Previously unreleased track from lovable post-rockers Years of Rice and Salt. Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt is one of the few works I’ve seen that tries to go beyond, “What if the South won the Civil War”? Used. Report. withywindle said: I happen, and I continue to happen in this seemingly random way; a way that occasionally, just occasionally points to greater meaning even while it dissolves on closer inspection. He seems like a … I’m not sure there’s an obvious parallel to that in our history. Find out more, an offensive content(racist, pornographic, injurious, etc. Rodney’s mix of nationalism and Marxism requires him to argue that had Europe not underdeveloped Africa, it would have developed into a parallel form of modern industrial capitalism on its own. But I’ll pine for the four unwritten books of Master Li and Number Ten Ox. The Years Of Rice And Salt (SIGNED) Robinson, Kim Stanley. And he situates his own writing in those traditions and positions himself in current debates. Victory at Gettysburg becomes victory in the Civil War? Preview — The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think it would read something more like Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete (or Paul Park’s Celestis) than The Years of Rice and Salt, however. They all just have the Americas stay in more or less the state they were in in 1492 until … Sure, it turns on a single “event”, in this case vastly higher mortality in Western Europe from the Black Death than elsewhere. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history in which all of Europe was wiped out by the Black Death. On the plague thing, I thought Robinson did a good job showing it came out of Asia along the Silk Road, and spread into Europe more rapidly than in actual history, as rapidly as diseases actually spread in North America and with similar effect. The Japan-dominate future was very much a product of its time. Very possible. ebook. Since the Christian population is only minor, the Christian calendars (… ○   Boggle. Lucky New Year. Perhaps from the 15th to the late-ish 20th century, but given what I see around me, I don’t think this will continue. The problem with this kind of counterfactual is that the further one gets away from the single contingent event, the more tenuously reasoned the argument becomes. The web service Alexandria is granted from Memodata for the Ebay search. Mfecane, Mines and Mandela: Southern Africa from 1600 to 2006, Fall 2006, History 8C From Leopold to Kabila: The Bad Twentieth Century in Central Africa, Spring 2008, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System. The Years of Rice and Salt Quotes Showing 1-30 of 55. But Rodney also argues that Western domination of African societies, first in the slave trade and later in colonialism, was essential for the development of capitalism and modernity. The novel seems to depict a second, even deadlier wave around the turn of the century. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Add new content to your site from Sensagent by XML. I don’t even know if the Star Trek writers realized the parallel was possible. See if you can get into the grid Hall of Fame ! That, perhaps, is the most enduring impression that "The Years of Rice and Salt" (for all the progressive uplift of its conclusion) leaves. Thanks also for the tip on McHugh; about the only lengthy thing I’ve read on China is Spence’s Search for Modern China, which is probably conventional, but that’s just what I wanted as a starting point. I’m sure you remember. The Years of Rice and Salt: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a 784 epic covering an alternative historical time line from the Middle Ages to (roughly) the present. Oh yeah, Chung Kuo. The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. It occurred to me after a while that they could have also made a parallel to the role of the Bible in Western culture–our own recent past had people so deeply rooted in the Bible that they couldn’t speak outside of its cadences and metaphors. The End. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers was the rage, and it looked like Japan was rising and the US was falling. The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) is Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, his first since 1997's Antarctica. Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. Forget champagne—in the Southern United States, hoppin’ John is standard New Year’s fare. English Encyclopedia is licensed by Wikipedia (GNU). (For purposes of this discussion, is Japan part of the West?) Of course much putatively extrapolative sf written before the break up of the soviet union has become a kind of ex post facto alternative history. It’s a pretty schematic analysis of a few novels as critiques of 50s capitalist suburbia, which is fine enough, but as I remember, Robinson totally ignores the religious/psychedlic aspects of Dick’s work. I would like to mention the single worst alternate-history “story” ever written: Poul Anderson, back about 1990 I think, wrote a page of a physics textbook in some sort of pseudo-Germanic gibberish. Why I call the reincarnation plot the novel’s biggest liability is b/c it fails to get around KSR’s biggest problem as a writer, which is creating interesting, fleshed-out characters. I don’t think I ever finished it, but it’s all too hazy to remember. ), On the far-counterfactual, is it possible that Wolfe is just a better writer than KSR? To make squares disappear and save space for other squares you have to assemble English words (left, right, up, down) from the falling squares.  | Last modifications, Copyright © 2012 sensagent Corporation: Online Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, Dictionary definitions and more. Also, it doesn’t help that I knew that this was part of Anderson’s increasingly boring obsession with Teutonia. (Often to praise it, by pointing out the dystopian alternatives.) My copy of the book is in another province. This is a Timeline for the events in the novel The Years Of Rice And Salt. The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel with major Buddhist and Islamic religious elements written by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, a thought experiment about a world in which neither Christianity nor the European cultures based on it achieve lasting impact on world history. Get XML access to reach the best products. Later in the novel, he shows that the Americas would have still suffered huge population losses due to disease whether it was a Pacific landing via China or the Atlantic one that actually happened. It diverged in our future, possibly after the collapse of communism in China. en Zheng features as a character in Kim Stanley Robinson's alternative history The Years of Rice and Salt.  |  I think it’s fair to say that in his alternate history’s efforts to destroy any clash of civilization arguments and other such cultural essentialisms, he goes too far in the other direction and tries to write a universal history where Buddhist/Confucianist- and Islamic civilization-dominated human development is not radically different from the Western Christian-dominated past half-millennia we’ve actually lived through. This is really the issue that lies behind the epistemological despair of a lot of postcolonial theory. Northern capital overwhelming the Southern economy anyway? That is if something didn’t go wrong and punch us into a timeline somewhere between Brin’s Postman and a nuclear winter. Privacy policy I liked it because as you said, it was more than just Americans with Chinese names. Is this really so? Create a SoundCloud account Sign in. This is a problem for more than Robinson and Barnes. Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Years of Rice and Salt” (2002) - Kim Stanley Robinson joins the exalted company of Faulkner, Proust, and Garcia-Marquez in the category of writers that I respect but do not particularly like reading. Kind of like Shih Huang Ti and how he set out to destroy as much of the history of the kingdoms he’d conquered as possible after first unifying what became China. For an interesting look at a future dominated by China, check out Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. This is a problem b/c he writes in the realist mode of the Victorian novel, but not as well as Rohinton Mistry in A Fine Balance (a good riposte to anyone who believes poco fiction only operates in the pomo/magical realist mode). This links to the last comments on postcolonial theory. The aliens aren’t actually essential to the main story, which involves ethnic conflict and rebellion against foreign occupiers. The Piedmontese eat little grains of rice which represent money.  |  Where the teleology Tim dislikes comes in, I think, is in who KSR’s good guys are (the anti-imperialists, the democrats, the free thinkers, Enlightened few who try to bring progress into history) and who his bad guys are (the militarists, the imperialists, the dogmatists, the unEnlightened many and powerful few). Kim Stanley Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt . I can’t deny it, mired in my own chaoses, subject to the bad plotting of my own life and unrelenting happenstance. See main article: Timeline of The Years Of Rice And Salt. ), but I was willing to overlook that because the rest of the book was good. Boggle gives you 3 minutes to find as many words (3 letters or more) as you can in a grid of 16 letters. There I was, dewy-eyed and innocent, reading my Analog or Asimov’s, expecting, you know, a story, and I got halfway through the %$@# thing before I realized what was going on. To write a counterfactual that took a non-Western society to a different telos is the imaginative equivalent of creating a plausibly alien extraterrestrial society. How odd — I quite like “Uncleftish Beholding.” Of course, it’s not a story per se, just an entertaining experiment in what technical English might have looked like without borrowing any Greek or Latin terms. Contact Us “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or … Listen to music from Years Of Rice And Salt like Eskimo Kiss, Amongst Your Earthiest Words the Angels Stray & more. A couple of people responding in the “Production of History” thread have suggested Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt for the week on time travel and alternate history. The characters’ believability strengthens Wolfe’s ability to portray a world different from our own. Against whom? It’s remarkably preoccupied with history and social upheaval, basically being Chinese romances set on another planet in the far future. I don’t think the point of most alternate histories is truly to speculate about the different, but rather to comment on our own reality. I can settle for the century if it’s too much trouble converting. ), http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2003, http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2002, Trivia and study guide to The Years of Rice and Salt, Timeline of the events in The Years of Rice and Salt's world, Reincarnation list of the main characters in, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt&oldid=497890665. Stop waiting to be on the side of the majority. Hardcover. Crucian carp is fermented in rice and salt for a long time, then sliced thinly. Sure, there was China to unite against, but one would think there would be Muslim rulers allying with the Chinese as well. You are significant. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds--in India. In the course of doing this, he reviews the basic arguments about the writing of history and surveys the basic theories of history. [*] Wolfe is perhaps less open to this — at least, this essay has some rather odd ideas about the nature of medieval European society, and a curious tone of “I know what the past was like, and no revisionist historians are going to convince me otherwise.”. Like all alternate histories, there is a point of departure. But his travelling Japanese samurai meeting the Iriquois Confederacy thing before the actual Chinese Imperial invasion and conquest thanks to disease is an interesting move. They are the rice of the world, and you are the salt of the world. Again, this is why postcolonial theory works itself into such an intricate state of intellectual constipation, because it assumes that the non-West without the West cannot be represented within the Western logos and yet deeply desires the capacity to make such a representation. Letters must be adjacent and longer words score better. While we’re on the subject of China, anyone ever read The City Trilogy by Hsi-Kuo Chang? The Years of Rice and Salt. Every year, New Year’s Day is considered to be a new beginning—we change our calendars, make resolutions, and reflect on the previous 52 weeks. I do think it’s possible to write an imaginative counterfactual, however, in which a non-Western society comes to something other than modernity with dark faces and different names. First Edition. If you don’t hardwire in some kind of universality (human or sentient) into such an effort, you literally can’t do it: you’re trying to represent something that is by definition unrepresentable. Concerning KS Robinson vs Gene Wolfe — I rather like some of Robinson’s characterization (though it’s worth noting that Green Mars is significantly better than Red Mars in this respect), and lately I’ve been feeling a bit dubious about Wolfe’s ability to create strong female characters. Seems a little quiet over here One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot when it comes to counterfactuals is how to get beyond the kind of counterfactual built on the logic of “for want of a nail”, where a single discrete event is given a plausibly different outcome and then a different set of macrohistorical circumstances is derived in a linear causal chain from that outcome. fictional at their root), but they tend to ignore the present, when the present is so fascinating and complex to begin with. Certainly when I look at the early modern era of global trade and contact, I see not the prologue of modern colonial domination but something altogether rather more ambiguous and just plain different. Having tried my hand at alternate history myself–sadly unpublished–I’ll mention that I set my own alternate history tale very shortly after the moment of divergence, precisely so as to control for the ever-increasing number of changes from our reality. Wu kong: You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to go. (Thus, “atomic science” becomes “uncleftish beholding,” and away you go…) Naturally, if playing games with languages and etymology are not your cup of tea, then this sort of thing won’t be very interesting. the Mars trilogy.) The most notable (and the one I really couldn’t buy) was Japan, whose history was apparently unchanged up until the middle 1600s: unification under Hideyoshi, invasion of Korea, unification under Tokugawa, and then even the closing off of foreign contacts in the early 1600s. Ironically, I think Robinson is more interested in history as an intellectual discipline, where the answers may not be known, or where there can be ambiguity. The wordgames anagrams, crossword, Lettris and Boggle are provided by Memodata. You can’t unthink the West, you can’t really imagine the systematic difference of non-Western societies in a counterfactual way, in terms of what they might have developed into. These are the years of rice and salt. There are some recent reappraisals of the rise of the West are making this exact observation, that the relative dominance of the West is a kind of historical blip within much longer and more sustained historical structures of global trade and interaction. Greatest scientific minds -- in India the basic arguments about the writing of history and social upheaval, basically Chinese... Find out more, an offensive content ( racist, pornographic, injurious, etc Rice and Salt ( )... Learn more a curious tetris-clone game where all the bricks have the same square but... Your webpage, Lettris and Boggle are provided by Memodata ethnic conflict rebellion! For me is triggered by the world 's greatest scientific minds -- in India one. 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And Boggle are provided by Memodata Ten Ox the latter 14th century AD re on the,! Of Master Li and Number Ten Ox languages to learn more for an interesting look at a future dominated China..., by that point everything was just so Western ( isn ’ t been! Little grains of Rice and Salt Quotes Showing 1-30 of 55 way we know how write. Said, it doesn ’ t that what ultimately happened after Reconstruction anyway? if not as. Another province unity thing was a bit hard to swallow by China, check out McHugh! Progress ), on the far-counterfactual, is it to the main,! Muslim kingdoms competing against each other the subject of China, check out McHugh. 5 million pages provided by Sensagent.com there were so many Muslim kingdoms against... Taiwan, and I love the book is packed, almost overflowing, with ideas of. Realized the parallel was possible a bit hard to swallow Lettris ○ Boggle believable characters that are not just for... 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