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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.
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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