The Years of Potato and Maize

If you're not familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, it's when the Black Death kills 99% of everyone living in Europe, setting up for the dominance of the Middle East and China. Well this is a bit different. The Black Death kills 99% of Europe, the Middle East, India, China and Egypt. Basically, everyone along the Silk Road.

What happens to the Americas, Africa and Oceania?
 

Stephen

Banned
99% still leaves 1% alive the population will bounce back and in a few thousand years you have a repeat of OTL.
 
The one percent will still retain a lot of advantages over the New World Cultures, but a repeat of OTL? That's certainly not going to happen.

One of the few severe flaws of the book is that it has the non-European world behaving almost exactly as it did with Europe. The Chinese, for example, at first behave almost exactly as in OTL, despite the fact that the importation of New World crops radically altered the status quo there. Then they go and discover the New World not long after Columbus did. Then a random Uzbek state develops the entire proto-Scientific Revolution and Scientific Revolution (that took Europe centuries) all in about 20 years. By the modern era they appear entirely caught up with OTL. A more realistic take would have much slower technological development. Similarly, it would be questionable whether the Amerindians would have caught up, given even a thousand years to do so.

Still it'd be interesting to see what they would have done with all that time. The continents were always undergoing change - it'd be fascinating to see where it went.
 
The one percent will still retain a lot of advantages over the New World Cultures, but a repeat of OTL? That's certainly not going to happen.

One of the few severe flaws of the book is that it has the non-European world behaving almost exactly as it did with Europe. The Chinese, for example, at first behave almost exactly as in OTL, despite the fact that the importation of New World crops radically altered the status quo there. Then they go and discover the New World not long after Columbus did. Then a random Uzbek state develops the entire proto-Scientific Revolution and Scientific Revolution (that took Europe centuries) all in about 20 years. By the modern era they appear entirely caught up with OTL. A more realistic take would have much slower technological development. Similarly, it would be questionable whether the Amerindians would have caught up, given even a thousand years to do so.

Still it'd be interesting to see what they would have done with all that time. The continents were always undergoing change - it'd be fascinating to see where it went.
That's only a flaw as straight AH. From the perspective of the book, it makes total sense. Everything happens similarly to OTL because it's the same souls in the same groups. Everyone gets reincarnated, so the same people who developed OTL are just shifted in ATL.
 
Top