SCOUTED: Review of "The Years of Rice and Salt" by KSR

[JonNRob2002]

Kim Stanley Robinson's newest book is out, and a review of it appeared today on Salon.com.  It looks like he's written an alternative history/future book with the same mammoth scope as his Mars series.  I really loved that series, and have really intensely disliked most of the other books he's written.  Let's see how this one does. :-)
Jon
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/03/06/europe/index.html
(I believe this one doesn't require premium access.  If it does, let me know offlist, and I'll post the entire article onlist.)
J

Excerpt:
"The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson
A novelist imagines 700 years of history in which the plague has wiped out the West and China and Islam rule the globe.
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By Laura Miller
March 6, 2002 |  "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it," Oscar Wilde said, and few have taken that imperative so much to heart as Kim Stanley Robinson does with his latest novel, "The Years of Rice and Salt." In this epic tale, he asks what the world would be like if Europe's people and culture had perished in the plagues of the mid-1300s. The book, which covers 700 years, from what we'd call the Middle Ages to 2091, describes a planet different in many ways from our own but in its essentials surprisingly similar. China and Dar-al-Islam (the conglomeration of Muslim nations) have become the predominant global powers, with a progressive Indian League and a confederation of the Hodenosaunee (Native Americans) filling out the map.
For the most part, what a novelist tries to do with any given book is far less important that what he or she actually manages to accomplish, but it's impossible to read "The Years of Rice and Salt" without stopping now and then to contemplate the vastness of the task Robinson has set himself. Think of the challenges in writing a novel that ranges over seven centuries and most of the globe -- then imagine having to concoct all of the history for it as well, each year building on the events of the year before and taking Robinson's conjectural world further from the one we know. Creating a credible depiction of 10th century Beijing may seem relatively easy, but as time rolls on how will exploration unfold, civilizations bloom, technology and ideas evolve in a world where Christianity is a mere footnote and the great campaigns of Western colonialism have never taken place?