The Years of Rice and Salt
By Kim Stanley Robinson
Bantam, $25.95
ISBN 0553109200

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A world that might have been

Kim Stanley Robinson's superb new novel covers 600 years of history that seem almost familiar, yet are completely different from our own. Robinson, who mastered the art of the multi-generational epic in his award-winning Mars series, now looks at our own world as it might have been if the Black Death had killed 99 percent of Europeans. The power-players in world politics are China, India, a loose federation of Islamic states and the wild card, the Hodenosaunee, who are Native Americans.

Robinson explores how history actually happens from the point of occurrence to the way in which the historical record is later perceived. We see where the seeds of change originate, where they rise up and where they are stamped down. While there are similarities to actual history, this is new and almost unrecognizable territory. It makes for difficult reading to see potentials we have missed in the "real" world: the Native American ways of life are extrapolated into multi-nation Leagues, which in turn inspire other nations to live more in balance with the earth. However, when war comes after the Industrial Revolution, there are the familiar horrors of trench warfare: gas, shelling, useless waves of slaughter, although here it is on the plains and in the mountains of China.

Robinson has never been one to let minor difficulties such as death get in the way of his narrative engine. He bypasses death with the Buddhist concept of the 'bardo' -- the place we return to after death and before birth. People move in groups through the centuries, although "people" is too definite a term; perhaps characters, or even characteristics would be better. This movement allows us to follow one group's -- and by extension, humanity's -- progress through the centuries.

Rarely has a novel seemed so timely. Readers everywhere have been turning to books to find out more about people in other countries. The Years of Rice and Salt gives us what might have been, but, instead of looking backward, it faces forward and asks, what might we all yet be?

Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn, where he writes and publishes speculative fiction.