The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel with major Buddhist and Islamic religious elements written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world in which neither Christianity nor the European cultures based on it achieve lasting impact on world history. As long as it’s on my mind, though, I’ll explore an issue it raised for me. They may be the majority, but they are the trivial majority and you are the impactful minority. 3 The Meanings of the Salt. The End. the Mars trilogy.) You are significant. The Japan-dominate future was very much a product of its time. It isn’t your standard kind of alternate history. He seems like a … I think it would read something more like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete (or Paul Park’s Celestis) than The Years of Rice and Salt, however. Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. God, I hated that Chung Kuo series. Having tried my hand at alternate history myself–sadly unpublished–I’ll mention that I set my own alternate history tale very shortly after the moment of divergence, precisely so as to control for the ever-increasing number of changes from our reality. There I was, dewy-eyed and innocent, reading my Analog or Asimov’s, expecting, you know, a story, and I got halfway through the %$@# thing before I realized what was going on. Two nations? 366 followers 366; 16 tracks 16; Follow. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is one of the few works I’ve seen that tries to go beyond, “What if the South won the Civil War”? “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or … Around what year in our calendar was the Chinese invasion of Japan supposed to have happened? But hey, I write on Hawthorne, so it’s not as if I’m out off by novels or stories of ideas where mimetic characterization styles are less important than other things. This is the only way we know how to write a counterfactual essay or book, however. Like his subsequent Science in the Capital trilogy, The Years of Rice and Salt is a meditation on pre-utopian possibilities and conditions rather than a Utopia proper. To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares. It’s pretty tough to do. The diverging moment in the novel's timeline seems to be the latter 14th century AD. (Often to praise it, by pointing out the dystopian alternatives.) By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Sarapen — the Chinese invasion is supposed to have happened sometime around 1650, I think (maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later). Throughout the book the Jati constantly find each other, often without meaning too, … A couple of people responding in the “Production of History” thread have suggested Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt for the week on time travel and alternate history. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame ! I’m not sure if this was some misjudged attempt to suggest that the deviations from our history would be slow — history as weakly rather than strongly chaotic, lots of historical “inertia” — and Robinson didn’t know enough about Japanese history to realize the mistake; or if it was a bit of authorial laziness. The suggestion is a great one, and I love the book. Given the length of China’s influence in world history, it’s quite possible the last 500 years will end up being but a blip. Contact Us It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer), All translations of the years of rice and salt. The character we meet in The Years of Rice and Salt were part of a Jati in Tibet that got killed in an avalanche. A windows (pop-into) of information (full-content of Sensagent) triggered by double-clicking any word on your webpage. Whatever your analytic framework for interpreting the Civil War itself tends to dictate what you think the consequences of a different outcome in the war might be. Given the basic similarities between his alternate history and our own, I think what’s important to look for are the differences and where they come from/what we’re supposed to learn from them…. The novel then covers around 700 years of history, ending in the future compared to our timeline, around the year 2088 AD. So seeing the novel as a meditation on the writing of history, as an attempt to write a fictional historiography, or a metahistorical fiction, is at least as important as figuring out KSR’s take on religion, science, imperialism, etc. In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland. Ro, Cookies help us deliver our services. Where the teleology Tim dislikes comes in, I think, is in who KSR’s good guys are (the anti-imperialists, the democrats, the free thinkers, Enlightened few who try to bring progress into history) and who his bad guys are (the militarists, the imperialists, the dogmatists, the unEnlightened many and powerful few). Privacy policy One can critique them for doing this *badly*, but one ought to assume this is the/a goal of the genre. Each square carries a letter. Now that I think about it, it obviously parallels Chinese experience during the Sino-Japanese War, but with great heroes and villains instead of banal bureaucrats and incompetent leaders. withywindle said: Forget champagne—in the Southern United States, hoppin’ John is standard New Year’s fare. I couldn’t help it, by that point everything was just so Western. The wordgames anagrams, crossword, Lettris and Boggle are provided by Memodata. Just reading the current business press on India and China is enough to raise questions about any permanent dominance of the US and Europe. Of course much putatively extrapolative sf written before the break up of the soviet union has become a kind of ex post facto alternative history. This is a problem b/c he writes in the realist mode of the Victorian novel, but not as well as Rohinton Mistry in A Fine Balance (a good riposte to anyone who believes poco fiction only operates in the pomo/magical realist mode). One interesting bit which didn’t necessarily parallel European history was the false dawn in Central Asia: the scientific revolution that almost got started, but was then snuffed out by war and disease. The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. The Years of Rice and Salt. That is if something didn’t go wrong and punch us into a timeline somewhere between Brin’s Postman and a nuclear winter. Signed. 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