The Years of Rice and Salt

infobox Book |
name = The Years of Rice and Salt
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = Cover of first UK hardcover edition, published by HarperCollins in 2002.
author = Kim Stanley Robinson
illustrator =
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Alternate history novel
publisher = Bantam Books
release_date = 2002
english_release_date =
media_type = Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
pages = 660 pp
isbn = ISBN 0-553-10920-0
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"The Years of Rice and Salt" (2002) is an alternate history novel with major Buddhist and Islamic religious elements written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world in which neither Christianity nor the European cultures based on it achieve lasting impact on world history. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2003.

Plot summary

The book is set between about A.D. 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira, by the Islamic calendar used in the book), and A.D. 2002 (1423 after Hegira). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99% of the population of Medieval Europe is wiped out by the Black Death (rather than the approximately 30-60% that died in reality). This sets the stage for a world without Christianity as a major influence.

The novel follows a jāti of three to seven main characters and their reincarnation through the centuries in very different cultural and religious settings. The book features Muslim, Chinese (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucianist), American Indian, and Hindu culture, philosophy and everyday life. It mixes sophisticated knowledge about these cultures in the real world with their imagined global development in a world without Western Christendom.

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 narrative style which reflects its setting.

Within the novel's re-imagined world, many places are given unfamiliar names, mostly of Chinese or Arabic origin. For example, Europe becomes Firanja, Great Britain and Ireland become the Keltic Sultanate, and Spain becomes al-Andalus; while the Pacific Ocean and Australia are called by Chinese names Dahai (大海) and Aozhou (澳洲), respectively, and North America becomes Yingzhou, a land from Chinese myth.

The ten chapters (theme) are:
* Book One - Awake to Emptiness - plague in Christendom; the Golden Horde; Zheng He's explorations and imperial China. This chapter 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 align with Samurai.
* Book Six - Widow Kang - the Qing dynasty meets Islam in western China.
* Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress - beginnings of industrialism in Southern India; Japanese diaspora to 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.

Quite a few historical characters make large and small appearances in this world, including Tamerlane, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Akbar the Great, and Japanese Kampaku and 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.

At the end of the book, we would get a picture of China finally recovering since the Long War. Everything seems to be in harmony and peace, until the goddess Kali is introduced once more in the final scene, hinting that chaos would return.

Key issues

Key issues of the novel are multiculturalism; and science; alternate history; philosophy, religion and human nature; politics; feminism and equality of all humans; the quest for freedom; and the struggle between technology and sustainability.

Not only because of the long time scale, but also because of its 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."

* "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."

*"This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing..."

*“We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

Other alternate Black Death worlds

*In Robert Silverberg's "The Gate of Worlds" (1965), another alternate history's divergence point originated from a more virulent version of the Black Death c 1348. Here, as in "The Years of Rice and Salt", Islam was an early chief beneficiary of the demise of European civilisation, although the survival of the Aztec Empire, Chinese Empire, African Kingdoms of Songhay and Dahomey and a Maori-centred Polynesian empire based in Aotearoa (New Zealand) are the dominant world powers in this timeline.
*Harry Turtledove's "In High Places" (2005) is set in a similar world where the Black Death killed many more than in the real world, resulting in large Muslim migration and settlement in Europe.

External links

* [http://www.geocities.com/heiankyo794/tyoras-guide.html Trivia and study guide to The Years of Rice and Salt]
* [http://www.geocities.com/heiankyo794/timeline.html Timeline of the events in The Years of Rice and Salt's world]
* [http://booksandotherstuff.blogspot.com/2007/02/reincarnations-for-years-of-rice-and.html Reincarnation list of the main characters in "The Years" "of Rice and Salt"]