The Years of Rice and Salt
Kim Stanley Robinson
Language: English
Pages: 784
ISBN: 0553580078
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With the incomparable vision and breathtaking detail that brought his now-classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author KIM STANLEY ROBINSON boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know....
The Years of Rice and Salt
It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur–the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been–a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt.
This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world’s greatest scientific minds–in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.
Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world.
From the Hardcover edition.
taunting the other team or even meeting their eyes, but watching either the ball or, it seemed, the sky. He played as if in a trance, as if confused; and yet when his teammates were tracked down and blocked, he was always somehow open for a pass, no matter how hard his guard, or soon guards, ran to cover him. Surrounded teammates, desperately keeping their bat free to throw the ball out, would find Fromwest there in the only direction the ball could be thrown, stumbling but miraculously open, and
warning her not to cross the busy harbor road outside the crosswalks: Budur cursed her. The house rules in her zawiyya: her teeth would clench. Don't leave dirty plates in the sink, help wash the sheets every Thursday; NO. But all that anger was trivial compared to the fact of her freedom. She woke in the morning, understood where she was, leaped out of bed full of amazed energy. An hour's vigorous work in the zawiyya had her groomed and fed, and some of the communal work done, bathrooms
is physical in origin. Day two fifty-seven of Year One. Forward and backward from that zero date, three hundred and sixty-five days, leap days added, whatever it takes to be accurate to nature. Then as these kinds of matters are all universalized, or made standard all over the world, when the time comes that governments begin to put pressure on their scientists to work for just one part of humanity, they can say, I'm sorry, science doesn't work that way. We are a system for all peoples. We only
were being readied, that negotiations were breaking down . . . On the fourth day the leaders of the coup were suddenly nowhere to be found. The Yingzhou fleet was a few ships smaller in size. The generals had been spirited off, everyone said, to asylums in the Sugar Islands or the Maldives, in exchange for quitting without a fight. The ranking officers left behind led the deployed units of the army back to their barracks and stood down, waiting for further instructions from the legitimate state
They took refuge in a storage building, a big stone-walled wooden-roofed barn, stuffed to the rafters with cloth, grain, and gold. The men would have killed themselves carrying gold on their backs, but Kheim restricted them to one item apiece, either jewelry or a single disk ingot. “We'll all come back someday,” he told them, “and end up richer than the emperor.” He chose for himself a hummingbird moth figured in gold. Though exhausted, he found it hard to lie down, or even to stop walking.