A review by nwhyte
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

4.0

The book starts by kiling off the whole of Europe in the Black Death, leaving Islam and China to develop civilisation and the industrial revolution. This book is perhaps a bit of a reaction to the deterministic approach of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" and David S. Landes' "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" which both argue that European superiority was more or less historically inevitable. My own view is that "natural" advantages need enlightened (or sometimes just lucky) rulers to exploit them - Rebecca West has some good observations on this in the Dubrovnik section of "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon". As a lapsed historian of science myself, I am particularly aware the rich tradition of Islamic knowledge, and that there was a time when Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the world. I also liked Robinson's Mars trilogy and the supplementary volume. Here, rather than the somewhat strained immortality thrust upon the Mars characters, he has reincarnation as a connecting thread between ten linked novellas covering 700 years. Oddly enough he ends up in much the same place as Robert Sawyer in "Hominids", with a rather utopian portrayal of an alternate timeline society contemporary with ours, but does it a hundred times better.