Rice and salt times

Times of Rice and Salt is a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, first published in English in 2002 under the original title The Years of Rice and Salt and translated into Spanish in 2003.

The novel was awarded the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2003.

Plot

Tiempos de arroz narrates a uchronia. Set in an alternate reality, it describes, against the background of the lives of a number of individuals, seven centuries of history under the premise that the Black Death has wiped out almost 90% of the population of Europe. In such a world there are two main civilizations that dominate the landscape in an antagonistic but complementary way similar to yin and yang: imperial China and the so-called Dar-el-Islam (a vast conglomerate of Muslim states). In the final centuries, however, other emerging forces such as the Travancore (Indian) and Hodenosaunee (North American tribal) leagues came on the scene as important figures.

The novel is divided into ten books arranged chronologically, each one of different structures and length. Each one narrates part or all of the life of a group of characters. Below is a summary of each of the books. The indicative dates at the beginning of each one belong respectively to the Muslim calendar (AD means, after the Hegira) and to the approximate equivalences of the Gregorian calendar in which the events occur:

1. Wake the Void (Awake to Emptiness) - 783 d.H. / 1381 d. C. A soldier of the Tamerlán army deserted by discovering that the plague has devastated the west. After wandering desperately across the ghost continent, he is captured by Muslims on the Mediterranean coast, sold as a slave in Alexandria and taken to Mombasa where they sell him again. Embark on one of the ships of the great fleet of Zheng He heading back to China. There, a slave companion and he work in a restaurant in Hangzhou before escaping together and getting bad jobs in the emperor's palace in the new Beijing capital.
2. The Pilgrimation in the HeartThe Haj in the Heart) - Years 970 d.H. / years 1560 d. C. The first two chapters tell the story of three peasants from northern India. The argument continues with the avatars of a girovago sufi master who, after the death of a tiger who has saved his life, begins a long pilgrimage first to Fatepur Sikri, then to Mecca and finally to Al-Andalus (the Iberian peninsula) where he and his companion joins a caravan of the marginalized who then head to the empty territories of the interior and that finally found Barnaire.
3. Ocean Continents (Ocean Continents) - Years 1030 d.H. / years 1620 d. C. A fleet is part of China with the intention of starting a slow indirect conquest of Nippon (Japan) but is carried away by the Kuroshio marine current to the shores of an unknown continent (North America) later baptized as Yingzhou. There they peacefully contact the Miwok and continue to navigate south along the coast until they meet the Inca civilization before returning to China with the help of the same circular stream that led them to the new territories.
4. The alchemist (The Alchemist) - 1050 d.H. / 1640 d. C. After a severe punishment by the Kan de Samarcanda for having deceived him and which leaves him disabled both physically and socially, an affluent alchemist initiates a new attitude towards physical phenomena through strict measures and the rigorous objectivity of experimental evidence with the influence and help of his son-in-law and the owner of a workshop. At the same time they conceive new wits, weapons and military strategies under the pressure of the feared khan. However, all these advances in deer are truncated at the end of the book.
5. Trama and Urdimbre (Warp and Weft) - About 1100 d.H. / 1687 d. C. A huge league of American tribes accepts a Japanese rōnin as one of their own and he tells them his busy past. He then warns them of the dangers of both the Chinese who are invading the continent by the west and the Muslim colonies that are being established in the east and proposes ways to go preparing against the future threat through the production of weapons and the development of strategies in advance.
6. Widow Kang (Widow Kang- 1190 d.H. / 1776 d.C. When a begging monk dies, partly because of his son's irresponsibility, a Chinese widow begins to behave in a strange way. She marries a scholar who investigates her problem and moves to Lanzhou, a conflicting area where various Chinese and Muslim factions end up crashing. Both analyse with depth and insight both their violent environment and historical significance and their disparate attitudes fertilize reciprocally the profuse writings of the two that serve as the germ of the modern egalitarian thinking of the later centuries.
7. The Age of Great Progress (The Age of Great Progress) - From 1200 to 1281 d.H. / 1787-1863 d. C. The decadent city of Konstantiniyye (Constantinopla) is attacked, besieged and taken by an army of the travancorí league with the assistance of amazing war machines never seen until then. The Ottoman sultan caliph flees but his young doctor stays and is taken to the city of Travancore (possibly Kottayam, in the Indian state of Kerala) where he meets an Abbot, with which he has maintained an extensive correspondence, in his hospital for investigation. The illustrated Kerala (governant) by Travancore, backed by an impressive progression of scientific knowledge, aspires to achieve a more balanced and egalitarian world. Years later, during a flood that lasts months Golden Mountain (North of California), a Japanese servant meets a young Chinese and her baby and sits in Fangzhang (San Francisco) where he joins a Japanese clandestine organization supported by the Travancorí League to fight against the Chinese powers of the region. The growing tensions caused by the resources of the new territories lead to a decommunal war between imperial China and the fragmented association of Muslim states and in which the leagues travancoris and hodenosaunee they are also finally dragged.
8. The War of the Asuras (War of the Asuras- Around 1400 d.H. / 1979 d.C. In the years of the call Long warThree Chinese army officers are fighting in a horrific, stagnant and seemingly endless battle against Muslim troops in the Gansu corridor. After the death of one of them, their armed forces advance massively to the south through Tibet to the north of India after the enemy that in their retreat is causing havoc on the religious symbols of their opponents.
9. Nsara - From the 1410 to 1423 AD / 1990 - 2002 AD. A teenager from the province of Emirates Alpinos (Switzerland), in Firanja (Europe) escapes from her family with her aunt to the city of Nsara (Saint-Nazaire), where she finds a relaxed and stimulating atmosphere and a teacher who greatly influences her. His aunt, an important physicist, is about to get in serious trouble when the police begin to suspect that their investigations could be used to develop a terrible hypothetical weapon coveted by the Muslim states, recently defeated in the devastating Long war. The girl becomes archaeologist and travels to an important scientific conference, remembrance of the Pugwash conferences, in the city of Isfahan where she suggests, under the influence of her aunt, ways for scientists to remain united in the form of counterweight against the brutal tendencies of the states. However, he has to return quickly when the army suspends the government and tries to take Nsara by taking advantage of a long and debilitating crisis. Most of the city's population opposes the army's intentions openly for days until an intervention by the Hodenosaunee League restores the previous government.
10. The First Years (The First Years) - Shortly after a great revolt and the defeat of the Chinese government that emerged from the Great War (The Fifth Assembly of the Military Talent) the chief leader of the rebellion is killed. His trusted man then begins to work as a diplomat in many parts of the world until he accepts a post in the city of Pyingkayaing where he works for the Agency of the League of All Peoples for Harmony with Nature (Water of Nature).League of All People's Agency for Harmony for Nature) where he meets the ideologist of the Chinese revolution again during an intense course in which they analyze human history. Finally, he sits in Fangzhang (San Francisco) and there he works as a professor at a university school of agronomic engineering.

The protagonists

Throughout the entire novel, Kim Stanley Robinson surprisingly maintains the same protagonists, who do not stop meeting each other time after time under different appearances, ages, sexes and situations thanks to the phenomenon of reincarnation. On many occasions, usually at the end of each book, the characters meet in the bardo where they prepare to come back to life, thus continuing the cycle, after almost total oblivion of their previous memories.

As the narrative progresses, we learn that they are a jati made up of eight members of a Tibetan village who died in an avalanche and are predestined to try to find each other and improve themselves.

As a help, Kim Stanley Robinson keeps the same initial letter for each of the protagonists, of which the main ones are:

• Baram / Bold / Bihari / Bistami / Butterfly (Butterfly) / From the west (Fromwest, real name Busho) / Bao / Bhakta / Hu Die (again Butterfly) / Bai / Budur / Bao (again) shows a flexible and adaptable personality; it is humble, of good character and of spiritual temperament.
• Kenpo / Kyu / Kokila / Kya / Katima / Kheim / Khaled / Wampum Guardian (Keeper of the door) / Kang Tongbi / the Kerala / Kiyoaki / Kuo / Kirana / Kung / Kali is inconformist, proud/or, possesses a deep sense of justice and is pragmatic in character.
• Iwang / I-li / Insef / Ibn Ezra / I-Cheng / Iwang (again) / Igogeh / Ibrahim / Ismail / Iwa / Idelba / Isao is interested in the systems and processes of reality and has an eminently scientific attitude and aptitude.
• The rest of the characters appear in a somewhat tangential or sporadic way except, perhaps, the reincarnations of Sidpa, a dangerous, selfish and cruel individual.

The Bard

In Times of Rice and Salt the bardo reflects humanity's continual and never clear, often ineffective or extremely slow attempts to improve. Part of the bard appears as a mere theatrical stage with the souls of the dead voicing out the problems of their role in the world; a mock backstage conversation, as they wait for their next task to be assigned. Everything is usually immersed in a horrific environment that, however, never lacks a certain humor that is somehow reflected later in Isao's points of view (The first years , last book) on history. and his comedic qualities.

There are no scenes taking place in the bardo in the sixth, seventh, eighth and tenth books but the concept is mentioned in them, either directly or covertly, as something that happens in the world itself in the form of a continuous struggle: at the end of The Age of Great Progress (book seven) there is a small explanation of how world tensions are accumulating until ending in a devastating global confrontation that appears in the next book (The war of the asuras) and in which one of the protagonists assumes that he is not in the world but in the bardo.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the concept of the bardo taking place on earth appears at the end of the sixth book (The Widow Kang), in a text with which a scholar lays the foundations of thought modern that will come in his analysis of human inequalities:

I feel that until the number of full lives does not exceed that of destroyed lives, we will be trapped. Until then we will remain just a kind of prehistory, indignant of the great spirit of humanity. History as a story worthy of being told will begin only when full lives exceed the wastes in number. That means we still have many generations left before history begins. All inequalities must disappear; all excess wealth must be distributed equitably, and humanity, as we usually think of it, will not yet exist..

The Story

The world described in A Time of Rice and Salt is obviously different from ours but at the same time recognizable in many different aspects. Human history unfolds in essence similar to ours, albeit at a different pace, with other relevant characters, inventions, and influences, and with diverse civilizations and cultural balances. Thus, for example, we perceive resonances of Da Vinci, Newton, Watt and even Einstein in various characters who inhabited Alexandria, Samarkand, Isfahan and Delhi, during the XVII; there are also indirect references to Columbus, Marie Curie, Nazism and many other historical facts and figures; modern entrepreneurial civilizations capable of serving as a counterbalance to the prevailing Chinese and Islamic forces are developing in North America and South Asia; there is only one world war but it lasts sixty years and kills a billion lives; the independence and integrity of scientists makes possible a world where no atomic bombs are detonated in any civilian area.

Tone and themes of the novel

Times of Rice and Salt is a novel with a general poetic attitude set against a background that is like an elaborate tapestry woven with complex social, religious, cultural, historical, scientific, philosophical, and artistic synergies. Topics as current as inequalities, feminism or the third world, to give a few examples, are treated under different approaches as the centuries pass through the work. However, the author at all times retains the point of view of the individuals involved in the story and who are to some extent adrift in it.

Despite being supported by a fantastic infrastructure (alternative world, the bard, reincarnation) Times of Rice and Salt shows an essentially realistic attitude. In turn, it differs from the so-called magical realism of South American literature.