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.

Synopsis

The book is set between about AD 1405 (783 solar years since the Hegira), and 1423 after Hegira (AD 2002). In the eighth Islamic century, almost 99 per cent of the population of medieval Europe is wiped out by the plague. This sets the stage for a world without Christianity as a major influence.

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), American First Nations, and Hindu culture, philosophy and every-day life. 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 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; Zheng He's explorations and imperial China). This book is written in a style reminiscent of the Chinese classic, the Journey to the West.
• Book Two - The Haj in the Heart (Mughal India and colonization of empty Europe)
• Book Three - Ocean Continents (discovery of the New World by the Chinese military)
• 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 in western China)
• Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress (Southern India as origin of modernity; Japanese diaspora to Chinese North America)
• Book Eight - War of the Asuras (a world-wide Long War, fought with 'modern' weapons)
• Book Nine - Nsara (science, urban life and feminism in Islamic Europe's post-war metropolis)
• Book Ten - The First Years (globalisation and sustainability)

Quite a few historical characters make large and small appearances this world, including Tamerlane, Chinese explorer Zheng He, Akbar the Great, and Japanese shōgun Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

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.

Robinson infuses the novel with a poetic style which readers of his other works will find familiar, and also fills it with tidbits of historical trivia to delight the careful reader.

Key issues

Key issues of the novel are hybrid cultures; progress and science; alternate history; philosophy, religion and 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 Robinson's Mars trilogy, a utopia brought to Earth.

External links

• Trivia and study guide to The Years of Rice and Salt
• Timeline of the events in The Years of Rice and Salt's world