Reply #40: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.

[Forkboy]

I've now read it three times since it came out in 2002, and I get more out of it each time. It's a fascinating book with an epic scope, and an extremely poetic ending.

It's an alternate history novel where the Black Death kills 99% of the European population, which results in Christianity never being more than a minor religion that never achieves any influence. That's the take off point. Robinson is usually a writer of "hard" sci-fi, but this book is nothing like that (though there is plenty of science). It follows a bunch of characters through multiple reincarnations (not always in human form even), but the character's names all start with the same letter from chapter to chapter.

From wiki, here are the ten Chapters and it's main theme.

* Book One - Awake to Emptiness - plague in Christendom; the Golden Horde; Zheng He's explorations and imperial China. This chapter 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 align with Samurai.
* Book Six - Widow Kang - the Qing dynasty meets Islam in western China.
* Book Seven - The Age of Great Progress - beginnings of industrialism in Southern India; Japanese diaspora to 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 - globalization and sustainability.

And here's a very cool quote from the book that serves as a great illustration of where it's coming from.

"My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist."

There's one segment in The Widow Kang chapter called "Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities" that should be mandatory reading.

I've never read a book like it, and I see myself reading it many more times as I get older.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt