Jess's Reviews > The Years of Rice and Salt

Finishing this book was a chore. It was impressively researched, decently written, and incredibly insightful, but at the end of the day I found myself glancing at my watch and trying to remember why I was supposed to care.

The marketing of the book is quite misleading. This isn't just a straightforward alternate history book--What if the Black Death killed off 99% of Europeans and the rest of the world's civilizations survived? Rather more importantly, it is a story about reincarnation. You start in the fourteenth century just as everybody's realizing that European civilization has become completely extinct, and over the course of the book you jump forward in time a couple decades or centuries at a time until roughly the present day, all the while following the stories of a handful of reincarnated souls. These souls are quite handily identified because, whether they are a fourteenth century nomadic Mongolian warrior or a seventeenth century wealthy Chinese widow with bound feet, their names always start with the same letter. Usually two souls in particular are the "main characters" in any given section, but they are surrounded by a little crew of other souls who are trying to achieve enlightenment together. Ostensibly, the crew of souls is getting better and better at life until they finally reach their ideal state.

Except maybe not? Because despite this elaborate setup of reincarnation as a method of exploring alternate history, the whole purpose remained frustratingly unclear. The author introduced and dropped literary motifs and themes seemingly randomly throughout the book. And once I figured out that every section was going to end with the main soul-characters dying and being reincarnated, I found it very hard to give a damn about what happened.

Some sections were more interesting than others. But given the number of sections, I was surprised at how limited the scope turned out to be. There were no sections located in Africa (though African characters showed up in other sections of the book), and way too many sections located in China. The characters came from all walks of life, so that the same soul could be reincarnated as a Sultana, a literal tiger, and a simple Chinese foot soldier, which was really quite gratifying. But it became difficult to recognize the souls over time. The author started out carrying over personality traits as the souls were reincarnated, and then just decided to drop that idea, I suppose.

All that said, it would be rude not to mention just how ridiculously thorough the research on this bad boy was. It was all completely plausible--both the historical technology, events, and philosophy discussed, and how it would all have been subtly or dramatically changed without the influence of Europeans.

The idea that the Native Americans would have actually had a chance of holding their own against invaders from the Old World was extremely provocative. It made me a little sad, actually, to see how they might have progressed as a unified world power in their own right if they hadn't been wiped out by European diseases and greed.

Possibly the most interesting plot point of the alternate history was that without Christians (the religion was basically wiped out along with its practitioners), there would still be religious wars. But instead of being between the three main monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the religious wars would be between the concept of one god (Islam), many gods (Hinduism), and no gods (Buddhism). The resulting wars, as imagined by Robinson, lasted for generations, and led to rapid technological innovations as people found new and exciting ways to murder each other.

The concept of gender equality in this alternate history was also pretty fascinating. Still tied to religious ideology, the whole concept of women-as-people came into and out of fashion depending on a number of factors. You have fifteenth century woman heads of state and seventeenth century woman philosophers and twentieth century woman scientists... only for their also to be concubines, harems, and bans on the education of women. It was a depressing pattern of ups and downs.

Look, I would've enjoyed this book a lot more if the stakes were made clear at the outset, and if the main driver of the plot was action, rather than discussion. It's not a bad book, simply exasperating in its execution. If you want a really, really thorough and imaginative alternate history, and you're deeply curious about what the world would look like without European imperialism, check this shit out.