The Years Of Rice And Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson in general)

Member Name: Mitnik

Product:	Kim Stanley Robinson in general
Date:	08/08/03 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Deeply Satisfying, Immensely Informative

Disadvantages: Somewhat devoid of suprises

** As always this`ll be moved once a home becomes available elsewhere...

In the year 1405, Bold Bardash, a scout in the army of Tamerlaine, last of the great Mongol conquerors, penetrates Hungary to spy out the land for his master's coming onslaught. To his consternation, Bold finds the land utterly devastated by plague. Not simply reduced, but completely emptied of human life. Europe, in its entirety, has been depopulated and Western, Latin, Christian civilisation becomes nothing more than a historical curiosity for all the ages that follow. And so In ten fascinating episodes, Robinson leads us from that late medieval moment down the centuries to a modern world that struggles with the same elements of overpopulation, pollution, political and moral failure that we do. Dipping in and out of Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Amerindian cultures, he turns over and over a provocative series of questions; how may people best live together? What is morality? What is progress? What is the true nature of these great non-Western cultures and traditions?

In what hasto be one of the most unique narrative techniques I`ve seen in a long time Robinson uses Hindu-Buddhist concepts of reincarnation to neatly tie together each episode. Bold Bardash dies and returns to life as Bihari, a village girl in India. His companion, Kyu, comes back as Kokila, another girl in the same village. Tied to each other through successive rebirths, these two characters and a half dozen others form a small, tight interweaving complex, a tangle of lives and relationships running through and around and over each other again and again and again as they strive to achieve an elusive perfection, or at least, as they frequently complain in brief afterlife interludes, at least some small degree of improvement in the world!

Robinson is one of the most socially and politically responsible writers, not simply in the science fiction genre, but in any genre. He stares at the great dilemm
as of our times, reflecting them and refracting them through his stories, turning them over and over to examine them first from one angle, then from another, seeking by this repetitive, recursive method to arrive at some truth or solution greater than the sum of its narrative parts. There's a breadth of vision here hard to find in other writers' works, a painstaking attention to detail, coupled to a capacity to examine cultures in their longest, most sweeping developments, spread over centuries.

Robinson is not simply a great writer; he is also a great educator. The Years Of Rice And Salt is an enormously timely book. Reading it affords insights into realms of foreign culture (that sadly too many people in this day and age simply won't sit still to be taught in any other fashion). Giving his readers a real taste of some of the divisions and complexities of modern Islam is the best sort of service any writer could perform at this moment, and this is only one of the cultures Robinson chooses to explore in narratives that are dramatic, comic, and sometimes tragic.

There are, perhaps, only three flaws that can be alleged. Firstly, that Robinson is, overall, perhaps too naive in his belief in the eventual, gradual, inevitable development of some real solution to the world's problems. Then again, as his stories get closer and closer to the modern era, they begin to get slower and slower, and more and more burdened with philosophy and socio-scientific musings. As the characters acquire more sophisticated tools of reason, they can't resist reasoning with them, at great length! Lastly, if one is familiar with Robinson's early work, one will see that he is no longer thinking new thoughts. The magnificent Mars trilogy deployed a great many of the same themes as The Years Of Rice And Salt, as did Antarctica. No question, these are messages that can bear repeating again and again and again, but this is vintage Robinson, deeply satis
fying, provocative, elegant, demanding, immensely informative and very necessary.

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