Rating: 
Summary: Boring
Review: Kim Stanley may be best noted for his outstanding Mars series however The Years of Rice & Salt fall far short of the mark. Stanley cannot seem to focus on any kind of meaningful character development throughout the book and when he finally does develop a character that person is tragically killed off. The book's focus seems to jump around from unrelated chapter to unrelated chapter worse than an ADD child during a Math class. Stanley may well have imagined himself to be interjecting various witticisms at the end of each chapter designed for comic relief however I found it to be tedious and just plain annoying.
Don't waste your time with this book if you are looking for entertainment.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Idea, Weak Execution
Review: There are few things more disappointing than a book with a great concept that fails to gel into an interesting story. Unfortunately, this is one of those books. And at 650+ pages, it's one of the more tedious doorstops I've ever forced myself to read all the way through. The great premise is that the Black Plague kills 99% of Europe, relegating it to historical oddity and leaving the rest of world for Chinese and Muslim empires to conquer. With that as the jumping off point, Robinson sets himself the ambitious task of recounting the next 700 years of history in ten chapters. To try and lend some structure to this sprawling construction, he uses three characters who continually experience reincarnation and are at the center of each chapter/story. One is ambitious and rebellious, one is sensitive and humane, and one is curious and intellectual. It's a nice idea, but never really works. The problems are many. Foremost is just a general longwindedness on Robinson's part, with lengthy descriptions of landscapes, cities, dress, and custom that simply aren't that fascinating to read, and in any event, don't add much to the stories. Another big flaw, especially in the final hundred pages, is his distinct tendency to sermonize and sprout theories through his characters. There comes a point where one wonders if the whole book is just an author's trick at avoiding writing a serious work of nonfiction. Clearly Robinson has some strong ideas about history, religious and social movements, and Samuel Huntington's famous "clash of civilizations thesis", so why not [absorb it all]and write about reality instead of cloaking it in pseudo alternate history. And I say pseudo because despite the erasing of white folks from the story, Robinson's history runs parallel to reality. The same scientific discoveries are made at roughly the same rates, with cutesy alternate names (the Chinese qi = electricity, the Arabic alactin = uranium, etc.), colonization of the world by the great powers still occurs, there's a "Great War", complete with trench warfare, and hey, guess what? Africans and Australian Aboriginals are absent from the story except as slaves! Another problematic aspect to the novel is that without a fairly decent knowledge of Bhuddism in all its flavors, Islam in all its flavors, the real life development of both up until the 14th century, and indeed, world history up until that point, one is unlikely to fully appreciate a lot of Robinson's arguments and themes. I don't know anything about Robinson, and have never read any of his work, but I'd be willing to bet he has some sort of PhD. in history or comparative religion, cause many many parts of the book read like transcriptions of bad grad school seminars in both fields. And one has to conclude that he willfully jettisoned some of what he knows in order to make his broader sermonizing work. For example, throughout the book, Tibetan Bhuddism and Sufi Islam (let's not even get into the very real argument over whether Sufism is Islam!) are much-praised throughout the stories. While he's perfectly happy to take on Islam's treatment of women, he ignores Tibetan Bhuddism's oppression of women. Similarly, he treats Sufism as a monolithic celebration of poetry, wine, and mysticism, failing to acknowledge the real breadth of Sufi sects, for example the Sufism practiced by Chechen freedom fighters, which is hardly all dancing and joy. Ultimately, the book is an ambitious but greatly flawed mess, and simply isn't a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: technically fascinating
Review: [My bias and background: I have not yet finished this book, as I write this. I have read other KSR stories, and liked some of them while disliking others.] I think the many reviews of this book describing it as a study of religion or an alternate history are misguided. As with Robinson's other novels, his utopian (and distopian) political systems are best viewed as interesting hypothetical concepts. The real strength of his work is his characters and their adventures. He also seems to be better at telling shorter tales. I think the episodic structure of the book plays to the author's strengths. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book for me has been that the writing structure is different in each section. Sometimes chapter-based, sometimes poetic, sometimes dryly historical, but always different. The timescales also vary from section to section, sometimes covering the whole life (so to speak) of characters and sometimes only covering very short but important moments in their lives.
Rating:
Summary: fasinating read
Review: This is the first book I ever read of Robinson's and I found this book rich in words and stories of what if. I found myself not putting the book down. 600 and some odd pages and I read it all. Great book.
Rating:
Summary: A bit irritating..and thoughtful
Review: I got this book for my birthday and while I enjoy his riffs on why Asian societies function the way they do, I was wondering why the author chose to ignore two or three major continents of people, namely, Africa, Australia and Greenland. I felt the author thought the Africans and other blacks were simply not worth mentioning except that they were either slaves, concubines or "animals", in the description of a Persian female sage. (There was a black boy whom the Chinese lynched; he rose to power in compensation, I suppose.) The Australian aborigines were hardly if at all mentioned, and you would think that Indians just existed in the United States and South America. I also found tracking some of the characters through the "bardo" kind of silly and unnecessary; and I really wanted to find out what happened to some of the characters but their stories were cut short so their fates were unknown. If the author reads reviews on Amazon.com I would welcome reading his reasons why he left out so many millions of people in his vision of the world.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful, engaging blend of characters and ideas.
Review: KSR presents people grappling with the big questions over millennia, while integrating into his plot an impressive range of insights from religious, cultural, political, and social history. Happening upon this work in the midst of studying Islam, it arrived at a perfect moment for me. KSR blends an astonishing amount of scholarship into his story but stays for the most part with how ideas have an impact upon the individual as well as the group. Trading off between earthly reincarnations of the "jati" group and brief scenarios with them yet another time in the bardo, this framework allows readers to learn along with KSR's appealing characters how to better one's self and those around us. Subtly, the characters' views move into more modern and skeptical bases as the centuries go on. Familiar inventions and battles occur, all the while tinged with the difference for us as readers effected largely from "our" Western-dominated absence from his global narrative. His humanism and skepticism against totalitarian and oppressive systems keep the wheel turning through a well-told tale. You lament the passing of nearly every main character, and the unpredictability of their incarnations adds tension and poignancy to themore intimate scenes. Sometimes, however, too much goes by in one character's long life to make much of it stick except in the more detailed vignettes. KSR's own grasp of historiography makes for great intellectual fodder, but it can be a bit clunky as presented in the latter chapters of the book by "talking heads." Then again, these ideas are discussed at academic conferences, so perhaps their erudition and airless quality fits! The blend of Native American, Islamic, Buddhist, Sufi, and Indian mentalities proves a fascinating thought-experiment while Judaism and Christianity have largely succumbed. I would have liked to have had a glimpse of the surviving two other monotheisms and how their remnant fared, as well as a depiction of Zott [Rom/Gypsies], Armenians, and more of the Africans and Aozhou [Australia]. But the book is long enough that you'll be entertained and educated in plenty as it is. His penultimate reflections of teaching in a university much like the one in KSR's own town serve as a thoughtful valediction upon the effect of students upon a professor. Although a bit long-winded in places, this actually adds verisimilitude to a novel concerned with how we wrestle-- stumbling, defiant, giddy, weary or blustering--against the gods' obstacles or the universe's indifference to improve our existence despite the fates and our own inevitable deaths.
Rating: 
Summary: What Imagination
Review: The Years of Rice and Salt is a tremendous undertaking, and if Robinson does not take it as far as it can go, so what? This is still a wonderful alternative history. Covering a thousand years of such alternative history is certainly ambitious and for the most part, this novel works. We follow a few souls (who conveniently always have names beginning with the same letter) through this alternative history, which begins with all of Europe wiped out by the plague. The souls are reborn and many times make the same mistakes from prior lives. Robinson certainly has his opinions on what works in our current civilization and extrapolates these ideas into his alternative history. This is an interesting, imaginative book that I found to be quite pleasurable to read. It can be a lot of fun if you don't take it too seriously.
Rating:
Summary: what a feast!
Review: Kim Stanley Robinson's story is one of the reasons I love to read, as he takes me, literally, into a new world where the continents are the same as I've always known them to be, yet how the people who live there have survived, is a totally different thing. If you enjoyed the movie, GROUNDHOG DAY & always wanted something more mature, informative & deeper, about living an examined life, about getting it right, then treat yourself to THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT. Be prepared for quite a few days of hypnotic reading. At times it got bogged down in theoreticality, however, overall it was a magnificent read!
Rating:
Summary: What if western civilization never existed?
Review: Imagine, for a moment, that western civilization not only did not evolve as we know it today, but that, in fact, it never existed at all. This intriguing speculation is the underlying premise of a novel which forces the reader to rethink all the assumptions with which we habitually evaluate the past--the "givens" through which we interpret events. Robinson presupposes that virtually all the inhabitants of Europe were wiped out by a plague in the fourteenth century and the continent left uninhabited. But this was not the end of the world, nor was it the end of learning and "progress." Life continued, but all the intellectual developments arose out of the Muslim states, China, India, and eventually the North America of the Native Americans. Alternating workman-like prose with prose "poems" and, occasionally, stories and legends, Robinson crafts a fast-paced history of a different world, creating two characters who appear and reappear in different incarnations from 783 a. H. (after Hegira), roughly the late 14th century, to the present day. Keeping basically the same personalities, regardless of their incarnations, Bold Bardash (Bihari, Bistami, Butterfly, Bahram, etc.) and Kyu (Kokila, Kya, Katima, Kheim, etc.) travel through time, experiencing life under the Mongols, Indians, early Chinese emperors, Muslim leaders, and Japanese sailors during their discovery of the New World. Some episodes are much more vivid, and ultimately more enlightening, than others, and as the cultures are brought to life, along with their different views of man's place in the universe, Robinson shows how the desire to impose one's own religion or beliefs on the outside world is the basis of some of the cruelest violence throughout history. Ultimately, the Great War, lasting sixty-seven years and costing one billion lives, pits the rulers of Dar al-Islam against the Travancori League (India), China, and the Hodenosaunee League (Native America). While it is intriguing to contemplate alternative history, Robinson's goal--the alternative history of the entire world for the past six hundred years is an enormous subject, one which, because of its breadth and scope seems to lose focus and pace as the book progresses. And while the reincarnations of Bold and Kyu help to bridge many gaps and avoid some problems of character development, the device becomes a bit tired by the end. Still, in showing us how all aspects of our current knowledge might have developed in other societies if western civilization had not existed, Robinson goes a long way toward reducing intellectual arrogance and increasing empathy for other cultures. Despite the book's limitations, Robinson succeeds in creating an alternative history which offers much food for thought and considerable narrative excitement...
Rating: 
Summary: Bitter Salt, Lustrous Rice
Review: This is a massive and ambitious work, perhaps too ambitious as it attempts to show how the world would have developed if the Black Death of 14th century Europe had been even more virulent, and instead of wiping out a third of the population it wipes out just about everyone in Europe. In doing so, KSR has set himself the task of recreating almost 700 years of history and all the geo-political, philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas and events that would occur in that span. In some ways, he comes close to succeeding, managing to present viewpoints that are probably very foreign to most Americans in at least a semi-understandable manner. But he also falls off the wagon at times and deteriorates into pedagogy and diatribe. The book starts very slowly, following a single individual as he treks through the incredibly deserted lands of the newly depopulated Europe, and really doesn't pick up speed until we reach The Alchemist, where we see a grand flowering of scientific investigation, paralleling the accomplishments of Newton, Leibnitz, and other European researchers, but from a Muslim viewpoint. Here for the first time in the book do we get some depth to the characters, and a first peek at the overriding theme of the book, on the power and obligation of the individual to do his utmost to change the world for the better, even if only by a miniscule amount. From here on the book is very uneven. Some sections, such as the ones detailing the events in the New World, are fascinating for their different development from our own history. Others bog down in debates over very foreseeable changes in and clashes between various religions (mainly Islam and Buddhism) and their sub-sects. Part of the problem here is his set of continuing, re-incarnated characters between each major section. At just about the point where you become interested in these people, where they have real faces and recognizable emotions and problems, that section will end, and in the following section you have new characters, who have some of the traits of the earlier ones, but often the relationship is not obvious, and the character's names are strange enough to cause additional problems in recognition. Another problem is KSR's depiction of the bardo, where souls go prior to re-incarnation. His description of this spiritual plane never made a concrete image for me, nor did it seem to make much logical sense. And finally, KSR's commitment to the ideal of communism at times becomes too strident, with too much of a sugar-coated outlook on the possibility of changing human nature to where that ideal could really form a workable society. So what is good? The grand sweep of this book will eventually catch you up in its implacability, the sense of inevitableness as KSR's imagined world shows so many striking, logical, and ultimately depressing parallels to our own. And by presenting some of the basic tenants of Islam in this fictional form, the reader will come away with a better appreciation of this religion and the possible power of its adherents as a force for good and enlightened investigation into all aspects of the world. Some of the poetry within these pages will evoke an awed feeling of 'this captures this feeling, this moment, exactly.' A grand idea, an impressive attempt, but with too many flaws to be considered great. Still, it shows that KSR is not afraid of attempting something new, something that would give most authors a bad case of palsy to even consider.
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