The Years of Rice and Salt

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002, ISBN 0553580078) is an alternate history novel written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world without Christianity.

Warning: Spoilers below

The book is set between the years 783 after Hegira (ca. 1400 AD) and 1423 after Hegira (2002 AD). In the sixth muslimic century, medieval Europe is struck and virtually emptied by the plague. This sets the stage for a world without Christianity.

In ten chapters we follow a jati of three to seven main characters through reincarnation and time, in very different cultural and religious settings. The book features Muslim, Chinese (Buddhist, Daoist, Confucianist) and Hindu culture, philosophy and every-day life as well as American First Nations. It mixes sophisticated knowledge about these cultures in 'our' world with fictional developments, partly resembling the actual history, but shifted and reflected by different cultural settings.

Our main characters, marked by identical first letters throughout their reincarnations, but changing in sex, gender, culture-nationality and so on, struggle for progress, for a human life. The book changes in style according to the settings of each chapter, reaching a different kind of modernity in chapter ten.

The ten chapters (theme) are:

• Book One - Awake to Emptiness (plague in the west; the Golden Horde and imperial China)
• Book Two - The Haj in the Heart (mughal India)
• Book Three - Ocean Continents (discovery the New World, by the Chinese)
• Book Four - The Alchemist (Islamic renaissance in Samarqand)
• Book Five - Warp and Weft (Native Americans league cum Samurai)
• Book Six - Widow Kang (Qing dynasty meets Islam)
• Book Seven - The Age of Great Progess (Southern India as origin of modernity)
• Book Eight - War of the Asuras (a world-wide Long War, fought with 'modern' weapons)
• Book Nine - Nsara (science and urban life in islamic Europes post-war metropolis)
• Book Ten - The First Years (globalisation and sustainability)

In the last chapters the book becomes increasingly reflexive, citing fictional scientists and philosophers we learned about in previous chapters as well as referring to Old Red Ink, who wrote a biography about a reincarnating jati group.

Key issues

Key issues of the novel are hybrid cultures; progress and science; philosophy, religion and the human nature; politics; feminism and equality of all humans; and the struggle between technology and sustainability.

Not only because of the long time scale, but also because of its realistic-utopian elements, and because of the frequent reflections about human nature, The Years of Rice and Salt resembles the Robinson's Mars trilogy, a utopia brought to Earth.