Years of Rice and Salt

Im surprised this one hasnt made it here. What did anyone think of Robinson's take on an AH where Europe is destroyed by the Black Death? I thought the stream of events was plausible but the afterlife sequences were distracting. Comments?
 
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Mike Collins said:
Im surprised this one hasnt made it here. What did anyone think of Robinson's take on an AH where Europe is destroyed by the Black Death? I thought the stream of events was plausible but the afterlife sequences were distracting. Comments?

It was reviewed here, long ago. Long ago being several months.
I will point out that Europe has the genes for resistance to Black Death. It's why some people are AIDS resistant or AIDS proof. They have the right proteins on their white blood cells to resist attack by HIV and Yersina Pestis. Europe would do a better job of surviving the Black Death than other countries. It initially spread more in Europe due to the local ecology for rats and people. It's cold in Europe so people tend to be forced to stay in houses, cohabiting with rats, fleas, and yersina pestis. If you can flee a plague to live in tents or huts you can leave the rats behind.
 
Personally, I thought that the book was okay overall, but did have a tendency to wander a bit. I am somewhat skeptical of the advance of technology in this game. (Essentially it's like a game of CIVILIZATION: the same stuff is discovered as in OTL, just at different times) Having the North American native population holding off both Chinese and Muslim colonization was also a little unbelievable. The hyperadvancement of India was a little strange too. These are just quibbling points, though.
 
I dont know about the impossibility of the Indians holding off the Chinese and Muslims. KSR posits the American Indians were more politically organized and had an influx of intel/technology from the Japanese dude in the book. Seems to me the possibility is there......
 
It did feel like a game of Civilization. There were too many accidents of great man of history episodes.

  • An ex-samurai doesn't like china for conquering Japan, so he hikes across North America and sets up the Iroquoi League.
  • An Indian king gets the Steam Engine advancement, and goes out to conquer half the world.
  • A single alchemist in mid-Asia starts the scientific revolution, and takes the world from about the 14'th century to the 18'th

It is an interesting attempt at a world without the west. However, the technological advancement doesn't seem organic, and it doesn't answer how the death of a continent positively affects the technological growth of other areas.
 

Diamond

Banned
Thyme said:
It is an interesting attempt at a world without the west. However, the technological advancement doesn't seem organic, and it doesn't answer how the death of a continent positively affects the technological growth of other areas.

I thought he was trying to answer that old 'nature abhors a vacuum' thing with regards to the Indian scientific revolution. I do agree that it was not adequately justified.

I managed to slog through this whole book only after 3, count 'em, 3 aborted attempts. The whole reincarnation thing, while certainly a unique way to tie the disparate time periods together, gave the whole work a very outlandish taste. It didn't feel 'real' to me.

I think the book would've been easier to swallow if it had been done as a series of discrete short stories, with totally different characters in each story. That way, the whole scope of the TL could still have been presented, but those of us who are less mystically-inclined wouldn't have had to suffer through all that stuff. But hey, what do I know? KSR is published and I'm not. :)
 

Grey Wolf

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Mike Collins said:
Im surprised this one hasnt made it here. What did anyone think of Robinson's take on an AH where Europe is destroyed by the Black Death? I thought the stream of events was plausible but the afterlife sequences were distracting. Comments?

I kind of thought the opposite - I felt that when the afterlife parts dropped ouit later on all continuity was lost, and I never finished the thing. I thought the idea of souls playing different but similar roles across a variety of lifetimes an intriguing one, and it also brought an element of fun trying to work out who was who. Then it became less frequent and we got one world after another, and little cohesion between them and altough about 3/4 of the way through it died a death on me

Grey Wolf
 
I read this some months ago. It took a little doing to get through 'cause it felt like the book was drifting dangerously towards irrelevance from time to time, but it had an interesting enough premise to keep it alive for me.

Rather a bleak world without the Europeans. And an unremittingly harsh view of Muslims and the type of world they would build. That aspect made the book flat out creepy for me. Theocracies are frightening things.

Anybody here read Guns, Germs, and Steel? It looks at why the way the world shaped up the way it did based on some very fundamental causes. Worth reading for anyone interesting in the alternate history thing.
 
Thyme said:
An ex-samurai doesn't like china for conquering Japan, so he hikes across North America and sets up the Iroquoi League.

Well, from what I gathered, he didn`t actually set up the Hodenosaunee League, merely helped it get it`s objectives straight (become modernized and hold off colonization and destruction, basically)

It is kind of strange, though. I`m sure he would`ve tryed to set up an anti-China sentiment, and the Hodenosaunee went on to fight with the Chinese in the Long War.
 
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