Lucky New Year. E.g., Lee winning at Gettysburg, and so on. In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland. This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. The whole thing came off as fairly doctrinaire and unreflective Marxism, so I’m not too surprised that he views world history through the lens of historical materialism. The Piedmontese eat little grains of rice which represent money. The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present. SM Stirling, Harry Turtledove and Kim Stanley Robinson (in the years of rice and Salt) have all written stories where something prevents the Americas being discovered on time. Eventual negotiations for reunification on favorable terms to the South? en Zheng features as a character in Kim Stanley Robinson's alternative history The Years of Rice and Salt. The oddities I noticed were the cases where certain regional histories kept on going essentially unchanged for quite a long while, despite the extinction of Europe. (Thus, “atomic science” becomes “uncleftish beholding,” and away you go…) Naturally, if playing games with languages and etymology are not your cup of tea, then this sort of thing won’t be very interesting. The Years of Rice and Salt is a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Again, this is why postcolonial theory works itself into such an intricate state of intellectual constipation, because it assumes that the non-West without the West cannot be represented within the Western logos and yet deeply desires the capacity to make such a representation. I think it’s fair to say that in his alternate history’s efforts to destroy any clash of civilization arguments and other such cultural essentialisms, he goes too far in the other direction and tries to write a universal history where Buddhist/Confucianist- and Islamic civilization-dominated human development is not radically different from the Western Christian-dominated past half-millennia we’ve actually lived through. Lay readers may not have to go as far as ethnographies of globalizationl. As one would expect from Robinson, the book is packed, almost overflowing, with ideas. English thesaurus is mainly derived from The Integral Dictionary (TID). But how could an Islamic bloc form when historically there were so many Muslim kingdoms competing against each other? The aliens aren’t actually essential to the main story, which involves ethnic conflict and rebellion against foreign occupiers. I don’t think I ever finished it, but it’s all too hazy to remember. They all just have the Americas stay in more or less the state they were in in 1492 until … A couple of people responding in the “Production of History” thread have suggested Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt for the week on time travel and alternate history. Now that I think about it, it obviously parallels Chinese experience during the Sino-Japanese War, but with great heroes and villains instead of banal bureaucrats and incompetent leaders. ), On the far-counterfactual, is it possible that Wolfe is just a better writer than KSR? Throughout the book the Jati constantly find each other, often without meaning too, … Most English definitions are provided by WordNet . I can settle for the century if it’s too much trouble converting. One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot when it comes to counterfactuals is how to get beyond the kind of counterfactual built on the logic of “for want of a nail”, where a single discrete event is given a plausibly different outcome and then a different set of macrohistorical circumstances is derived in a linear causal chain from that outcome. Kim Stanley Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt . This is the only way we know how to write a counterfactual essay or book, however. Northern capital overwhelming the Southern economy anyway? Every year, New Year’s Day is considered to be a new beginning—we change our calendars, make resolutions, and reflect on the previous 52 weeks. Each square carries a letter. (I think that KSR used to better at this, as in the California trilogy, Escape from Kathmandu and Planet on the Table.). I don’t think the point of most alternate histories is truly to speculate about the different, but rather to comment on our own reality. Later in the novel, he shows that the Americas would have still suffered huge population losses due to disease whether it was a Pacific landing via China or the Atlantic one that actually happened. You can also try the grid of 16 letters. Lettris is a curious tetris-clone game where all the bricks have the same square shape but different content. Contact Us Just reading the current business press on India and China is enough to raise questions about any permanent dominance of the US and Europe. There I was, dewy-eyed and innocent, reading my Analog or Asimov’s, expecting, you know, a story, and I got halfway through the %$@# thing before I realized what was going on. Given the length of China’s influence in world history, it’s quite possible the last 500 years will end up being but a blip. I see it as his response to Orson Scott Card’s worst novel, Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christipher Columbus (I much prefer his Alvin Maker series for an alternate fantasy on early American history). “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 terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or … Although recognizing the alternate versions of people from here was kind of fun (off the top of my head, I can remember Marx and Lenin, Sartre, and Samuel Huntington). Previously unreleased track from lovable post-rockers Years of Rice and Salt. Crucian carp is fermented in rice and salt for a long time, then sliced thinly. Actually, the central premise was itself ridiculous (a disease that only kills white people? Victory at Gettysburg becomes victory in the Civil War? The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Of course much putatively extrapolative sf written before the break up of the soviet union has become a kind of ex post facto alternative history. ), http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2003, http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2002, Trivia and study guide to The Years of Rice and Salt, Timeline of the events in The Years of Rice and Salt's world, Reincarnation list of the main characters in, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt&oldid=497890665. Yes, China Mountain Zhang is quite good. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (2010), Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (2011), This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. A Jati is type of village or community; sometimes it can also mean clan or group of that nature. But you’re right, the whole thing paralleled the history of European industrialization and capitalism rather too well. But what’s interestingly is that in the end, that society essentially transits into modernity on roughly the same terms and with the same basic geist as Europe did. Wondering now if Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead might count as an alternate history/dysutopian SF novel that successfully subsumes Western history into a history of the world from an Americas-centric p.o.v….? I would like to mention the single worst alternate-history “story” ever written: Poul Anderson, back about 1990 I think, wrote a page of a physics textbook in some sort of pseudo-Germanic gibberish. With a SensagentBox, visitors to your site can access reliable information on over 5 million pages provided by Sensagent.com. Around what year in our calendar was the Chinese invasion of Japan supposed to have happened? Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. He can’t really imagine what “Shaka” would have been had he been part of a dominant global civilization, save an angry militarist, can’t derive the full alternate history of “Zuluness” had it never been encapsulated within a British-dominated South Africa. The novel then covers around 700 years of history, ending in the future compared to our timeline, around the year 2088 AD. It gets kind of muddled near the end, but it’s definitely a look at something different from English-language sci fi. And the whole Muslim unity thing was a bit hard to swallow. Find out more, an offensive content(racist, pornographic, injurious, etc. The English word games are: That, and the non-Western Others actually had histories of their own instead of being stuck in their essentialized “cultures” — you know, the kind of crap alternate history “What if the ancient Egyptians went on to rule the world?” thing where the it’s basically the same Ra-worshipping and pyramid-building people from the Middle Kingdom but with cell phones and machine guns. To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares. Ro, Cookies help us deliver our services. You are significant. [*] Wolfe is perhaps less open to this — at least, this essay has some rather odd ideas about the nature of medieval European society, and a curious tone of “I know what the past was like, and no revisionist historians are going to convince me otherwise.”. by Kim Stanley Robinson . The wordgames anagrams, crossword, Lettris and Boggle are provided by Memodata. While we’re on the subject of China, anyone ever read The City Trilogy by Hsi-Kuo Chang? (For purposes of this discussion, is Japan part of the West?) Your presence should make a BIG difference. So seeing the novel as a meditation on the writing of history, as an attempt to write a fictional historiography, or a metahistorical fiction, is at least as important as figuring out KSR’s take on religion, science, imperialism, etc. Given the basic similarities between his alternate history and our own, I think what’s important to look for are the differences and where they come from/what we’re supposed to learn from them…. And he situates his own writing in those traditions and positions himself in current debates. Stop waiting to be on the side of the majority. As long as it’s on my mind, though, I’ll explore an issue it raised for me. The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, his first since 1997's Antarctica. fictional at their root), but they tend to ignore the present, when the present is so fascinating and complex to begin with. Postcolonial theory definitely has a very short perspectival framework. The characters’ believability strengthens Wolfe’s ability to portray a world different from our own. My copy of the book is in another province. Give contextual explanation and translation from your sites ! Preview — The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s remarkably preoccupied with history and social upheaval, basically being Chinese romances set on another planet in the far future. The Black Death, which killed 30 to 60% of Europe's population, peaked around 1348-1350. withywindle said: "The Years Of Rice and Salt" posits a world where Christianity is for all intents wiped out by the plague, leaving Europe nearly uninhabit This is another of those books I tried to read two or three times previously and never could do it despite knowing I would like it once I got involved in it. You can’t unthink the West, you can’t really imagine the systematic difference of non-Western societies in a counterfactual way, in terms of what they might have developed into. Thanks also for the tip on McHugh; about the only lengthy thing I’ve read on China is Spence’s Search for Modern China, which is probably conventional, but that’s just what I wanted as a starting point. Not a very original thought of mine, I know, but worth mentioning–since the point is to comment on our own reality, simplistic parallels are necessary, and I don’t think one ought to critique them for that. The End. One can critique them for doing this *badly*, but one ought to assume this is the/a goal of the genre. I liked it because as you said, it was more than just Americans with Chinese names. I couldn’t help it, by that point everything was just so Western. Change the target language to find translations. ), but I was willing to overlook that because the rest of the book was good. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds--in India. Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Years of Rice and Salt” (2002) - Kim Stanley Robinson joins the exalted company of Faulkner, Proust, and Garcia-Marquez in the category of writers that I respect but do not particularly like reading. The End. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel with major Buddhist and Islamic religious elements written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world in which neither Christianity nor the European cultures based on it achieve lasting impact on world history. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame ! He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Galileo’s Dream.In 2008 he was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.” Listen to music from Years Of Rice And Salt like Eskimo Kiss, Amongst Your Earthiest Words the Angels Stray & more. Robinson tries to keep a very broad perspective on the consequences, however. Barnes doesn’t really think about what African or Middle Eastern slave systems might have been had they been exported into an Atlantic world: he simply changes the color and names of the masters and slaves. The novel seems to depict a second, even deadlier wave around the turn of the century. I do think it’s possible to write an imaginative counterfactual, however, in which a non-Western society comes to something other than modernity with dark faces and different names. Robinson’s work is more ambitious by far, and strays more interestingly into trying to think about what a Muslim-Chinese global society would have been. This simple, delicious dish of peas, pork and rice has graced holiday tables since the 1800s. See main article: Timeline of The Years Of Rice And Salt. Rice signifies the phrase, “May the love in your home multiply.” Since a bag of rice can be a little plain, jazz up the gift by pouring the rice into a stylish porcelain treat jar. Published by Harper Collins Publishers, London, United Kingdom (2002) ISBN 10: 0002246791 ISBN 13: 9780002246798. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is one of the few works I’ve seen that tries to go beyond, “What if the South won the Civil War”? You could argue that a study like Ken Pomeranz’ The Great Divergence amounts to an unannounced counterfactual of this kind, given that he is trying to write about a huge number of important variables in comparing China and Western Europe in the transition to modernity. But his travelling Japanese samurai meeting the Iriquois Confederacy thing before the actual Chinese Imperial invasion and conquest thanks to disease is an interesting move. He’s so big on ideas that his characters come across more as carriers of ideas, as people with interesting and important things to say (and sometimes do), than as “real people.” (Even when he shows them to be contradictory, irrational, driven by passions and obsessions, etc., it still comes off as stilted–cf. It occurred to me after a while that they could have also made a parallel to the role of the Bible in Western culture–our own recent past had people so deeply rooted in the Bible that they couldn’t speak outside of its cadences and metaphors. Add new content to your site from Sensagent by XML. The Years of Rice and Salt. Get XML access to fix the meaning of your metadata. Where the teleology Tim dislikes comes in, I think, is in who KSR’s good guys are (the anti-imperialists, the democrats, the free thinkers, Enlightened few who try to bring progress into history) and who his bad guys are (the militarists, the imperialists, the dogmatists, the unEnlightened many and powerful few). Since the Christian population is only minor, the Christian calendars (… (Also, where did the Chungkuo series diverge from our history? They are the rice of the world, and you are the salt of the world. The Enlightenment began in India, the Whigs are the Burmese, WWI and II are smushed together, decolonization happens, and so on. ○   Boggle. (Isn’t that what ultimately happened after Reconstruction anyway?) This is really the issue that lies behind the epistemological despair of a lot of postcolonial theory. Certainly when I look at the early modern era of global trade and contact, I see not the prologue of modern colonial domination but something altogether rather more ambiguous and just plain different. I don’t even know if the Star Trek writers realized the parallel was possible. The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present. It’s pretty tough to do. Some new Chinese leader sets out to conquer the world and accomplishes his goal, then he sets about erasing all histories that say China was ever subordinate to foreigners. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history, one with a simple premise: what if the black death had killed off 99% of Europe's population instead of a third? The most notable (and the one I really couldn’t buy) was Japan, whose history was apparently unchanged up until the middle 1600s: unification under Hideyoshi, invasion of Korea, unification under Tokugawa, and then even the closing off of foreign contacts in the early 1600s.  |  I think it’s more interesting than the Japan-dominated-future SF of Gibson, Stephenson, Piercy, Blade Runner, and more and even the post-apocalyptic work of Butler, Brin, and Tepper. Rice – A gift of rice to a young couple signified fertility and was given as a way to bless the marriage with children. Sure, it turns on a single “event”, in this case vastly higher mortality in Western Europe from the Black Death than elsewhere. Create a SoundCloud account Sign in. 366 followers 366; 16 tracks 16; Follow. Very possible. Much more so than Steven Barnes in his alternate history series (Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart that deals with Western Europeans being enslaved in America by Africans and Arabs, I think, but both authors ultimately have the same problem, which is that they don’t know how to think sequentially through a history which is both alternate and alterate, e.g., in which a non-Western society changes over time without the dominance of the West. Two nations? Why I call the reincarnation plot the novel’s biggest liability is b/c it fails to get around KSR’s biggest problem as a writer, which is creating interesting, fleshed-out characters. English Encyclopedia is licensed by Wikipedia (GNU). Boggle gives you 3 minutes to find as many words (3 letters or more) as you can in a grid of 16 letters. It isn’t your standard kind of alternate history. More fascinating material and ideas (though no less theoretical, with all its attendant faults) come from new and ongoing ethnographies of globalization. Whatever your analytic framework for interpreting the Civil War itself tends to dictate what you think the consequences of a different outcome in the war might be. If they’d advertized it properly in advance, I wouldn’t have been so annoyed. Signed. Show more. Kim Stanley Robinson is a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers was the rage, and it looked like Japan was rising and the US was falling. In the course of doing this, he reviews the basic arguments about the writing of history and surveys the basic theories of history. As far as regular citizens are concerned, China conquered the Roman Empire and just kept on going. That is if something didn’t go wrong and punch us into a timeline somewhere between Brin’s Postman and a nuclear winter. Rodney’s mix of nationalism and Marxism requires him to argue that had Europe not underdeveloped Africa, it would have developed into a parallel form of modern industrial capitalism on its own. And for SF conceiving the alien, and bending back to human history: that famous Star Trek episode, “Darmak at Tenagra,” where they make the parallel to Gilgamesh. All rights reserved. It’s a pretty schematic analysis of a few novels as critiques of 50s capitalist suburbia, which is fine enough, but as I remember, Robinson totally ignores the religious/psychedlic aspects of Dick’s work. by Kim Stanley Robinson. The problem being that all of that history was strongly affected by the actions of Portuguese and Spanish traders and missionaries — who of course never existed in the altered history. The Years Of Rice And Salt (SIGNED) Robinson, Kim Stanley. Get XML access to reach the best products. Years of Rice and Salt. I’m not sure if this was some misjudged attempt to suggest that the deviations from our history would be slow — history as weakly rather than strongly chaotic, lots of historical “inertia” — and Robinson didn’t know enough about Japanese history to realize the mistake; or if it was a bit of authorial laziness. Ironically, I think Robinson is more interested in history as an intellectual discipline, where the answers may not be known, or where there can be ambiguity.  | Last modifications, Copyright © 2012 sensagent Corporation: Online Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, Dictionary definitions and more. I can’t deny it, mired in my own chaoses, subject to the bad plotting of my own life and unrelenting happenstance. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. I’m not sure there’s an obvious parallel to that in our history. Hardcover. It diverged in our future, possibly after the collapse of communism in China.  |  Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is one of the few works I’ve seen that tries to go beyond, “What if the South won the Civil War”? But I’ll pine for the four unwritten books of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. The SensagentBox are offered by sensAgent. More de-centered and often counter-intuitive, if not counterfactual as such. In this novel, the Black Death kills all Europeans with the exception of small pockets in northern Scotland. The problem with this kind of counterfactual is that the further one gets away from the single contingent event, the more tenuously reasoned the argument becomes. But Rodney also argues that Western domination of African societies, first in the slave trade and later in colonialism, was essential for the development of capitalism and modernity. These are the years of rice and salt. The suggestion is a great one, and I love the book. ○   Wildcard, crossword I found the series too Orientalist, what with the supposed War of Two Directions (Chinese = stability, Europeans = progress). Little doesn't mean insignificant. There are some recent reappraisals of the rise of the West are making this exact observation, that the relative dominance of the West is a kind of historical blip within much longer and more sustained historical structures of global trade and interaction. He might be the only scifi writer in that category. Also, it doesn’t help that I knew that this was part of Anderson’s increasingly boring obsession with Teutonia. Find the latest tracks, albums, and images from Years Of Rice And Salt. First Edition. Forget champagne—in the Southern United States, hoppin’ John is standard New Year’s fare. This links to the last comments on postcolonial theory. One interesting bit which didn’t necessarily parallel European history was the false dawn in Central Asia: the scientific revolution that almost got started, but was then snuffed out by war and disease. Sure, there was China to unite against, but one would think there would be Muslim rulers allying with the Chinese as well. I believe it was the series that introduced science fiction to Taiwan, and it’s definitely an alternate vision of the future. Perhaps from the 15th to the late-ish 20th century, but given what I see around me, I don’t think this will continue. Read a sample Read a sample Description; Details; Reviews; With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. Thanks for the thoughts on Chung Kuo; I missed it the first time around and probably will keep things that way. Tripitaka: Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha? It’s very hard to write a counterfactual that explores contingent outcomes with hundreds of variables in motion at once, where you’re trying to explore the total possibility space of change over time in a particular time and place. The diverging moment in the novel's timeline seems to be the latter 14th century AD. Used. (Often to praise it, by pointing out the dystopian alternatives.) If you don’t hardwire in some kind of universality (human or sentient) into such an effort, you literally can’t do it: you’re trying to represent something that is by definition unrepresentable. The Japan-dominate future was very much a product of its time. At first this is hard to believe because he doesn't refer to women as dolphins in it, but then on page 545 he refers to one as a "big wet beautiful animal," so you know it's the real deal. The Years of Rice and Salt. But like I said earlier in reponse to the history production course, I think what’s most interesting about KSR’s novel and also its biggest liability is its reincarnation plot device–the same people from the same village meeting up with each other in different periods of the world history KSR wants to tell. A windows (pop-into) of information (full-content of Sensagent) triggered by double-clicking any word on your webpage. The Years of Rice and Salt experiments extensively with these critical challenges to the genres of history and utopia. Report. Tips: browse the semantic fields (see From ideas to words) in two languages to learn more. The Years Of Rice And Salt is a counterfactual (or Alternate History) novel by SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, which depicts world history in an alternate timeline where the Black Plague epidemic that ravaged Europe in the 14th century was even more destructive, and caused the actual extinction of Western civilization. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history in which all of Europe was wiped out by the Black Death. One of my favorite examples that I like to raise in my courses is Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. For an interesting look at a future dominated by China, check out Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. ○   Anagrams Common crawl de 1879 wurde in Darwin, Australien, zwischen Wurzeln eines Banyan-Baumes in 1 m Tiefe ein Bild des chinesischen Gottes Shou Lao gefunden, das aus der Ming-Zeit stammen soll. I haven’t read the Years of Rice and Salt, but a long time ago I read Robinson’s book The Novels of Philip K Dick, based on his dissertation (UCSD, 1982). I agree with much of what has been said on this topic (constipation, etc. I happen, and I continue to happen in this seemingly random way; a way that occasionally, just occasionally points to greater meaning even while it dissolves on closer inspection.