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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.
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.
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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