“It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It’s easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It’s making good that’s the hard part, it’s staying hopeful that’s the hard part! It’s staying in love that’s the hard part.”
Sails above. Pier One, Salamanca, Hobart. August 2021. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson This is an immense book in all sorts of ways. Just shy of 800 pages, it is quite unlike anything that I have ever read before. A sprawling, opulent alternative history novel about human civilisation beginning with a twist that eliminates European influence from events post-1400. We begin with a small detachment of Mongol soldiers stumbling across the fact that nearly all of Europe has been killed by a plague of such magnitude that it has emptied most cities and towns, leaving on a few survivors to scrabble on. From here, we travel through a series of chronologically spaced sections over the next seven centuries on an alternate Earth in which the societies of varying forms of Islam, the vast Chinese empire and other Buddhist states dominate global affairs in the absence of western Christendom. The conceit is fabulous, and in embracing a broad approach to reincarnation, we can ...