The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present. Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland.
The novel is a heady mix of adventure, speculation, religious philosophy and ventures into historiography. For a popular “genre” novel, or any novel for that matter, Robinson deploys an impressive array of knowledge of the cultures he deploys. The world is divided between empires of sub-continent Indians, the Chinese, various Muslim emirates, and a New World empire originating with the Iroquois Confederacy, and expanding to most of North and South America.
Sure, Robinson deploys impressive “historical” knowledge in explaining the big picture of his world (although toward the end, there is a great deal of speech making among the characters, which while important, is probably too long) but ultimately this novel is about characters whose names begin with B and K. They are constantly reincarnated, assuming new guises and, in a sense, evolving as they are reborn.
This is work quite an accomplishment. One has to wonder what a stiff, messy disaster Salmon Rushdie would have done with the same type of material. Robinson avoids this, giving us an entertaining and smart novel; two qualities that are difficult to deliver.
The novel is a heady mix of adventure, speculation, religious philosophy and ventures into historiography. For a popular “genre” novel, or any novel for that matter, Robinson deploys an impressive array of knowledge of the cultures he deploys. The world is divided between empires of sub-continent Indians, the Chinese, various Muslim emirates, and a New World empire originating with the Iroquois Confederacy, and expanding to most of North and South America.
Sure, Robinson deploys impressive “historical” knowledge in explaining the big picture of his world (although toward the end, there is a great deal of speech making among the characters, which while important, is probably too long) but ultimately this novel is about characters whose names begin with B and K. They are constantly reincarnated, assuming new guises and, in a sense, evolving as they are reborn.
This is work quite an accomplishment. One has to wonder what a stiff, messy disaster Salmon Rushdie would have done with the same type of material. Robinson avoids this, giving us an entertaining and smart novel; two qualities that are difficult to deliver.
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