et us start with a small revere. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, a novel which spans 700 years of human life on this planet after the peoples of Europe are wiped out holus bolus by the Great Plague of circa 1350 A.D., has brought alternate history into the 21st century. Years does so in the same way that, in the 1990s, Robinson's Mars Trilogy toilet-trained future history: by taking an initial premise with the utmost of seriousness, and by taking that premise to the limits—some might say beyond the limits—that demarcate fictional narrative from the contents of the Library of Congress.
The Mars books start with the premise that Mars can be brought into the human story, through exploration, terraforming, experiment, transformation, revolution, etc., etc.; and the 2,000 pages or more of the trilogy exfoliate implacably from the need to argue—to elucidate, to memorialize, to lock in place down to the last detail—the how and why and when and where of that initial premise. There are costs, of course: after five hours of reading a Robinson text, and knowing there are
a lot of hours left before the book is going to come to climax, paragraphs which begin with sentences like "[X] learned every detail of farming existence during that time" are sentences which strike the eye with a poignance as deep as dread though less arousing. But the Mars trilogy, though full of paragraphs that explain every detail of farming existence during that time, does, in the end, insuperably and unstoppably manage to convince us that this—this something of genuine great
importance being described—might actually come to pass. And that it was wise of us to continue reading, to find out.
And I will say this right off: that those who finish The Years of Rice and Salt, and there will be many who do, will gain almost immeasurably from the experience of finding out. Years is humane, romantic, implacable, luminous, engaging, lovable, wise, mature, savvy. It thrums with the warp and woof of the songs of the lives it incarnates, reincarnates (see below), incarnadines with blood and milk. Avoiding malice, and generally eschewing cheats or elisions in its limning of the passage of 700 years, the book manifestly urges its readers to understand that the continuity of the human species on this planet is in itself numinous. But The Years of Rice and Salt is also daft.
A special sort of madness
Twice daft. It is daft in the mad-professor way Robinson is so often daft: dozens upon dozens of pages in which mouthpiece characters—the sentence about learning every detail about farming
existence in that time is in fact from page 631 of the U.K. edition of this book—never stop learning something interesting about something—anything—and never stop passing it on to bemused
interlocutors, which means us. Long quotes would demonstrate how difficult this can become for the reader. One short sample may do the trick, though. Budur, one of the novel's several B protagonists (see below), is taking a break with a colleague from a scientific conference held in Isfahan, Iran, in what would be 2002 if A.D. dating were still honored:
And the locals among them cheered and drank, although many of them were clearly students from Africa or the New World or Aozhou.
"This is how all the world will look, as people become more mobile," Abdol Zoroush said to Budur and Piali afterwards, as he showed them around the institute's grounds, very extensive....
At times like this one feels that one is less reading a novel than a guide to some great World Fair, that the World Without Europe of Years is in fact a display...
That's daft, sometimes deliriously, sometimes irritatingly, sometimes comically, sometimes (one suspects) deliberately daft. The second daftness, though, has nothing directly to do with Robinson's own vagaries. It is the daftness inherent in the conflict between telling story and telling history, for it is, in the end, daft to attempt both simultaneously. (It is also, of course, necessary to
attempt both if one is writing a fiction.) And it is here that the clarity of Robinson's mind exposes all too clearly the impossibility of the task of telling both responsibly. With a clear hot cogency of mind and tongue, he tells us again and again in this honest
and ultimately profound novel that the years of rice and salt in the human experience—the necessary grinding invisible years between having children and seeing them take the world away, the invisible women's years that make life up and carry life on and through, the years that return again and again, as they do in some of Years's most moving pages—cannot plausibly be connected to world-changing moments through story-shaped protagonists who must be both invisible and somehow effect, or at the least impose significant effect upon, the change on view. But yet, as he's writing a novel, he must try.
Ten salty stories in 700 years
Years is divided into 10 long books.
One. A captain in Temur the Lame's Horde travels west and finds the edge of Europe depopulated. His name is Bold; he is the first B (see below); Bs are Sancho Panzas, though without the coarseness. He undergoes a series of garish, beautifully rendered adventures which take him on a bird's-eye tour of several of those parts of the world where significant events will occur for hundreds of years. He is enslaved, is taken into Africa; meets the first K (whose name is Kyu), a young black who is soon castrated; they are transported to India and thence to China, where they meet the first I (her name is I-li). Kyu becomes a favorite of the emperor, which gives us a view of things happening in the world that changes—a world ignorant even of the absence of Europe. There are violent deaths.
(B and K and I, and others of what is known as their jati—a sibling-like nest of souls who are reincarnated again and again, though they are never fully conscious of their earlier lives—awaken in a pre-birth and/or post-mortal arena called the Bardo. They are confused by their human lives. They are sent back. This pattern is repeated at the end of every book but the last.)
Two. There are several Bs and Ks. The most vivid is K as a tiger in India. The most important carries a Muslim B through the disjointed hegemonies of patriarchal Islam, giving us another informed tour; he ends up in Nsara, which in our world would have been Bordeaux, where a female K attempts to rule and is eventually driven in to exile by the mullahs of her misogynist faith.
Three. A Chinese armada misses its target, Japan, and rides the westerlies and the ocean currents to South America, where gold is discovered, though avarice on the model of Spain is not displayed.
Four. In Samarkand, a K and an I (Ks are voluble, argumentative, smart, aggressive; Is are insatiable tasters of the facts of the world; both can do Don Quixote routines) create a kind of Renaissance, spurred on by the pixilated local sultan and his streetwise consigliero, who demand
of the geniuses that they invent more and more better weapons to fight off the enemy. K is a bit like Leonardo da Vinci; his pal I, who comes up with the theory of gravity at the end of the book, is Newton. En passant, they invent printing, poison gas, rifled artillery shells and more; they measure the speed of sound, though light is still to fast to clock; they are masters not only of theory but of praxis too—for they must not only conceive of but actually manufacture the weapons made possible through their creation of Western scientific thought and method. This is, all of it, of course, an example of daftness number two (see above). But Samarkand is not Italy, and the Renaissance of K and I fails to generate an Industrial Revolution.
Five. A Japanese B comes to the heart of North America, where the Hodenosaunee compact of nations operates a complex, movingly described warp-and-woof polity. B brings to them knowledge of the world political situation—the super-conglomeration of Islam to the east of them, China, a genuine centrally-controlled superpower, to the west; both powers aim to take the rest of America. This is thwarted, at great cost.
Six. A Chinese K who is a widow, and an I who is an Islamic scholar, join in middle-aged matrimony along the inner Asian frontiers of China, where religious and ethnic quarrels are deepening savagely. They spend their long lives creating and/or codifying philosophy and utopian thought. It is a long book (70 pages) and luminous. At this point The Years of Rice and Salt could go on for ever.
Seven. In the south of India, long after the Samarkand Flowering (see Four above), a charismatic K begins to rule. He is an enlightened despot; he is compassionate, wise, full of energy; he engineers a Better War; he creates the Industrial Revolution. He represents the most culpable daftness Robinson allows himself to get away with: because his creation of the Industrial Revolution from above dodges the most serious alternate history issue caused by the absence of Europeans: which is how do you
get an Industrial Revolution (much less a Samarkand Flowering which fuels it with Big Thinks galore and the inductive method) without the procreative clashing cacophony of Europe from 1500 on? A farce in
Samarkand, and a philosopher king with cojones in India, does not constitute an adequate alternative.
Eight. Somewhere in what would be our 19th century, a terrible war begins, on the model of World War I. It lasts for at least 70 years: if there has been a sense throughout the earlier pages of Years that humanity has done pretty well without Europe, then that sense is complexified here. A K and an I and a B are caught in hellish, unending trench warfare. They survive—or don't. In a stunning coup, Robinson places the last pages of this book in a venue so terrible that his protagonists think they are being tortured, posthumously, in the Bardo. They are not. It is real. The war ends with the victory of the allies—the Travancori League based in southern India, China and the Hodenosaunee League—against Dar al-Islam.
Nine. We are back in Nsara (Bordeaux), where Islamic conservatives are gradually losing their fight to maintain the purity of their patriarchal desert sect.
Ten. We are in America and elsewhere. A B lives a long life trying to understand the world, history, the sense that he has been here before, the ultimate sense that the lives he has lived and the Is and Ks he has loved have carved out a path intrinsicate with living. The novel ends calmly, humbly, in salt and rice; there is a joke at the very end who the final K will be.
At play in the fields of the Buddha
The Industrial Revolution was dodged. The gulf between the Third World and the First was downsized. Computers and the Internet were referred to only in passing. Corporate capitalism—which seeks to
transform our own globe into what Robinson, in a Locus interview, describes as a kind of killing ground for pyramid selling—does not really come into play. The Years of Salt and Rice does not, in other words, incorporate the whole history of the world since 1350.
And there are longueurs, and the Two Paths of Doing Daft. But, in the end, there is something more important than the blemishes and the stalls: a deep lucid serenity of telling, a clarity of cognition and compassion that, in the end, has a religious intensity, though without a single hint from Robinson as author that there is a God in view, anywhere. If there is a religion acceded to in the book, it is almost certainly an austere form of Buddhism (the Buddha, maybe, being the quintessential B: Sancho Panza without the mask). In this form of Buddhism there is no god, but only reverence. Revering.
Page 498 of the U.K. edition says all that can be said here about The Years of Rice and Salt, for good and for wacky. At the top of the page, in one of Robinson's daftest moments, we overhear two soldiers talking on the plains of India. One of them (the local I) notices the Himalayas to the north, and that from where they stand below the great mountains it looks as though "India were a ramming ship that had slammed into Asia and ploughed under it, pushing all the way under Tibet, etc...." Which gets plate tectonics under our belts, pretty damned quick.
But a couple of paragraphs down, on the same page, Bai (the local B) muses on the war, and the gods and reality. There are a doxen—a dozen dozen—other wise and beautiful passages in this great long book; but this one can stand for them all:
What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was ... clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the
triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no god, with only this world.... everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a God if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything.... That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention.... Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colours of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water.
