The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

great premise, poor follow-through

I thought this was a great premise for a book, but the execution was more than a little disappointing. There are just too many ways a civilization can change for anything to seem realistic. Just as the black plague was a historical turning point that ended European influence in this book, couldn't something else have changed the world the writer created into something completely unrecognizable? The world the writer created here seemed too much like the world we know today, with a different accent -- like throwing curry powder on a food to make it "Indian" or chili powder on something else to make it "Mexican." I did enjoy the earlier chapters, but they seemed more appealing on their own than having to follow the conceit of having them reborn over time. Getting familiar with the world was difficult enough -- to have to relearn who was who in the story was more work than I was prepared for.

"Will you come with us? Will you do that?"

alt.history generally doesn't do it for me. I really love authors like Tim Powers who pick more obscure moments in time, but I really don't like the seemingly ubiquitous what if the Nazis weren't defeated books which seem to dominate the alt.history market.

In that sense, Robinson's book was a relief. The premise question of "What if the plague destroyed 99% of the European population?" is an interesting question, and open to a lot of good themes. Robinson is clearly alive to the endless possibilities, because he unfortunately tries to stuff every answer/theme he can think of into this book's 763 pages of itty bitty type. Although the reincarnation device serves as a unifying principle, it is pretty difficult to unify this much stuff and you practically need a reader's guide to get all the recurring souls and the various ideas straight in your head.

I started off really resisting the book, but by 100 pages in I was really enjoying the experience. Unfortunately, my interest started to flag again somewhere around page 500 and by the "Nsara" chapter I was fairly actively bored and annoyed. This may make me a shallow person, I suppose, but it was just plain old too much of a muchness for me. (And to give you context, I was kind of sorry that the Baroque Cycle didn't have more pages, so it isn't an issue with long books in general.) I think that it is also that in the latter portions of the book I felt Robinson pushing more to get his agenda heard and something about the politics took a weird left turn into wishful thinking at the end. Too bad.

The writing is skillful, although it did not set me on fire. I would recommend the book, particularly to someone with a specific interest in alt.history fiction. I'm not dying to run out and read the Mars trilogy based on this however-- should I change my mind about that or not?

An alternate history that really is an "Alternate History"

To many alternate histories fall into two categories "What if the South Won the Civil War?" or "What if the Nazis Won World War II?"

In this case "What if Europe were decimated by the Black Death?"; now there are times when the story (which is very long) is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own narrative. There are even times when you need a rolodex to keep track of all of the characters (there are sites on the internet dedicated to this) the simplest advice in this case is to follow closely the characters starting with "B", "P" and "K"

Overall-If I had read this a year ago when I expected everything I read to be a great work of literature I would have given this a much lower rating, however in the little while since I have had a revelation I was entertained and my intelligence wasn't insulted so I had a good time.

interesting premise, awful execution

Reading the summary of this book, it sounded really quite interesting. European society had been killed off by plague and thus Islamic and Chinese societies were the dominant ones on Earth. The book was divided up amongst several stories detailing various time periods and the ways in which scientific discoveries - flight, gunpowder, trains, telescopes, etc were "discovered" in this alternate history. But these stories just got boring and I found myself wanting to skip large sections of them in the hope that the book would get better, unfortunately it didn't.

Didn't live up to expectations

As an alternative history of what would have happened if Europe had been depopulated by the Black Death this book had some real possibilities. Would Islamic civilization, which was still thriving at the time, have taken the lead in the world? Or might China have rose to the challenge? Through the use of reincarnation the author attempts to explore the possibilities but never really succceeds in pulling the reader in, at least not in my case.

A great idea for a book, though.