"The Years of Rice and Salt" is a novel with a good idea with less-than-artful execution. I am big fan of alternate history and there are a number of things I like about the premise. One is that the novel looks at one change and shows its ripple effect across centuries. Two is that it generally looks at the lives of ordinary people, especially women, in the various locations and time periods. Third is that the vision that is presented of the future is not overly optimistic or pessimistic. Too often, the genre can be dystopian or apocalyptic and show a future vastly different than our own. But I think one of the novel's strengths is that it shows how many things would have developed along similar lines as they have in our history. Science and technology remain bound by the same laws, even if the locations in which they were discovered or created differed. Fourth, I liked the way that those discoveries took on different terminologies given the different intellectual sources in the world. For example, electricity becomes qi and climate change becomes balance with nature. Fifth, I like some of the interesting turns the history takes - the pioneers resettling Firanja (Europe), the Renaissance in Samarkand, how the Americas being discovered from West to East would have affected the development of the continent, the rise of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) league as a major global power, the Industrial Revolution in India, and groups of scientists in peacetime being able to keep the ideas that could lead to the atomic bomb a secret. Lastly, I like the reincarnation premise and, for the most part, it works.

But I do think that the novel suffers from a number of narrative flaws. The novel is divided into ten parts and not all ten parts are equal. I feel that the novel is stronger it its earlier chapters. They are rich with detail and ideas. But from the contemporary 19th century to the present (the last three to four chapters), I feel that Robinson wanted to rush to get to his ending. And I don't feel like the ending was completely earned. In fact, I feel the quality of the writing was less strong in these later chapters. Granted, the novel is nearly 800 pages but I would have rather had a 1000 page novel with more consistency. And these last chapters become deep philosophical meditations on history. While they are wonderful in and of themselves, I found them a bit too abstract and not well-integrated into the narrative.

Robinson also tried to write the chapters in different styles but I really didn't notice beyond the first chapter and in the later chapters when characters began to get self-referential. I feel like a novel that did this technique to perfection was "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell where the six stories really do feel like they were written by different authors.

I also have problems is with one of its central premises - that Christianity would have disappeared completely. To say that Christianity would have disappeared with the destruction of Europe ignores the presence of a large Oriental Christian community in the Middle East, India, and even China. This community split off from the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and they exist today in groups like the Coptic Christians and the Syriac Christians in India. This group was sizable (large than Europe) and would not have been affected by the plague that killed off Europe. It only started declining deeply in the 14th Century. A few other points that I would contest: would Buddhism have taken on as large of a role in the world? Did there need to be an earth-shattering conflagration in the middle of the 20th Century?

In the end, I enjoyed reading the novel but not as much as I would have liked. I think that other authors in the genre have done things better and with more artistry. But I cannot deny that the novel has immense imagination and is worth picking up if you have the time.