2002
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
The Years of Rice and Salt is something of a departure from the last books of Robinson's I read (his earlier hard-SF Mars trilogy). This novel has a similarly ambitiously enormous scope and similarly thorough background research to the Mars books, but it is set entirely on Earth and focuses almost completely on history and philosophy rather than science. The main problem with it is that it is a mile wide and an inch deep: it covers a ton of ground, both physically and temporally, but doesn't get deep enough into any one character or plot line to allow me to get invested in it.
Most of the plot summaries I saw for this book, both on the cover and on bookseller websites, tease solely with its initial premise, which is: what if, when the bubonic plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages, it had had a 99% fatality rate and wiped out essentially all of the Europeans? I thought that meant that the book was going to be set in Europe, during the time of the plague, and that we were going to see what life would be like during a cataclysm such as that. But the premise is really just a brief starting point, setting the stage for what the book really is: a sweeping alternate history of the world from the Middle Ages until the present, in which the major emperors, explorers, inventors, scientists, politicians, and eventually world superpowers are Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American.
Robinson tells his story through a pair of central characters who are reincarnated over and over again in different times and places. These two people are cosmically joined, always fated to live and work closely together in some way, regardless of who they are or when they are reborn. You can tell who they are in each incarnation because their names always start with the same first letters (B and K), and they retain much of their own distinct personalities. "B" is a soft-hearted, inquisitive person who tends to be optimistic and think the best of people, while "K" tends to be ambitious, opinionated, skeptical, and sometimes violent.
These two people, or spirits, or souls, or whatever, are born into more or less difficult situations depending on how they behaved in past lives. They are usually also reincarnated together with other more peripheral members of their jati, or larger spiritual family, so some of the same supporting characters crop up repeatedly (also identifiable from the first letters of their first names).
Between lives, B and K wait in the bardo, which is a sort of a purgatory-like holding area in which they discuss the lives that just ended and await their new ones. It is only in the bardo that they can really remember the long line of people that they have been--although occasionally they do have a sense, while alive, of having been somewhere or having met someone before that they have only been to or met in a previous life.
B and K move through history, appearing as people of any nationality in any land across the world. They switch back and forth between man and woman, gay and straight, Muslim and Buddhist and agnostic. They are never biologically related, instead showing up as lovers, best friends, student and teacher, or army comrades.
They are friends, an Islamic sultana and cleric, when they lead the re-population of Europe; they are a Chinese navy man and a native girl when the Chinese "discover" North America and give the indigenous people smallpox; they are an indigenous Hodenosaunee and a Japanese immigrant when the Iroquois found their confederacy of native nations; they are variously Islamic and Indian and Chinese and Tibetan when they invent telescopes and microscopes and the printing press and come up with the law of gravity and the theory of relatively and the atomic bomb.
The book is by Kim Stanley Robinson, after all, so everything geographical and historical is impeccably researched. The settings are vivid and rich and colorful and exotic, yet familiar; the characters are well developed and their motives are understandable.
You also certainly get a sense of the vast sweep of history, and of how much all of our technological advancements rely on earlier peoples' knowledge and experimentation, so that our current achievements are the result of thousands of years of thought and learning. His more academically advanced characters have a keen awareness of this, too: that they are tiny parts part of a much greater historical picture.
I also appreciated at least one of the lessons that I think Robinson was trying to get across: that humans are fundamentally the same, for good or for ill, across all of our cultures. That if there had been no white Christian Europeans to establish a world empire, someone else from somewhere else would have. That we would have had scientific and industrial revolutions in different places led by different people. That we would have invented weapons of mass destruction and had long, bitter, pointless world wars. And that we would still struggle with the same issues of slavery, poverty, equality, and environmental destruction.
I also appreciated Robinson's dips into overt self-awareness. He makes you very aware that he is very aware of what he is doing. For example, one of K's incarnations, a teacher in an Islamic city on the west coast of repopulated France, says that musing over alternate histories is a waste of time: it is "such a useless exercise," she says, to constantly debate "what if this had happened, what if that had happened." And during another episode, a Chinese scholar talking about reincarnation references an ancient anthologist who put together a "reincarnation compendium," in which his characters were always reincarnated with names that begin with the same letters.
But it is a frustrating format because you can never get truly invested in any single incarnation. It is less like a single novel and more like a very long series of separate short stories, where you only just get familiar with the location and the people, and then it's all over and you have to move on to the next story.
And the stories and characters were not distinct enough from each other to be immediately memorable in themselves. No one single episode really stood out enough for me to remember specific names and incidents, except for one in which K makes a major mistake in one life and comes back in the next as a tiger.
And the years go by, and the characters are reborn over and over, and the names and places change, but the lives of the individual incarnations never reach any kind of satisfying resolution. After B and K get out of slavery and are done with world exploration, and achieve a sort of comfortable professorial status, they don't make that much more progress. They seem to just stay at that level, expounding and philosophizing, making the necessary era-appropriate inventions and discoveries to advance the world as a whole, but their individual lives often are disappointingly short and unresolved. They usually die without really finishing that life's work.
Maybe that's another of Robinson's points--that most lives are somewhat unresolved. One of B's incarnations reflects at one point upon how most lives are wasted, cut short, lived in "ignorance, hunger, and fear." There really are very few real-life stories with Hollywood-level excitement.
But that doesn't make for a really gripping novel. This book would have been a real page-turner if he had taken any one of the incarnations of B and K, fleshed it out and given it more drama and suspense, and let them complete a major discovery or invention and then have a moment of celebration, rather than just having them work hard for a lifetime and then slip to the next life to start all over again.
I appreciate the idea, the premise, and the effort. I really do. And in many ways, Robinson executed the individual elements excellently. I just need more of a hook and more exciting storytelling to keep me at attention.
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