Most people don't think about the plague anymore. Not the 2020 version, but the big one—the Black Death. But Kim Stanley Robinson did. In 2002, he published a book that basically asked: "What if the plague didn't just kill a third of Europe, but 99% of it?" That’s the entire premise of The Years of Rice and Salt. It is a massive, sprawling, 700-page beast of an alternate history novel that somehow manages to feel more real than actual history textbooks.
It’s weird. It’s dense. It’s beautiful.
Most alternate history stories focus on one thing. What if the Nazis won? What if the South won the Civil War? They usually fixate on white, Western people doing different stuff. Robinson does the opposite. He wipes Western civilization off the map by page twenty. Gone. The "empty continent" of Europe becomes a ghost world, eventually resettled by Muslim and Chinese explorers.
What's left is a world dominated by the East. It’s a story told over seven centuries through the eyes of a "jati"—a group of souls who keep reincarnating together. They show up as soldiers, scientists, slaves, and feminists. You track their progress through the Years of Rice and Salt as they try to figure out why the world is so cruel and how to make it better.
Why the "What If" in The Years of Rice and Salt Works So Well
Usually, when a writer changes one big thing in history, it feels like a gimmick. Robinson doesn't do gimmicks. He’s a researcher at heart. He looked at the actual demographics of the 14th century and realized that if Europe had truly collapsed, the power vacuum would have been sucked up by the two biggest engines of the time: the Islamic world and the Chinese Ming Dynasty.
This isn't just a "vibe." It’s built on real geography.
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In the book, the colonization of the Americas (called Yingzhou here) isn't a Spanish conquest. It’s a Chinese discovery from the west and a Muslim discovery from the east. Because there's no Christianity to drive the specific brand of European colonialism we know, the "New World" develops totally differently. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) actually survive and become a major world power because they get access to modern technology without the immediate genocide of our timeline.
Honestly, it makes you realize how fragile our own history is. One flea. One slightly more lethal strain of Yersinia pestis. That’s all it would have taken to delete the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution as we know it, and the American Revolution.
Reincarnation as a Narrative Engine
The weirdest part of the book is the "Bardo." Between chapters, the characters die and meet in this Buddhist/Hindu purgatory. They argue about their past lives. They complain to the gods. Then they get shoved back down into new bodies.
Some people hate this. They think it’s too "woo-woo" for a book that is otherwise very focused on science and politics. But it’s the only way a story covering 700 years can have a consistent heart. You start to recognize the characters. "K" is always the rebel, the one pushing for change. "B" is the cautious friend, the one trying to survive. "I" is the intellectual or the seeker.
It turns history into a personal grudge match.
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The Science and the "Long War"
Around the middle of the book, you hit the "Long War." In our world, we had World War I and World War II. In the world of The Years of Rice and Salt, there is one massive, multi-decade global conflict that pits the Chinese-led alliance against the Muslim world. It is brutal. It’s trench warfare, but it’s happening in a world where the Enlightenment didn't happen in Paris, but in Samarkand and Hangzhou.
Robinson is obsessed with how science happens. He argues that science isn't "European." It's human. In the book, a character named Khalid discovers the vacuum and the laws of motion in an alchemy lab because he’s trying to disprove old Aristotelian ideas that were preserved in Arabic texts.
It’s a bit of a slap in the face to the idea that the West has a monopoly on "progress."
- Technology develops anyway. The telescope, the printing press, and the steam engine all show up.
- The timing is different. Without the specific pressures of European competition, some things move slower, others faster.
- Medical ethics are different. Because the Islamic world has a different view on the body than the medieval Church, surgery and anatomy advance in unique ways.
The Most Controversial Part: The Ending
If you’re looking for a fast-paced thriller, this isn't it. The final sections of the book are very philosophical. They deal with a world that has finally reached a state of relative peace. The characters are living in a 20th-century equivalent, attending academic conferences and discussing the philosophy of history.
Some readers find this boring. I think it’s the point. Robinson is a utopian writer. He wants to know if humanity can ever actually "win" against its own violent nature. He uses the Years of Rice and Salt to suggest that maybe, just maybe, if we had a few different cultural starting points, we could have built a world that wasn't quite so obsessed with hierarchy and domination.
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It’s not a perfect book. The chapters set in the Americas feel a bit long, and some of the philosophical debates in the Bardo get repetitive. But the ambition is staggering. There is nothing else like it on the shelf.
What You Should Do If You Want to Read It
If you’re ready to dive into this 700-year alternate timeline, don't try to power through it in a weekend. It’s a marathon.
- Get a map. Keep a map of the world handy. Because the names of the cities and countries are different (since they are transliterated from Arabic or Chinese), you can get lost. When they talk about "Al-Andalus," they mean Spain. When they talk about "Lanzhou," they are often referring to the American West Coast.
- Focus on the Jati. Don't worry about memorizing every minor character. Just look for the initials. If a character’s name starts with K, B, or I, they are part of the main soul group. Follow their personality traits.
- Read the "Alchemist" chapter twice. It’s the heart of the book’s argument about how science and religion can coexist or collide. It’s arguably the best piece of historical fiction (or counter-factual fiction) ever written.
- Expect to be uncomfortable. The book challenges the idea that "Western Values" are the default for a successful society. It forces you to look at the world through a non-Eurocentric lens, which is exactly why it’s still relevant twenty years after it was written.
The Years of Rice and Salt isn't just a book about the past; it’s a manual for thinking about the future. It teaches you that nothing is inevitable. The world we live in is just one version of what could have happened. If you can change the way you see history, you can change the way you see the people around you today.
Go find a copy at a used bookstore—the older, beat-up paperbacks feel more authentic to the "weathered" vibe of the story. Skip the spark notes and just let the reincarnation cycle wash over you. It’s a long trip, but it's worth the mileage.