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So I finally finished The Years of Rice and Salt by KSR by recommendation of @self_made_human and my 15-year-old self. I loved this book when I was a teenager (I even based the last two parts of my Paradox mega campaign on the success of the Iroquois in these books. Unfortunately, like the final book of the Mars Trilogy, this book didn't really hold up, although that is not to say that there aren't positive aspects or things that I really liked on this read through. My main issues with the book revolve around the confused nature of historical materialism and great man theory of history that Robinson seems to subscribe to, and the fast and loose approach he has to religion and ideology.
The Years of Rice and Salt is a series of collected novellas taking place in a world where white people basically don't exist because the black plague wipes out 99% of the population. Each novella takes place at key moment in this alternate history following four characters that are continuously reincarnated. In the earlier novellas, reincarnation plays a more central role in the story, with each containing a chapter where the characters are in the Bardo (a waiting room for being reincarnated), and a clearer link between each reincarnation: each character can be identified throughout time by the first letter of their name and a key personality trait. For example, K characters are prickly and impulsive, B characters are gentle and loving, I characters are intellectuals, and S characters are generally idiots. Both of these features drop out of the narrative over time, which I think was deliberate (more on this later). The constant reincarnation and relatively short length of each novella (10 in ~750 pages) made it difficult to get to know the characters, especially as they shifted away from their archetypes in the later half of the book. The purpose of reincarnation in the first half of the book is clear: as a road to enlightenment and Nirvana, and the characters do make great strides in correcting their flaws throughout these first few novellas. However, by the second half of the book it's clear that for all their actions, world history is following a pretty set course, and the best that they can do is enjoy "those years of rice and salt" as a character puts it in the book. I generally liked this, and I think it's a positive message that would resonate much stronger in this world where Buddhism, rather than Christianity is the dominant religious force. One of my frustrations with Christianity is that the goalposts are so focused on the afterlife, which, at least subconsciously creates disdain for the world in the here and now.
On a macro, worldbuilding level, however, my opinion about this book has not held up at all. The destruction of Europe by the Black Death leads to a world that is dominated for much of the novel by a struggle between Islam and Buddhism. This should be a very interesting premise, and indeed starts out extremely promisingly. The great struggle occurs not in the Atlantic, in much of our timeline, but in Central Asia, the heart of the world, which is very much reflected in the settings of the various novellas. However, by the end of the book, history has disappointingly reconverged to something that resembles very much our timeline. Muslim-dominated Europe is impoverished because of a world war, China has fallen to a Communist revolution, America (governed by native peoples) is the dominant power because of control of international maritime trade. Science, culture, and economics have taken their exact same courses as in our timeline, and it very much feels like Robinson swapped out skin-colors and funny hats from our timeline. Of course this is perhaps not surprising given Robinson's political and philosophical views (materialist Neo-marxist), but it does stretch believability, especially when the reincarnated characters so frequently behave like "Great Men" of history to make it all happen. Although I have sympathy for this view of history (I am currently reading Marx and find him sympathetic), I also find it to be a little insular and self-limiting. China and Islam are very different ways of looking at the world as compared to Faustian Western civilization, and it seems a little myopic to believe that technological and social development of these societies really would have ended up in the same place without Western influence. Heck, even in the West we didn't have to end up in this particular present: I would argue that the development of the personal computer and the internet especially, rather than more analog tech like that shown in the Fallout Universe was a very real cultural path. The author's blind spots both within his universe and in real history are pretty glaring. In one novella Constantinople is easily captured by a force of Indian Dreadnoughts, but in the next Islam is somehow able to stand united against China, India, and the Iroquois for 60 years in a global war. The scale of that war also completely stretched my credulity: look at how exhausted all the combatants were by 4 years of WWI, and how absolutely destroyed the USSR, Britain, and Germany were by 6 years of WWII. Robinson also chose an interesting Native American confederation to be the basis of his replacement America. Robinson portrays the Iroquois as a model democratic people, which not entirely misguided, misses their own blatant imperialism and destruction of other native groups to create a glorified game reserve in the 17th century. Luckily this whitewashing does not extend to other cultures: the Chinese and Muslims are both shown to be just as imperialistic as our timeline's Europeans, which I think is something that KSR's usual audience probably needed to hear.
So in short, while I found the character work and personal themes to be pretty decent still, I was very disappointed in this book's theory of history and exploration of non-Faustian culture. Muslim France and Iroquois America ending up exactly like France and America in the 21st century doesn't seem to very realistic to me, nor to be a very interesting exploration of non-Western cultures.
Damn it. I'd written a full review of the novel at some point, but I can't find it. I guess I'll have to do it all over again:
I really wanted to love this book. In the grand calculus of my reading preferences, it scores a solid 7.5 out of 10. But the experience was less like a perfect meal and more like being served a top-tier Wagyu steak in a kitchen that has just failed its health inspection. The texture is savory, the preparation is skilled, but there is a lingering, bitter aftertaste suggesting that the underlying infrastructure is infested with pests. I felt compelled to turn the pages, but I could not bring myself to love it.
Here's particular aspects that turned me off, and some of the good:
The novel opens with a masterful depiction of the end of days. We see the final days of Europe and Byzantium through the eyes of a Mongolian soldier, and it effectively conveys the sheer scale of the Black Death. It feels like a genuine apocalypse, a wholesale deletion of cultures where the map is suddenly wiped clean of territory.
And then, inexplicably, the point of view shifts. We leave this fascinating post-apocalyptic landscape and barely return to Europe until centuries later. This feels like a massive failure of resource allocation. I would have happily read five hundred pages detailing the logistics of recolonization and the emergent order of new societies filling a vacuum. There is a smattering of this, but nowhere near enough to satisfy the premise.
This is compounded by the fact that several chapters/hundreds of pages dwell on civilizations in South and East Asia that were practically unchanged by the catastrophe. This is plausible, since I doubt Imperial China would notice or care about the death of all the gweilos. But that makes it boring to dwell on them, Akbar is the same Akbar, the Ming/Ching/Ding-Dong dynasty does their usual stuff. Another missed opportunity.
Then there is the Buddhism.
I generally try to be charitable to an author’s metaphysical framework, but the inclusion of the Bardo and literal reincarnation strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. The book frames these not as poetic metaphors or cultural delusions, but as real events interacting with the material plane. Characters experience déjà vu and, in some cases, regain actual memories from past lives.
This presents a serious world-building problem. If Buddhism is literally true to the extent that personality continuity survives death, this is a much bigger deal than the geopolitical maneuvering of the Chinese Empire. It is the discovery of a new law of physics. To include this high-fantasy element in an otherwise grounded alternative history feels jarring. It is like reading a hard sci-fi novel about Mars colonization where the astronauts occasionally cast magic missile spells, and nobody treats it as unusual. It makes the story feel a bit like a sitcom, oh, what are B and K getting up to this episode? How will that scoundrel P fuck things up again?
My biggest gripe mirrors the standard rationalist critique of deterministic history. KSR seems to subscribe to the "Civilization Tech Tree" view of scientific progress. We spend long, dense chapters watching a group of reincarnated souls invent the scientific method and discover new paradigms. There is a commendable depth to the description of their rational analysis and use of period-accurate tools.
And then they die of the plague.
The narrative result is that nothing comes of their work. I understand the literary impulse to show that the universe is uncaring and that nature does not respect narrative arcs. However, the subsequent eras simply reinvent the same things. It feels like rail-roading. The author assumes that scientific discovery is a single narrow path that must be walked exactly as we walked it.
Where is the divergence? Where is the serendipity? I can conceive of a timeline where the plague pressures lead to a biomedical boom, resulting in the discovery of penicillin in the equivalent of the 19th century. Instead, we get a reshuffled version of our own history, implying that the history of science is inevitable rather than path-dependent. It is a missed opportunity for genuine speculation.
The geopolitics were acceptable, if somewhat safe. One might describe the author’s sociological framework as "Standard Blue Tribe Consensus," completely bypassing any engagement with human biodiversity or more controversial anthropological theories. That is forgivable, or at least I couldn't read most fiction if I expected authors to acknowledge such facts. That said, there's no way in hell that the Iroquois end up in control of North America when faced with Islamic and Chinese colonialism. I would have been okay with some kind of weird syncretic mix, but other than the Chinese holding California, the Native Americans won the rest.
I did appreciate the depiction of the Chinese imperial system. By positing a world with no external peer competitor, the author plausibly argues that an autocracy could persist much longer than it did in our timeline, avoiding the specific trap of making it just a reskin of 20th-century Communism.
Here I personally disagree.
World War 1+2 in a single package, a grinding forever war that ran for decades and killed over a billion people? I actually liked that, it made sense in context. The technological level seemed to be at about our WW1, with a massive theater that seemed to span half of Siberia, the Himalayas, Burma and a front in the Americas. The individual blocs were also much larger, and China in particular was an autocratic state that very much could throw a lot of meat into the grinder. The novel does make clear that the war pretty much wrecked all the players, Arab Europe was practically depopulated. Especially since nukes weren't invented till much later (and never used because of some kind of weird cabal of peacenik science hippies), there simply wasn't any decisive engagement and the core lands were unthreatened till the end of the conflict. We don't have to assume it ran at maximal intensity for the entire duration either.
Finally, the scope. If you are going to write a history that spans millennia, why stop at the equivalent of our present day? I found myself wishing KSR had extrapolated past the turn of the millennium. A three-way space race between a neo-Arab bloc, China, Greater India and the indigenous American federations would have been fascinating. This is Kim Stanley Robinson, if he won't do it, who will?
I give points for the deep historical research and the richness of the cultural flavor. KSR clearly did his homework. I only wish he had used that homework to explore new territory rather than simply walking a slightly more scenic route to the world we already live in.
Good review! We'll have to agree to disagree about the Long War (or whatever it was called). It's just too long compared to any war of that intensity we've experienced in the real world.
My interpretation of the Bardo was a little different. Based on the last chapter and the changing styles of each novella (Cloud Atlas lite, unfortunately Robinson is not as gifted nor as interesting as David Mitchell) my interpretation of the whole construction is that The Years of Rice and Salt is supposed to be an in-universe history that uses the Bardo as a framing device to make sense of the historical narrative. That's why it changes so drastically over time, and basically vanishes in the second half of the book, because it reflects the characters' shift towards rationalism and away from belief in the mystical.
Agreed on everything else. I was most annoyed by the railroad, tech-tree nature of the progression of the Chinese and Muslim societies, which really indicates a lack of imagination on the part of Robinson.
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That reminded me a lot of the civilization-altering (and sometimes civilization-ending) mega-wars in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Darkness and Light.
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This sounds like the explanation might be "the author just wants an excuse to write about his pet subject, and the scifi elements are only there in service of that and nothing else."
And having Buddhism be literally true in a novel with no other fantasy elements and no effect on the world sounds like the writer believes Buddhism is true in the real world and doesn't think he's adding a fantasy element, or adding an element at all. So no effect on the world is expected. (Googling shows that I nailed it.)
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To a lot of people, especially those who deny HBD, there seems to be a complete lack of connectivity between real world actors doing things that drive forward history and history itself. It's like they see history as a movement independent of people. That it was preordained or inevitable that certain developments would happen at certain times.
To that extent the sentiment being expressed when exploring alternate realities like this ends up being a sneer: 'You only got there first. If you hadn't been in everyone's way things would have been better for us.'
It does not have anything with regards to HBD, it is more related to Hegelian philosophy, or one could even call it a religion. Hegel was the most influential philosopher of the 19th century who integrated older philosophers like Schiller and Rousseau into his concept of History - the concept where the history is a progressive project of Hegelian dialectics, where people are only actors "discovering" the preordained path of how to abolish opposite concepts into their new higher synthesis. Hegel himself was more of an idealist, where he saw his Geist as the moving force ranging from Weltgeist through Zeitgeist and Volksgeist. In his view the great men of history are products of their Zeitgeist - they are the ultimate incarnation of their era who move the history forward into another revolution, they personalize and enable the synthesis of higher level of Geist in an inevitable march of progress. While I would not say that Hegel's philosophy is explicitly racist, it is also not not-racist. It is absolutely possible that the forces of history will obliterate races, ideologies, religions and basically anything else in lieu of progress. It may not be necessary, but in this philosophy the end justifies the means - what if billions need to perish for progress, if it will bring more progressive society for untold trillions.
Of course Marxism is an offshoot of Hegelianism, he just flipped the script from idealism to materialism. Heck, Karl Marx himself popped out of Young Hegelian movement so of course his philosophy incorporates many of Hegel's concepts including dialectics, now called Dialectical Materialism, Hegel's concept of History which Marx turned into his focus on class struggle stemming from material conditions and his historical stages toward Communism and many more. But I'd also argue that OG Marxism is not against HBD or racism, similar to Hegel, these concepts are tangential to the true forces of History. It is only the more modern interpretation where racial oppression was added to the whole edifice, often on top of class oppression. Marx himself was extremely racist - at least from modern moral stance - approvingly quoting Trémaux theory that the common Negro type was a degeneration from a quite higher one in his letter to Engels in 1866, probably spurred by the fact that his son-in-law Paul Lafargue was of creole origin an Marx had some nasty things to say about him in his letters. Although to Marx "defense", he was extremely nasty person to everybody around himself including his wife, children, parents and his best buddy Engels, so this should not be surprising.
Tolstoy articulated the Hegelian worldview beautifully in his chapters on Napoleon in War and Peace; I don't know if I believe him or not, but certainly more than after hearing excerpts of Hegel.
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This makes me think of ACOUP on the industrial revolution. Now, I think Bret Devereaux goes too far in his claim that virtually nowhere but 18th-century northern England could possibly have begun the industrial revolution (it doesn't take too much imagination to think of possible substitutes for ingredients he considers necessary, and the fact that there has been only one historical industrial revolution isn't that strong as evidence that it could have begun nowhere else, considering the speed of its spread means that there was little opportunity for independent industrial revolutions after the first.)
-But I do think that the overall point that the course of history is contingent on a lot of steps needed to get everywhere, and as such, I would expect annihilating the population of medieval Europe to produce a path of global technological development that would be at least substantially delayed. (No printing press, no telescope, and no need for Europeans to seek alternative to Ottoman-conquered trade routes takes a good deal of the oomph out of mid-2nd-millennium development.)
So is this book's Modern Age at least a couple centuries delayed relative to reality? I'd hope so, as the alternative suggests an untenably-strong view of historical inevitability.
Nope. Not in the least. It moves in lockstep, we get the Middle Ages, a Renaissance+Industrial Revolution, and a 20th century that's pretty similar to our own. At the start of the 21st century, they're practically identical, barring a reduced prevalence of consumer electronics since they use standalone desktop computers instead of mobile devices.
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Very curious to hear your take on this, I've never thought about it
I got this idea from fallout, so definitely isn't originally mine.
In the fallout universe instead of going small, technology went big. Huge weapons systems, power armor, etc, all powered by very small nuclear reactors. Computers didn't develop much beyond punch cards, and in the games any computer interfaces are very much out of the 1970s.
I think this extreme of a technological shift is unlikely, as there are big advantages to computational power and miniaturization. However, I don't think this is the case with the internet or the personal computer. As much as I love theMotte and other parts of the internet, the personal computing revolution has been pretty bad for productivity. The internet especially. Since the internet was first developed as a military technology, I can easily see it remaining that way for some reason or another, given that there don't seem to be huge long-term advantages to adopting it.
Please explain
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Is there even a single instance of an indigenous (by which I mean tribal when Europeans showed up, not organized states like Japan) people actually advancing to the technological/military frontier without getting colonized? I find it unbelievable that the Iroquois could become a major power, just because of all the catching up they'd have to do in statecraft. They were behind the Aztecs, who themselves were far behind the Europeans or Asians at this point. There's zero chance they can control international trade because 'native peoples' were vastly inferior at sea to Europeans or settled peoples, for obvious reasons. They'd need to develop a seafaring culture first and that takes time.
Ironically, this is also orthodox Marxist thought (I am not a Marxist). Marx was dead against the idea of revolution in Russia. No revolutionary conditions he said, not enough industrial workers, improperly developed, not enough capitalism. You can only move onto socialism after completing capitalism, he said.
Brittania and Gaul?
Also the North American Indians were already on the technological frontier so far as "living in North America" was concerned when the Euros showed up, and remained so for about a few hundred years -- they were behind in the "conquering and killing people" department though, which turned out to be pretty important.
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Adding to @Jiro's comment below, there are some arguable cases predating the level of statecraft needed for full colonisation: the Magyars turned up on Europe's borders as a tribal confederation and took plenty of scalps until getting their asses handed to them by the Germanics, whereupon they seemingly settled down and advanced to whatever they technical frontier of 12th century Europe was. The various states of the Korean peninsula were still in tribal stage when first encountered by the Chinese blob but had seemingly more or less caught up before the Mongols/Yuan riding the soft power tiger that was the Middle Kingdom finally rolled over them.
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There are almost no cases of indigenous people not getting colonized, period. So the fact that there are no cases of indigenous people not getting colonized and also X doesn't really tell you much.
Your definition here feels tautological: we only apply "indigenous" as a label to people whose lands have been colonized. Hardly anyone applies that label to Anglo-Saxons, or Jews in Israel. And there are a few: Thailand and Ethiopian were never fully controlled by Western powers.
For fun, consider that Vikings settled Greenland before "Native Americans" got there.
I thought the same, but to be fair, it makes sense in the framing of the post it's a reply to. People who were tribal when the Europeans showed up were colonized by them, period. It's also true that tribals generally tend to get conquered/enslaved by anyone who shows up with a sufficiently high tech level compared to them, so this has little to do with Europeans in particular, though.
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How would you have imagined history playing out differently with Islam and Buddhism as the major world religions?
I don't think there's the same level of exploration or scientific curiosity. The discovery of America and other European voyages of exploration were pretty much only to undercut muslim monopolies on the spice trade. Neither the Chinese nor the Arabs that recolonize Europe have any need for this, making voyages of discovery, at least on the timeline given in the book, quite unlikely.
I also think science would have taken a very different route. Science in the West seems to have been driven by a very specific world view of a rational construction of the universe, which lent itself to investigations into physics and naturalism. Maybe Islam would have followed a similar trajectory, but I think Buddhism would have been much more psychology or neuroscience focused.
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