The Years of Rice and Salt
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The Years of Rice and Salt (2002, ISBN 0553580078) is an alternate history novel written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world without Christianity.
Contents |
Synopsis
The book is set between about AD 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira), and AD 2002 (1423 after Hegira). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99 per cent of the population of medieval Europe is wiped out by the plague. This sets the stage for a world without Christianity as a major influence.
The novel follows a jati 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 First Nations, 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.
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 cum Samurai)
- Book Six - Widow Kang (Qing dynasty meets Islam in western China)
- Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress (Southern India as origin of modernity; 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 tidbits of historical trivia to delight the careful reader. Quite a few historical characters make large and small appearances this world, including Tamerlane, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Akbar the Great, and Japanese shōgun 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 realistic-utopian elements, and because of the 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.'"
- "The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god..., to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce that there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it."
- "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."