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A review by storytimed
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
5.0
The story's told through a group of reincarnated souls who flit around different cultures and time periods, including:
Zheng He's Chinese fleet
the alliance of the Haudesaunee aka the Iroquois
the real-life Kerala empire of Travancore
Muslim-colonized Europe
Basically though you see the development of two big Chinese and Muslim empires, with the Iroquois as an emerging power and India as a smaller neutral state with greater industrial capabilities
For ease of identification, the souls all have names that start with the same letter each time. B is a spiritual sweetheart, filled with love and a desire to care for the people around them. K is a revolutionary, furious with the desire to change and make things better. I is an intellectual, always seeking the truth of their reality.
It's very fun to see their essential personality traits shine through different characters! Very early in the book, K tries to attack the system of reincarnation sending them into a new soul and ends up being reincarnated into a tiger that protects B, in this incarnation a Sufi mystic grasping at the essential value of love for the world
Robinson is pretty slight with characterization but this is very much not a book about characterization. No, this is a 777-page epic about HISTORY and how it's built by the people living in it
I think this is a fairly good thesis statement for what the book is trying to do. Coincidentally, it is an actual speech from a proletariat's movement in the book's fake-1950s:
"Now the generals think they can stop all this and turn the
clock back, as if they did not lose the war and cast us into this
necessity of creation that we have used so well. As if time
could ever run backward! Nothing like that can ever happen!
We have made a new world here on old ground, and Allah
protects it, through the actions of all the people who truly
love Islam and its chances to survive in the world to come.
"So we have gathered here to join the long struggle against
oppression, to join all the revolts, rebellions, and revolutions,
all the efforts to take power away from the armies, the police,
the mullahs, and give it back to the people. Every victory has
been incremental, a matter of two steps forward one step
back, a struggle forever. But each time we progress a little fur-
ther, and no one is going to push us backward! If they expect
to succeed in such a project, the government will have to dis-
miss the people and appoint another one! But I don't think
that's how it happens."
Over and over again, the protagonists in the novel try to work towards justice for the oppressed, peace and betterment, in whatever form it takes in their era: in Samarkand, Khalid the alchemist invents the basic principles of science despite being continually told by the sultan to focus on impressive weapons instead. In the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, Kang Tongbi and Ibrahim ibn Hasam try to reconcile their two very disparate cultural philosophies and fall in love in the meantime. In a history so diverged from ours that we can only half-recognize it, Budur joins a women's movement and a worker's movement and an alliance of scholars working together to suppress the knowledge of the atom bomb.
Although Kim Stanley Robinson tries very hard and has done a lot of research to try and make sure his protagonists all have different points of view that are fairly accurate to their cultures and time periods, his personal philosophy very much shines through
If I had to describe it, I'd say it was a very secular multicultural California humanism with the following tents:
that we are all more similar than we are different; you can find similar concepts in different cultures that mean essentially the same thing, that a Muslim queen's struggle for equality in Al-Andalus is not so different from a Chinese revolutionary's search for an equality of his own
that an essential form of morality comes from compassion and empathy, which is a basic human instinct, love is at the core of all things
that people will always try to gain power over others; but also that the powerless will always band together in solidarity to try and stop it
that humans are good, that believing in humanity is good, that loving humanity is good
that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice
SO really a lot of my love of this novel comes from the fact that I share most of Robinson's philosophy
But I would very much like to read more non-Western takes on this, specifically Muslim takes. Because Robinson switches cultures and genders and ages for his protagonists so much, he avoids a lot of obvious bigotry. There's a war between the great Chinese and Muslim empires and in one chapter you get Chinese people deriding Muslims as religious fanatics; then in the other you get Muslim philosophers talking about how the Chinese lack of religion allowed them to commit war crimes
HOWEVER I do think he doesn't really like religion other than ^ a vague form of semi-Buddhism that is just "love is good" and you can kind of tell
And I do agree with other critiques of his work that say he ignores the historical empires of for example Ethiopia and Africa's potential as a world power (there is one African main character in this book, who is taken as a slave and then burns down a city and then dies)
Plus it's very cringe that the way he decides to change the fate of the Iroquois is............... by having a Japanese samurai come and warn them about colonialism, sigh
But idk this stuff just kinda Hits for me:
The Kerala laughed, looked at Ismail and gestured at the
colorful and fragrant fields. "This is the world we want you to
help us make," he said. "We will go out into the world and
plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build
roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and ter-
race the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will
be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be
no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans,
emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or
princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery
and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no
more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture
or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no
more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy,
no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suf-
fering than what life brings us for being born and having to
die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of crea-
tures we really are."
And the writing can be frequently very gorgeous and meaningful:
Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long - that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, "God is great. We will never meet again."
Bc I read that and I was like........... yeah. That is how it is
Or at least it has been for me
Every few years, I've lived a different life. College, Taiwan, COVID, the era of First Stop Cosplay, now this new life that I have to build
Idk. It's a really good and interesting book