The Years of Rice and Salt

A while back I did a post about Agent of Byzantium.  I talked about how it was not at all bad but the short story format didn't flesh out the world nearly as much as I wanted it to and how I wished that it had gone further down the path of history.  The Years of Rice and Salt answers most of those complaints, ironically from the opposite direction.  In Agent of Byzantium, Islam is never founded and so the Eastern Roman Empire never falls.  The premise of this book is that instead of one third of Europe dying during the black plague, 99% does.  The book starts when the black plague is just finishing up its course and goes through about 2050 C.E. So it covers about a 1000 years and really fleshes out the world showing how different parts adapted differently.

The book was recommended to me by a friend after he lent me Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.  I didn't get around to reading it for about four years until it caught my eye in the small used book store in the little town where my Dad lives.  Since I have a difficult time leaving a book store empty handed I bought it.  $8 for a hard cover in good condition is pretty good.

Unlike a lot of alternate histories, this book does not make special effort to point out that certain events did or didn't happen.  Perhaps it is partially because this is so drastic of a historical change but I would like to attribute it at least partially to Mr. Robinson's skill at writing.  Despite the massive change, it is a pretty believable history (though Japanese ronin helping Native Americans fend off  Chinese conquistadors is a little far fetched, I will admit).  The history, rather than focusing on the leaders and major events, follows the lives of relatively normal people.

The book covers its time span by having 10 short-story-esque parts with varying amounts of time between each one.  The group of characters are always the same group, reincarnated in different positions.  This would merely be a quirk of the book except that some of the stories follow the characters after death while they have conversations in the afterlife; a seemingly needlessly fantastical flourish.  Each of the characters is then reincarnated as someone whose name starts with the first letter of the last life's name so you end up thinking of the characters as K and B.

One of the themes of the book is that the idea of a one overarching "shepherd" god is a bit naive and that there is holiness in all things.  Multiple different characters express this view and even the ones that don't seem to believe it.  In addition, the book spends a lot of time following the advancement of women's rights in the world and, while not as much the progression of science, the progression of scientific thinking.  It is very interesting.

This book makes for an good read, however, it can come across as a bit dry at times.  Not exactly a fun read, but a nice intellectual one.

Overall, I would give this book a 92%.