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

hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

 

[...] what we call history has at least two meanings to it, first, simply what happened in the past, which no one can know, as it disappears in time – and then second, all the stories we tell about what happened.

A while ago, I was looking around for speculative fiction about a world where Christianity never existed or became as popular as it is, expecting people to have explored how a world with less or no influence from that religion might have developed. An incredibly interesting subject to me, considering how deeply rooted Christianity is in the world's history and how much it shaped our cultures and way of life, especially throughout the West, even outside of the church and its believers, often in ways that we don't even recognize anymore as stemming from Christianity.
Many people recommended me Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt because of that and the basic premise of this alternate history novel sounded like a perfect match. Here is a world where the black plague kills almost all of Europe and with it Christian beliefs, leaving more space for other beliefs to grow and shape the world.

Reading this book was a lot of ups and downs for me. The initial thought experiment is super interesting and the reincarnation theme of following the same souls throughout different bodies and different times is a very cool concept. It makes for quite a lot of variety as this book basically ends up being an anthology of different short stories or novella sections with some connecting details and a couple of scenes in the bardo space between lives. And these stories are populated with quite a lot of interesting characters.
But these individual stories also felt more isolated from each other than I would have hoped and there were definitely some settings and situations I would have much preferred to spend more time with while others didn't engage me at all.
Additionally, while I loved all the dialog of different characters discussing life and death, and criticizing or philosophizing about different religions and beliefs, I had some big gripes with the author's lengthy expository sections that completely ignored the "show, don't tell" rule and turned potentially interesting developments into dry walls of text.
But making it through those dry sections, I was always eventually greeted by another section that suddenly made me excited to read on. Like feminist movements challenging patriarchal religious systems or exploring the Americas in a world that never had Europeans invade and colonize it. It's also very satisfying to meet characters close to the end of the book that now, many decades past the initial black plague situation, get to look back at, study, and ponder about this alternate version of world history.

In the end, The Years of Rice and Salt is a mostly engaging reflection of what the concept of history even is, what we do with the knowledge of the past, and where beliefs and sciences lead us. As well as being a general love letter to all the little, undocumented things people do that don't become part of the general world history despite being part of it just like every other action and reaction is.
I was hoping for the reincarnation theme to have a bit of a more palpable development and pay-off, and wished the author would do less "telling" and more "showing. But overall this was a book I'm glad I read and stuck with. Some parts of it were genuinely awesome.