidation, and so Robinson relies on a Buddhist concept to tie the ten novellas that make up the book together. In his world, the Buddhist concepts of the bardo, the afterlife between reincarnations, and the jati, the idea that souls come together again and again throughout incarnations. Thus, through the novel, Robinson has these characters meet and interact again and again, using the literary device of common first letters to help us keep it all straight (he even explicitly spells out the literary convention in the last novella, perhaps just for those who didn't "get it"). Thus, we have the K's, who are aggressive, passionate people, always testing boundaries, moving forward. The B's are more introspective, salts of the earth, perhaps more spiritual. The I's are the intelligensia, the thinkers, the idea people. There are a few other letters who appear less frequently and consistently as well.

This allows Robinson to set the ten portions of the book widely disseminated in time and space in his alternate world, and we get a few scenes in the bardo as well. We see the characters sold as slaves to 15h century China, as proto-scientists in Samarkand, as a half-Japanese admiral who discovers Yingzhou (The Americas) to meet a young native girl he feels a connection to, and other such venues. Thus the novel does rise and fall on the strength of these stories, not all of them are equally compelling, I am reminded of, for example, Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years in this regard.

Throughout the book, though, are other pleasures. We get to see discoveries and inventions from our own history, transmorgified in his alternate world. Everything from the Little Ice Age to the discovery of the colecanth. Some might argue that a world without Europe might not have industrialized on anything like the schedule it did in our own history, but I think that might be a bit of Eurocentric bias. After reading The Rise of the West, I do realize that, before the year 1500, China was far more powerful and potent than many people realize, and without Europe, both it and the world of Islam...why wouldn't they have discovered the Western Hemisphere, plunder their gold, invent industrialization?

I think I've missed some things, too, and I would like to see a concordance. For example, the first novella uses a literary device at the end of each chapter that seems to echo Buddhist stories "and we will find out in the next chapter". Another novella, which I think is the pivot point in the book because from it derives the title, uses Chinese style "commentaries". The nature and description of the bardo seems to be tied to the ascendant religion or ethos at that time in his history, too.

Its a book which is much easier to admire than to read and re-read, I think, but its definitely in the top tier of the books published last year, and probably one of the most ambitious alternate history novels I have read, or perhaps even SF novels in general. I recommend waiting for the paperback which will come out in early summer, I know some of you will love this, and others not to your taste. If you like alternate history, and you've already been exposed to and like Robinson's style (eg. Antarctica, or the Mars novels, or the Orange County novels), then I heartily recommend the Years of Rice and Salt.

Rating:
Summary: Too long to recommend and far too convoluted
Review: Kim Robinson's done some very compelling work with his Mars trilogy (although at times some of those works "drag" a bit). I read his trilogy and found the first book interesting and then it kind of deteriorated from there for me anyway. Here, Robinson takes an interesting premise that has been done before, namely a world dominated by non-European powers. In the book the forces of Islam emerge from the plagues that ravage Europe relatively unscathed and battle the Chinese and Indians for supremacy of the world over the ages. Already one can see that this is just too much to put into one book. The main characters all go through a reincarnation process and keep meeting during their lives. This is meant to create some continuity and also is meant to allow the story to flow from one time period to the next. The characters are generally used as archetypes and are often extraordinary individuals or simply part of the masses. Robinson certainly knows a great deal about what he writes about and has done his homework. He has thoroughly researched the Chinese, Islamic, and Indian civilizations, but he should have focused on some of the more interesting segments and not simply turned the book into a massive saga spanning over 1000 years of history. It's too much and some of the segments are just downright sleep inducing. I liked the first segment with the slave boy and the Mongol/Tartar warrior. The segment about the Muslim feminist Sultana was also well written and interesting but too short. This is a recurring problem in the book. The interesting stories are too short as Robinson can't wait to get to the next time period. The segments with the Central Asian inventors and the war between the Indians and the Ottoman Empire (the Ottoman caliph was particularly lively, but his part comes and goes too quickly, while his dull vizier becomes the focus of the segment) were also interesting but either too short or focused on broad philosophical questions rather than the characters. The story about the Japanese Samurai Ronin in America hooking up with the Native Americans was also quite interesting. Now with all of these interesting segments Robinson could have focused more on any or all of them instead of proceeding down the road of trying to philosophize about everything about Islam including the sufis and then discussing how similar sufism is to buddhism and hinduism etc. Personally, I found it all rather tiresome. I wanted entertainment, not a retread of my comparative religions class which I took years ago. He could have just as easily done books about each of the interesting segments as well. Also, I found it somewhat absurd that the plague specifically wiped out only Europeans and why would remote peoples in Scandanavia be effected and not the Ottomans who were essentially living partially in Europe? I would have gone with the premise that it wiped out the major powers of France, Germany, Britain, Russia, and northern Spain etc. and left some pockets of people alive to be absorbed into the Islamic fold or something. The development of the Indians makes no sense either. How could India develop when they were constantly being invaded by Islamic armies (arguably if not for the British, India would today be either an Islamic state or under Islamic domination in some way I believe). The Japanese also seem anemic at times and then the Native Americans somehow all learn to fight the invaders from the Old World. Maybe one group could hold out, but to assume that they would cooperate with the Indians and Japanese to fight a balanced war seems somewhat far-fetched. Robinson seems to have been intent on the world developing the same technological level that currently exists, but this is absurd because the Europeans were a part of the development of the world. At the very least without Europe either the world would have developed less by the 21st century or perhaps moreso because it didn't have Europe to contend with, but not the same. Too much of this book seems rigid in this regard. It's too bad because some the characters are really interesting and could have used more development. And I would personally skip the last 2 segments of the book as they involve really weak characters and stories. I'd read the first half or two-thirds of the book after getting it from the library, because buying it in hardcover is asking wayyyyy too much.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious, Boring, Doorstop Preachy
Review: Tedious- Boring- Doorstop- Preachy. I picked these four words from reviews I agree with to get right to the heart of the matter. I was really looking forward to reading this book, it combines reincarnation fantasy with alternative history, two of my favorite flavors, but in this combo they don't taste great together. I'm just sorry I wasted a good Christmas gift certificate on it. After reading reviews from like minded readers I refuse to read any further. So if you are considering this book, please let me save you the trouble that I have put myself to by not reading these reviews first. Don't be fooled by this book, just when it starts to pick up for a few pages after tedious boring endless descriptions, you are sucked back into the dulldroms. Forget it. Don't waste your precious time. I think I'll regift this book and pass it on to a friend who actually likes tedious boring pretentious [books].