“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 follow three distinct characters who carry some elements of themselves and their memories (with intervening moments in bardo, the transitional state between death and rebirth.

It's hard on the brain, but Robinson aides the reader by keeping the various reincarnations as characters whose names begin with 'K', 'B' and 'I'. Switching cultures, genders, status and (in one case) species, the literary device grants the book omniscience that at once feels natural and real.

While it could be trimmed down a bit, and at times,, the characters discuss the finer points of philosophy at tedious lengths, in sum, there is a sardonic and gentle charm that carries through the wonderfully diverse and exotic characters and places.

One particular quite captures the heart of the piece:

"This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing."

There is a sanguine lens to what the World might be like free from European influence. World wars, genocide and exploitation emerge, as does feminism, a class consciousness despite the absence of Marx along with the full gamut of scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment.

The world that emerges is for the most part no better or worse. While distinctive in terms of surface details like fashion and language, it remains much the same at the human level. Species extinction, the nuclear threat and climate change all emerge as the world is both the worst of times with the possibility of becoming the best of times ever-present.

Be warned though, this is a book that tests the intellect. A solid footing in philosophy, world culture and basic scientific principles should see you through, but it will challenge you nonetheless. The book delves deep into the metaphysical weeds of eastern religions, which are then assimilated into a truly unique setting, unlike anything that I have seen previously.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐