I’ve been getting into alternate history novels lately – The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove, Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp – and one of the better ones I’ve read is Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 book The Years of Rice and Salt. I’ve read Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which I thought was interesting but lacked a strong central concept to drive the plot, but this book is an accomplishment.
The classic strategy of alternate history is to pick some important historical event, assume that it turned out differently, and explore what the consequences would be for human society. Robinson’s chosen divergence point is the Black Death, which in our world wiped out about a third of Europe’s population. In his book, it kills 99% of the population.
With no European civilizations, new national powers rise to prominence, and the history of the world develops along a recognizable but distinct parallel track. Chinese sailors discover the New World and seek to colonize it; Muslim explorers create a new Al-Andalus and spread north into a vacant Europe; Islamic experimentalists and mathematicians spark an Enlightenment in the Middle East; India kickstarts the Industrial Revolution.
China becomes one of the world’s superpowers, colonizing and dominating most of eastern Asia. Islam becomes the other, gaining sway over the Middle East and Africa and repopulating and rebuilding Europe. At the margins of these great powers, people and ideas mix freely, leading to a flourishing tradition of history and literature. But perhaps inevitably, as empires jostle for position, mutual suspicion becomes hostility, and the planet becomes embroiled in a world war as devastating as any that took place in history’s actual timeline.
To bring a human scale to these global events, Robinson tells his story through the eyes of a group of characters who are repeatedly reincarnated at different eras, so that they’re in a position to witness or participate in some of history’s turning points. (You can tell who’s who because their names always start with the same letter.) In between each chapter, there are scenes in a spiritual realm, a bardo, where their choices in the previous life affect how they come back in the next (one character is even reincarnated as an animal at one point). This could be dismissed as just a framing device, except that there are also several earthly scenes where the characters, in deep meditation or other altered states, remember glimpses of their former lives. Given that this book is set in a world where Islam is a major power and is otherwise thoroughly realistic, it was an odd stylistic choice to write it so that some form of Hinduism or Buddhism is apparently true.
On the other hand, something I especially appreciated was Robinson’s depiction of the Native Americans. The more I learn about just how vast, creative and complex were the civilizations that existed in the New World before the arrival of European colonizers and European diseases, the more I realize what a tragedy it is how many of them were destroyed with scarcely a trace besides mute ruins. I would gladly read more about an alternate history where the Native American civilizations survive, and in Robinson’s telling, they do – and eventually become a world power.
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