Review: The Years of Rice and Salt

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So this really was another accident of the classic "Frank didn't read the blurb before starting" variety and I can tell you that when I did stop to read it, I felt like a bit of a silly billy.

As such this "review" (which is far too long) will be, more than usual, a collection of thoughts from a timid (and in this case largely uninterested) observer, after which I'll add a little digression at the end about how this book bounced up into my current reading pile.

If you'd like an actual review that brilliantly explains what this book is about look for the review by Claudia on GR which is just spectacular. I was looking for some guidance and read that review when I was about half way through the book and it helped me focus a lot better in the second half of my read through.

This is not at all a book for me given my inability to retain historical data (not for a lack of trying). Also, it doesn't help that I don't read alt history in general and would prefer (or generally require) a strong scifi element if I did. I don't know enough about history to know when this really diverged. Or even how much of it was different to actual history which is, I'm sure, the main draw for these books. At 760 odd pages I was definitely in deep, deep water with this one.

All told and in hindsight, I was able to laugh and scream in equal measure throughout this story. It's quite brutal near the start and after witnessing the castration of a young slave boy I was ready to give up. I'm glad that I persisted in some respects, because I do hate to give up on a story, especially one by a favourite author, but also because the story would eventually bring me as much joy as grief.

Just briefly, in case you too didn't read the blurb before starting my review. The premise is: How would society have changed if the Black Death had wiped out an even more significant portion of the population?

Ok anyway, the story only began to catch my interest around 250 ish pages into it when the characters began to develop scientific concepts. For the reasons mentioned I don't want to comment too much about how different things in the book are from reality, so don't over analyse my take, but I was grabbing the notion that maybe science blossoms earlier because say the period referred to as the dark ages doesn't come about and consequently libraries aren't burned etc... and there's no information reset.

I can see it, if the right(wrong) persons weren't around for one thing, but also probably civilisation's prior obtained knowledge would have to be considered much more precious a resource in this scenario, of course I'm way on board with that idea.

For an example of how little the details could possibly mean to me; at one point the Khan is watching a demonstration of ballistics and wind resistance comes up as a topic. The Khan makes a reference to a knife slicing through butter and well I don't even truly know what century this is happening in beyond a guess so even though it sounds like a modern phrase I'm not sure if the Khan would have butter to reference or not. How old is butter? (A decade ago I would have been Googling this kind of thing while reading, but I'm just not that interested lately.)

All of this reinventing science at a different time or a different place is conceptually stimulating, however as a story this is rather dull. Particularly if you're already familiar with basic science and I'd presume that it's not much less dull even if you aren't. So, what is this book all about? What's the story and where is it going? I think basically imagine that Western dominance isn't a thing and we get a narrative of Eastern folks adding their values more dominantly into the march of progress.

Is it an optimistic view as I've hinted at above or ultimately a pessimistic take on what could have been? Well like any good story it flips a little back and forth with the flow of the narrative and I'll let you decide once you reach the ending for yourself.

With very few exceptions I generally don't enjoy watching others play sports and as it turns out, I now know that I enjoy reading about a fictional lacrosse game even less.

"Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation."

There are a few religions that feature to varying degrees in the story which is as you'd expect, but interestingly probably the most frequently mentioned religious idea is the Buddhist notion of reincarnation and at least twice we seem to follow characters into the afterlifey, transition period (like a catholic "limbo" I guess, where the person goes between incarnations). This inclusion of the supernatural and the occasional "keep reading to see what happens in the next chapter" thrown in by the narrator had me rather confused about what exactly was going on with this book.

Stories that span large periods of time can lose a lot of steam because of switching characters and consequently diminished attachment to the expanding cast. Marina J Lostetter got past this in her 'Noumenon' series by having her generation ship populated with clones, who were never quite the same person twice but managed to provide an ongoing connection. In this story reincarnation eventually serves that same function and I liked that aspect of the narrative.

Another thing I didn't pick up on, which I learned from Claudia's wonderful review, was that the author connected the reincarnated individuals by always matching the first letter of their names. This was one of the things which really helped me focus better in the second half and was actually necessary in order to understand and appreciate the final line of the book!

Here's a comical exchange about reincarnation that I wanted to share:

"just before we're sent back into the world, the Goddess Meng administers to us a vial of forgetting."

"I don't remember that," Keeper said.

"That's the point."

- (Zing! Well, duh! Keep up, Keeper!)

And a few more quotes which are just random observations from the text that I also decided to share:

"To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time is even harder. If you want release from the wheel, persevere."

"In a rage he committed her to a monastery, then he burned the monastery down."

"A bodhisattva, Dizang Wang, took her spirit to the Forest of Corpses, where she helped the unsettled ghosts. After that she went down through the levels of hell, teaching the spirits there to rise above their suffering, and she was so successful that Lord Yama returned her as the Bodhisattva Guanyin, to help the living learn these good things while they are still alive, before it's too late for them."

"Think of equations as excuses, and you'll be fine! But all you do is think of ways not to think of things!"

And that's all I can really observe about the book for you, folks. It's possibly a good alt history but I'm not the person to ask. I've told you how it made me feel a bit of everything at various stages. KSR is probably the perfect author to do alt history because his books tend to be detail heavy and very focused on political and technological elements.

I'm going to end with the promised digression about how I got here, so most readers can probably skip the last few paragraphs, provided merely for entertainment value, at my own expense of course.

So how did I so mistakenly begin reading this book? Well, being a KSR fan this was already in my TBR pile and by chance this came up as a nomination for an August read in a scifi book club that I recently joined on fb. It didn't win the poll but on an impulse I decided to read the 5 or 6 losing nominations as well as the winner. To add to the hilarity of my silliness, I had actually voted for this based solely on familiarity with the author, again, I hadn't read the blurb at all. In a stunning bit of added irony, I had recently started a discussion in that same fb group about how I wasn't convinced that alt history was scifi and that I couldn't see myself reading much of it.

Well, it's not exactly my first alt history, I'm thinking of the Flashman papers and a short story by Eric Choi called 'The Greatest Day' and it is true that I enjoyed both of those but the former is a comedy and the latter very scifi so I definitely enjoyed them for reasons other than the alternate take on history that they presented.

This book has done nothing to change my mind and I still think I'll avoid alt history as a general rule except by accident (as in this case) or by hook, if historic events might be reimagined to include aliens or something similarly, unambiguously scifi.

I'm going to end with a quote from near the end of the book which many book collectors will appreciate and seems particularly fitting in this case, for me. Talking about the many and varied books on his shelves:

"But I have not read them, I must admit. They exist only for their titles, which say it all. They could be blank inside."

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