10.21.2007
The Years of Rice and Salt
by Kim Stanley Robinson, 763pgs paperback
Overall Grade: B
Very interesting premise - what if the Black Death had wiped out 99% of Europe's population instead of the 33% it did? Robinson assumes that this would nix all the Christians and rarely mentions them afterwards (I'm not sure I agree because by the Middle Ages there were Christians in a great many places). He then plays out the history of the world in the interplay between Islamic and Buddhist peoples. Also interesting - though probably more interesting if you know more about the tenets of both faiths so you can understand what people are quoting, saying, and killing each other about. The time scale also fuzzes out rather quickly, so I was never quite sure if advancements were being made proximally with our own historical timeline or if they were occurring later.
Labels: genre: fiction, genre: historical, media: book
