The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Great Plague destroyed Europe. Now the world’s a different place … From the award-winning author of the Mars trilogy, ‘the ultimate in future history’ (Daily Mail), comes the most ambitious alternate history novel ever written.

As Bold Bardash, a horseman in the army of Temur the Lame, rides west across the steppe and on to the Magyar Plain, he comes across a town in which everyone lies dead. Long dead. Plague has struck Europe. Kali’s black blanket has fallen over the lands of the West and nothing will ever be the same again.

Into this empty land pour the opportunists: the merchants, slavers and warlords. The Chinese cross the oceans in their huge fleets; the Arabs traverse the deserts by camel and mule and the mediterranean by dhow. The last Europeans are killed or enslaved – consigned to the seraglios of the sultans. So die the ancestors of Da Vinci and Copernicus; Columbus and Machiavelli; the Spanish Inquisition and the Conquistators; Shakespeare, Newton and the Pilgrim Fathers; Einstein and Hitler. And the world becomes a different place.

In this extraordinarily ambitious, poetic and powerful novel, Kim Stanley Robinson takes us on a journey through seven hundred years of history as it never was, but might have been.

Reviewed by nannah on

1 of 5 stars

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DNF @ 20%

Sorry, I just couldn't do it. I hate not being able to finish books, but this was just an agonizingly slow, painful, and difficult read.

It starts with such an intriguing concept: the Black Plague actually killed off 99% of Europe's population instead of just a third, and in place of Christian Europe rose an alternate history where Asian cultures and religions dominate. Unfortunately that's where my fascination with the book ends.

There are two souls in the book that seem bound together, and they meet in the afterlife countless times only to be reborn again, meet, die, etc. At first I loved that concept (especially because I believe in reincarnation), but I expected there be an actual point to the meeting and intertwining of these two souls. Instead, what I seemed to have gotten was an atmospheric book giving me snapshots of this alternate history: a book of short stories without any overall story arc. Looking through some reviews here, it doesn't seem that the book ever comes together with any kind of arc, and slogging through these (often) tedious little short stories became unbearable. Especially since the telling of them was only summary after summary. The language at times was so dull and academic I couldn't understand what I was reading.

I hate giving up on books, especially diverse books, but I just couldn't do this one.

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  • Started reading
  • 1 February, 2017: Finished reading
  • 1 February, 2017: Reviewed