The Years of Rice and Salt

Duncan Lawie writes: "Kim Stanley Robinson started reading science fiction at the start of the 1970s, as New Wave was breaking over the genre, and began writing it not long after. He soon established a reputation for literate science fiction, confirmed by the 'Orange County Trilogy' written during the 1980s. Perhaps more usefully re-named Three Californias, this thematic trilogy offers alternative visions of America's future. In the 1990s, he came to dominate science fiction through his massive, and massively detailed, Mars trilogy, tracing the colonisation and terraforming of our neighbouring planet. In turn, his output has been dominated by the success of this work and the continued working out of the ideas contained within it. For a new decade, there is a new kind of work by KSR." Duncan goes on to review an example of this new work below. The Years of Rice and Salt author Kim Stanley Robinson pages 670 publisher HarperCollins rating 7.5 reviewer Duncan Lawie ISBN 0553109200 summary What would the world be like without European influence? Very different yet much the same.

The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history, opening at the dawn of what should have been the 14th Christian century. Instead, the Black Death has wiped out the population of Europe, leaving the future open to the trans-Asian cultures of the Old World. Robinson has applied his usual detailed research and rich, convincing narrative to the production of this book, giving the world he creates a lived in and liveable depth. Through this, he has successfully avoided many of the pitfalls of alternate history, growing his work from a common root but not dependent on our branch of history for its survival. This book could have been a rather tedious meditation on the absence of da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hitler and a million others. Instead, it is defined by the presence of Arabic and Chinese civilisations, expanding across the planet and finding $other cultures.

The Years of Rice and Salt covers a period of seven centuries and, in the end, the technology that these rather different occupants of the planet discover seems remarkably similar to what our contemporary world has found. In this, KSR seems to have had a failure of imagination -- he does not, or dares not, find the world too different a place. Perhaps the book would have been tedious to read, or impossible to write, if the world had collapsed into an eternal mediaeval culture. Perhaps a pure golden age ushered in by the avoidance of "Western rapacity" would have produced a story without sufficient conflict or complexity. Perhaps, in the final analysis, human nature is human nature regardless of the cultures which seek to shape it. Of course, this leads to the essential problem of alternate history, something which the book discusses directly - "we don't know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilisation was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once."

As the tapestry of its internal history is so convincing, and so little reliant on our own, it can be hard to see what the book actually has to do with us. The characters spend a lot of time in discussion throughout the book's length but as the world reaches into the modern age, it reaches also into self-awareness and the protagonists increasingly become historians and philosophers. Towards the end, the book almost dissolves into the deconstruction of it's own content. This approach seems to be an attempt by the author to give himself an opportunity to comment more directly upon our world. In the final section, the story regains the impetus as a new global culture starts to pull together. This section is written in the future from our perspective and the narrative is more comfortable as Robinson abandons alternate history for the stronger stuff of true science fiction.

In terms of technique, Robinson manages both interesting and admirable approaches, experimenting and further developing his craft as a writer. He maintains a set of central characters across the whole period in question by making use of the idea of reincarnation. This fits nicely with the idea that this is an "Eastern" book rather than a "Western" one whilst avoiding the complications of a generational saga or of writing about totally new characters in each section. It provides the reader with a thread to follow through the ten tales, tying them together in small ways as well as large and allows commentary on the progress of the book and of society. Additionally, each of the ten 'books' which make up this large novel is written in a different style, reflecting the characteristics of the period in which it is set. Even the map which introduces each section is drawn differently.

This new book is vintage KSR - so rich in detail that the experience of his milieu becomes personal. Clearly, a master builder of worlds is at work, thoroughly working his research into the foundations. It also has the fingerprints of ethical and ecological concern, encouraging us to do our best, be of good will and to maintain an upward slope for ourselves, our kind and our world. Robinson's fans will enjoy The Years of Rice and Salt. Other readers may fare better by skipping to the final chapter.

You can purchase The Years of Rice and Salt from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

Comments

Western Rapacity?

[Hairy_Potter]

Oh yeah, Asia is just full of gentle, earth loving Asians, who would never dare fill their oceans with mercury, run unstable nuclear reactors, deforest thier jungles, wipe out their tigers, rape their nankings and generally behave just as boorishly as any westerner. Cut the racist crap Timothy, that attitude was old when Kipling used it.

Scientific Development

[kmellis]

I enjoyed this book up until the middle portion where these societies entered their version of "the enlightenment". At that point (although this was true to a lesser extent earlier) only a tiny handful of thinkers have an unlikely number of profound new scientific insights. That one man could casually toss off a series of ideas that took several men in our world generations to produce was, well, absurd. Furthermore, it was evident why the author thought that it wasn't absurd: he has an extremely condescending attitude toward those older, "obviously" nonsensical ideas and those who held them, vastly underestimating their acceptability within their context and vastly overestimating the assumed self-evident nature of ideas that we now believe are correct.

This is a huge annoyance to me. Unlike most people, unfortunately including KSR, I have a strong education in the history of science and philosophical thought, with a very strong and particular emphasis on actually doing the scientific work and carefully reading the various texts. For someone who approaches the evolution of western empiricism in this manner, it is very often a surprise at how natural, obvious, and reasonable so many false scientific beliefs are. Very often, Kuhn's paradigm shift is a very difficult and sometimes unlikely event that is enabled because some crucial prerequisite(s) is satisfied. In my opinion, the archetypical example is geocentricism versus heliocentricism.

Moderns assume that the ancients and Ptolemy were just plain batty and obtuse in their adherence to a geocentric geometry of circles upon circles upon circles. Isn't it obvious that a heliocentric model is simpler and compelling? There is an attitude that the ancients were simpletons for not recognizing this. But they did. They were well aware of a heliocentric model, and Ptolemy concedes its simplicity. However, they had absolutely no context within which to find the idea of the Earth in motion (and the consequently enormously large universe) an acceptable idea. Until Galileo's telescope, from an empiricist standpoint, the geocentric model seemed to be completely correct. We grow up learning that the Earth rotates and that it revolves around the Sun, and so vastly underestimate the counter-intuitiveness of that idea.

In closely examining the history of science, over and over this sort of thing becomes evident. Outdated, supposedly absurd ideas are found to be far more reasonable (in context) than is commonly assumed; and modern ideas far more radical, even in context, than is commonly assumed. It takes a lot of hard work, profound insight, chance, and a friendly social and political environment for even the incremental, but crucial, changes in thought to occur.

The reason this is important, in my opinion, is because we are no more exempt from the hubris that arises from ignorance as our ancestors were. The contemporary scientist who has nothing but contempt for those ignorant ancients and their ridiculous ideas -- because they are very sure in the assumption of the (overall) correct state of contemporary thought -- is really no different from those ancients they are ridiculing. "All or most of the things I think about the world are true, isn't it obvious?"

Lest cranks and fringe scientists think I am validating their loonyness, I hasten to make it clear that I am not. In truth, the conservative nature of science and scientists is a necessary and good thing. It's a crucial part of skepticism. The hubris of close-mindedness is the enemy of the Newton or Einstein, that's true. But, while there's only ever going to be a few Newtons or Einsteins, there's (currently) millions of everyday working scientists. So, functionally, this attitude isn't a problem, it's a feature.

But if one has any pretensions of wisdom and education -- and many scientists do -- then a deep and profound skepticism is a necessity. One should respect the immense mysteries of the cosmos and recognize that they dwarf one's puny certainties. Not only because there's so much left to learn, but because there's also very likely much to unlearn. That is the lesson of the history of scientific thought. You don't really need know this to be a good, productive scientist. But you do need to know it if you wish to exist as thinking being in this universe in the manner that the scientific tradition exemplifies.

And, without question, philosophers of science, writers of the history of science, or science-fiction writers constructing an alternate history of science -- for all of these, this comprehension is also a requirement.

Kim Stanley Robison's The Years of Rice and Salt fails in a crucial way for this reason. As he attempts to reconstruct an evolution of empirical thought that mirrors our own, he demonstrates that he doesn't really understand his subject matter. His subject matter is not merely the scientific ideas themselves; but those ideas in the context and tradition of the rational, empiricist tradition and the complexity of factors and ideas that have enabled and nurtured it. He sees the facade, and confuses it for the entire structure and its engineering. That's an egregious error in the context of this book.