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'What If' Literature
Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt
 Listen to Neda Ulaby's interview with Kim Stanley Robinson.
April 14, 2002 -- It’s been said there are three categories of science fiction: what if, if only, and if this goes on... There’s recently been a boom in "what if" fiction, also known as "alternative histories."
This kind of fiction speculates about what might have happened if some key event in history had occurred otherwise. What if America had survived a nuclear attack in the 1980s? Or what if disease had almost completely wiped out Europe’s population in the 13th and 14th centuries?
Writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes a living by answering such questions. Robinson’s new book, The Years of Rice and Salt, follows two reincarnated soul mates through 700 years of history. It begins after the Black Plague wipes out not 30 percent of Europe’s population, but nearly every European. How different would the world be if Europeans didn't colonize the New World, or lead the Industrial Revolution?
Instead, the novel follows the rise of the Islamic Empire and China as they become the world’s great superpowers. The New World is discovered by the Chinese. The Industrial Revolution sparks in India.
Robinson tells NPR's Neda Ulaby his narrative uses just two main characters to tell the story, and an unusual literary idea: "My cast of characters is this jati, which is an Indian idea that you travel through life, your reincarnations, with a small little family... so that you keep meeting the same people in life after life."
For example, we first encounter Bold, a Mongol warrior, who travels through the empty European landscape, its cities littered with corpses. Later, he’s a Native American girl named Butterfly, a Sufi inventor named Bahram and a Chinese diplomat named Bao. Each character shares the same soul, and his jati mate is a character whose name always starts with a "K."
In between adventures, the two souls meet in the bardo -- a space where many Buddhists believe souls go to be judged. And slowly, through the centuries, the soul mates move closer to the next realm of existence. But Robinson tells Ulaby there's something bigger at stake than "an intellectual parlor game" about reincarnation.
"It seemed to me it would have to try shoving together cultures that hadn't really combined before," he says -- namely, Buddhism and Islam. "There have been fruitful interactions betweens (these) two religions in the past, but they were squashed and marginalized... because in our world, almost everything was squashed and marginalized by Europe."
Other Resources
• Bantam Dell Publishing.
• Interactive online interview with author Kim Stanley Robinson on SciFi.com.
• Interview with Robinson about his series of Mars-based science fiction novels, on the Web site for the Mars Millenium Project.
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