"The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson

The year is 1405 A.D. and as scouts of Timur the Lame's Mongol army ride into Eastern Europe they encounter an empty land and the remnants of a civilisation that has been wiped out by plague. The premise for the novel is an alternative history for the next 800 years in which the black plague eradicated 99 percent of Europe's population at this point in time instead of roughly one-third, as occurred in reality. History is therefore written largely by China, India and the Islamic world of Central Asia and the Middle East. The story is broken up into ten "books", each of which is set in different parts of the world at different points in history and with a new set of living people, which are in fact reincarnations of the same characters, all part of a cosmic "jati", a group of souls whose past and future lives are always intertwined. In the first book, a exiled Mongolian horseman, Bold, wanders through the dead lands of Eastern Europe before being captured by Arabic slavers and sold to a Chinese treasure fleet, led by the famous Chinese admiral Zheng-He, where he meets an African slave boy, Kyu. The two disembark at China in Hangzhou and work briefly at a restaurant for Madame I-Li and her husband Shen, who Kyu murders before setting fire to the shop and making an escape to Beijing with Bold in tow. The two get mixed up in the politics of the emperor's court and are eventually executed. In another story, A Sufi wanderer Bistami is appointed as a zamindar in Agra, India in the times of the Mughal emperor Akbar, before being exiled to Mecca where he eventually goes on to travel across the Sahara and Gibraltar strait to the newly-populated lands of Al-Andulus (modern Spain). There he meets the Sultana Katima and her husband Sultan Mawji Darya who are travelling into the lands north of the Pyrenees mountains to establish a new township in the uninhabited lands of what is modern France. In each story, reincarnated versions of the same characters are identified to the reader through a common use of the first letter in their names (i.e. B, K, I, P, Z, S etc.). The "K" character is passionate, short-tempered and fights for justice in the world by lashing out, often at his/her fellow jati members; "B" is kind, gentle and always supportive of his/her fellow members; "I" is ever curious, scholarly and rational; "Z" a figure of power; "P" a wanderer who weaves in and out of the stories, and "S" is often the antagonist of the other members, always set in a position to challenge them. Between each life, the characters return to the "bardo" (from Budhism) for judgement by the gods and to await reincarnation where they ponder their gains and losses on the "great wheel" of death and rebirth, working their way towards enlightenment.

The stories through the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries mostly involve historical events and people very similar to our own history; eventually the Chinese sail across the pacific and conquer the western half of the new world, while muslims from repopulated Europe and West Africa conquer the eastern side of the Americas. A kind of scientific renaissance in Samarqand results in discoveries in chemistry, the speed of sound and development of the laws of gravitation. When Japan is invaded and annexed by the Chinese, Japanese exiles move to North America and banding with the Hodenosaunee tribes of the East coast form a native North American nation that resists the colonies of the old world and becomes a successful world power centuries later. In the 18th century an industrial and scientific revolution in the Indian provence of Travancore sets off a new Indian world power. Eventually rebellion and religious tensions in China's west lead to full-scale war that rages across the globe for over 60 years between the Islamic world and the allied powers of China, Travancore and the Hodenosaunee. The end of the war comes with a treaty that sees Islamic nations surrendering and paying reparations to China and her allies, but at the cost of over a billion lives and China withdrawing from Japan and giving large amounts of territory in Northern Asia to the Japanese. The military dictatorship in China that came to power during the war years is eventually overthrown more than thirty years later and the last chapter of the novel presents a world similar to our own in terms of modern science, politics, environmental issues etc.

Overall this was a really great book; the premise was a very interesting thought experiment and the story is rich in the history, philosophies and cultures of Asia and the Middle East. I really liked the use of the jati to connect together the flow of the story and to give it direction, to feel for the characters and their struggle. Much of the focus of the novel is on social history, women's liberties, the divide between poor and rich with eastern philosophies used to study the theories of the cyclic or linear nature of history and the role of the individual shaping history or history shaping the individual. I particularly enjoyed the chapters "Awake to Emptiness", which provided a kind of play on characters and storytelling styles in "Journey to the West" (probably better know to some as "Monkey Magic" :), even suggesting that "B" is in fact a reincarnation of Monkey himself); and "Nsara" in which Islamic feminism, student activism and scientific breakthroughs collide in post-war Europe. On a slightly negative note, it's perhaps the ending (last chapter) that lets the book down; it starts to gets a bit too dictatorial with the long discussions on history, which to be frank are a bit boring and feel like Stanley-Robinson is trying to give us a classroom lesson. I felt like the story got a bit lost and I'm not sure I really felt satisfied that there was any real resolving of the struggle of the characters. That said, there was rarely a dull moment in the preceding chapters (with the exception perhaps of "Warp and Weft") which is an achievement for a book with over 750 pages. That said, I'm a bit biased, because I really do like Kim Stanley-Robinson's books and so I can understand that others might not have found it so exciting.

Overall really happy with this one and definitely recommended for anyone willing to put in the time.