THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT – Kim Stanley Robinson (2002)

One has to admire Kim Stanley Robinson for the breadth of his work. He has published 19 novels, 2 works of non-fiction, 8 short story collections and 4 novellas. If you just look at the novels, you see a wide variety of angles. Still, his topics remain steadfast: the evolutionary & ecological nature of humans, what human societies could amount to  – progressive, utopian thinking – and how science and technology ties into that.

The Years of Rice and Salt is no dystopian near-future story, nor an account of prehistorical homo sapiens, nor a clifi thriller, nor an hard SF tale of terraforming or interstellar travel. It’s what’s called an alternative history.

As a starting point Robinson lets the black death wipe out 99% of the European population, instead of – current best estimate – 65%. What follows is, in 652 pages and 10 chapters, a history of seven centuries “on an alternate Earth in which Islam and Buddhism are the dominant religions. (…) the New World is discovered by the Chinese Navy, and the Renaissance is played out as a conflict between a Middle Eastern Islam and Chinese Buddhism.” (Kirkus)

Robinson basically wrote 10 novellas that are entangled because they each figure the same three characters, each time reincarnated – as “orphaned Indian girl, Sufi mystic, African eunuch, Sultan’s wife, Chinese admiral, dourly brilliant alchemist, feminist poet, village midwife, glassblower, theologian, etc.”

The Kirkus review is on point in that it names the book at times a bit “ponderous” and “overlong”, and also Laura Miller expresses some of that sentiment in her 2002 review for Salon. But it would be foolish to discard the book just because of that: The Years of Rice and Salt is a tour-de-force.

The task of imagining a 700 year alternative history to the extent that Robinson does is something to behold. He brings the same rigor and research to the table as readers of some of his other works might recognize, and the result is an intellectual smorgasbord that’s nevertheless adventurous, astounding and at times emotional. Especially the chapters that deal with slavery and colonization shine in their power to transmit some of the effects of cruelty and horror to the reader’s own feelings. Not all is gloom, as Robinson manages similarly to convey love and intellectual curiosity in other chapters.

It is only in the one but final chapter I lost interest, as there, indeed, the study of “esoteric ironies among evolving theological and political ideologies” takes over – in that respect this chapter reminded me a bit of the dry yet imaginative slog that is Stapledon’s Last and First Men. But me losing interest was a matter of taste: I’m sure those with a bigger appetite for comparative religious studies will find this 100-page chapter a delight. And besides, as The Years of Rice and Salt can be considered and enjoyed as a collection of seperate novellas too, it’s no biggie if you don’t like it: it’s not like the regular fantasy book in which a dud of a grand finale ruins all that came before.

The three recurring characters (“earthy, pragmatic B, impetuous, vengeful K, and quietly intellectual I” as Kirkus dubs them) contribute to the intricacy of the novel, but figuring out their correspondences chart isn’t at all necessary to enjoy the different chapters: a bonus, not a sine qua non. In that sense, Robinson has written something modular – and yet not, making the form of this book something wholly original, on top of the content that is a rare hybrid too: both intellectual & wondrous.

The Years of Rice and Salt is Robinson’s most feminist book, as he takes the historical practices of foot-binding, harems and Islamic patriarchy as a springboard to explore these issues – sometimes to chilling effect – without pointing fingers or resorting to cheap & essentialist Islamophobia. It also struck me that Robinson seems to be in the same boat as Graeber & Wengrow, clearly admiring certain Pre-Columbian Native American ways of organizing their society. It makes me want to read up on Native American history – if you have any recommendations on that, do not hesitate to comment, but please, only solid work, without the questionable methodology of The Dawn of Everything.

Politics & religion aside, the other thematic focal point is the advent of science – in that sense it is a curious fellow of Greg Egan’s Incandenscence, or even of  non-fiction books on convergent evolution. A bit like an unexpected gift, in the final chapter it turns out that The Years of Rice and Salt is also meant as a deep exploration of history & history-as-storytelling & storytelling itself.

Robinson shows himself to be an idealist, having written yet another “romance in which humanity struggles to work out its dharma, to better itself, and so generation by generation to make progress, fighting for justice, and an end to want, with the strong implication that we will eventually work our way up to the source of the peach blossom stream, and the age of great peace will come into being.”

But, as always with Robinson, it is more complex than that, because Zhu Isao, the fictional founder of the League of All Peoples School of Revolutionary Change, continues that passage. It is probably the most explicit formulation of Robinson’s own poetics, so any Robinson aficionado would do well to read this carefully, more so, it should be of any interest to any student & lover of literature.

“It is a secular version of the Hindu and Buddhist tale of nirvana succesfully achieved. (…) The opposite of this mode is the ironic or satiric mode, which I call entropic history, from the physical sciences, or nihilism, or, in the usage of certain old legends, the story of the fall. In this mode, everything that humanity tries to do fails, or rebounds against it, and the combination of biological reality and moral weakness, of death and evil, means that nothing in human affairs can succeed. Taken to its extreme this leads to (…) people who say it is all a chaos without causes, and that taken all in all, it would have been better never to have been born. These two modes of emplotment represent end-point extremes, in that one says we are masters of the world and can defeat death, while the other says that we are captives of the world, and can never win against death. (…) two other modes of emplotment (…) tragedy and comedy. These two are mixed and partial modes compared to their absolutist outliers (…) they both have to do with reconciliation. In comedy the reconciliation is of people with other people, and with society at large. The weave of family with family, tribe with clan – this is how comedies end, this is what makes them comedy: the marriage with someone from a different clan, and the return of spring. Tragedies make a darker reconciliation. (…) they tell the story of humanity face-to-face with reality itself, therefor facing death and dissolution and defeat. Tragic heroes are destroyed, but for those who survive to tell their tale, their is a rise in consciousness, in awareness of reality, and this is valuable in and of itself, dark though that knowledge may be. (…) Now, I suggest that as historians, it is best not to get trapped in one mode or another, as so many do; it is too simple a solution, and does not match well with events as experienced. Instead we should weave a story that holds in its pattern as much as possible. It should be like the Daoists’s yin-yang symbol, with eyes of tragedy and comedy dotting the larger fields of dharma and nihilism. That old figure is the perfect image of all our stories put together, with the dark spot of our comedies marring the brilliance of dharma, and the blaze of the tragic knowledge emerging from black nothingness. The ironic history by itself, we can reject out of hand. Of course we are bad; of course things go wrong. But why dwell on it? Why pretend this is the whole story? Irony is merely death walking among us. It doesn’t take up the challenge, it isn’t life speaking. But I suppose we also have to reject the purest version of dharma history, the transcending of this world and this life, the perfection of our way of being. It may happen in the bardo, if there is a bardo, but in this world, all is mixed. We are animals, death is our fate. So at best we could say the history of the species has to be made as much like dharma as possible, by a collective act of the will. This leaves the middle modes, comedy and tragedy. (…) Surely we have a great deal of both of these. Perhaps the way to construct a proper history is to inscribe the whole figure, and say that for the individual, ultimately, it is a tragedy; for the society, comedy. If we can make it so.”

A bit later, might Robinson talk about himself? “Zhu Isao’s own predilection was clearly for comedy. He was a social creature.” Whatever the answer, it is clear that, as a species, we need more weaving indeed, more cooperation, more family. Isn’t that as good a meaning as any – especially if you consider Robinson’s one line version of human history: “Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings.”

Highly recommended – except chapter 9.

---

My other Kim Stanley Robinson reviews are here: The Wild Shore (1984) – Icehenge (1984) – The Memory Of Whiteness (1985) – The Gold Coast (1988) – A Short, Sharp Shock (1990) – Pacific Edge (1990) – Antarctica (1997) – Galileo’s Dream (2009) – 2312 (2012) – Shaman (2013) – Aurora (2015) – Green Earth (2015, the revised Science In The Capital trilogy (2004-2007)) – New York 2140 (2017) – The Ministry for the Future (2020) – The High Sierra: A Love Story (2022).

---

Consult the author index for all my other reviews, or my favorite lists.

Click here for an index of my non-fiction or art book reviews, and here for an index of my longer fiction reviews of a more scholarly & philosophical nature.