The Years of Rice and Salt

I don’t think the two phrases ‘alternate history’ and ‘alternative history’ are interchangeable. Alternate history is the ‘what-if’ story, where for example most of the population of Europe was wiped out by the Plague in the Middle Ages. Alternative history suggests an academic discipline, alternatives to the usual study of history as taught in schools, history as a series of battles and various uninteresting kings.

Alternative histories are for example feminist or working-class histories, and in his alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt Kim Stanley Robinson addresses both, from the divergence in history mentioned above. At many points in the book he does go into lecture mode possibly too much, and very often has different characters advance certain of his ideas at different times. History does not however follow a very different path from our own world, suggesting inevitability though I’d be surprised if that was what Robinson intended: the clash of Islam and the Chinese way, with Buddhism squeezed out between them, produces industrialisation, electric communication, and a Great War that lasts from 1912 to 1979 in our calendar (which calendar has been long forgotten), and the splitting of the atom (and probably the Renaissance. I don’t know if anyone invents the cuckoo clock). But but … the natives of the Americas, for example, developed advanced civilisations without having the wheel at all and there’s nothing here as variant as that. Robinson’s narrative suggests that the best cultures come from the mixing of others, where for example Chinese and Islamic cultures might mix and remove the crueler aspects of both – footbinding for example didn’t survive contact with the West for very long. And there is nothing, apart from one trading expedition, of the African cultures in the book’s world; Africa is as much a carte noire as it was for the imperialist designs of Europeans in the 19th century who conventiently ignored artefacts from Aswan to Zimbabwe.
You can tell me all about it in the next Bardo 

Whether the literary device to link the stories in the volume, the recurring meetings of souls in the Bardo (a Buddhist concept that isn’t exactly an afterlife, more a between-lives, a clearing-house for souls waiting to be reincarnated), is necessary or not, I wasn’t sure, and although he plainly wants us to see the Native American [if you can refer to ‘America’ in a timeline where it’s never called that] ‘Hodenosaunee’ culture as ideal, a benign-matriarchal culture where all citizens, male or female, have a voice, he spends a lot of time away from that culture and berating the distorted form of Islam preached by fundamentalists, when he isn’t attacking the Chinese for not having any moral precepts against cruelty, ‘so they were cruel because they could be’. His analysis of why Islam, and by implication Christianity, is a monotheistic religion – religions formed by seminomadic herdsman peoples look to a Shepherd God, while settled agricultural cultures develop multiple gods – doesn’t explain why the concept of a Mother Goddess was overturned. One theory is that once people were able to raise crops they no longer needed to pray the Earth to be fertile – they knew it was – , but instead needed to pray the Sky to give sun and rain when they needed it. This however doesn’t necessarily presuppose a movement from a female to a male deity. The Japanese sun deity for example, Amaterasu, is female.

Years of Rice and Salt is an excellent counterfactual history. The Muslim and Chinese worlds divvy the world up between them, back in what we call the Middle Ages (middle of what? I ask).