The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

An interesting touch is that the main characters recur from episode to episode, through a framing story based on Buddhist cosmology where their karmas have become linked, and they find themselves meeting over and over in different relationships, both in the world and in the bardo between lives. He tells the story in a series of linked vignettes, episodes ranging in time from when a soldier in Tamerlane's golden horde comes across the utterly depopulated cities of the Balkans to sometime in the mid-21st century when a Chinese revolutionary and academic settles down at an agricultural school in California (that we get strong hints is located in the same place that UC Davis, where Robinson lives and teaches, is in our history) to reflect on his life and find a kind of peace.

The way he frames the narrative is a bit unusual and interesting. It explores historiography, the way cultures interact, and the question of the prominent role oppression has played in human history, all in the context of Robinson's slightly quirky humanist leftism and communitarianism that readers of his previous books should be fairly familiar with by now. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history, one with a simple premise: what if the black death had killed off 99% of Europe's population instead of a third? As one would expect from Robinson, the book is packed, almost overflowing, with ideas. The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, his first since 1997's Antarctica.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson