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Notes -
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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