‘It Is One Story’: Writing a Global Alternate History in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt

Summary

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) depicts a world that might have developed had European civilizations been eradicated by the Black Death. Scenes set in the bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, introduce a narrative frame for reflecting on the language games relating to history that are portrayed in the text. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which the alternate history is used to present history and the development of societies in the context of an absent Europe, and in the absence of the concept of Europe as historically constructed in our timeline. Analyzing the use of textual strategies such as the narrative cohesion generated through the reincarnation of focal characters, I consider what it means to tell stories about history by investigating how the text represents several non-European civilizations, and by examining what these portrayals say about the relationship of history to the formation of stories about cultural identity and the future. These non-European civilizations include the Chinese and Arabic societies that are portrayed in the novel across a period of over 680 years.

This analysis will begin by considering a scholarly dispute over interpretations of the metaphysical significance of reincarnation for the cosmology of Robinson's alternate history in order to highlight the differences in various readers’ orientation to the text. Emphasis on plausibility and representations of reincarnation and the bardo as evidence of a ‘true’ reality results in a different interpretation when compared to a treatment of the text according to what the historian Gavriel Rosenfeld describes in his 2002 article, ‘Why Do We Ask “What If?” Reflections on the Function of Alternate History’, as a ‘document of memory’, for which he argues the alternate history is well suited (90). Rosenfeld argues thus:

Ironically, alternate histories lend themselves very well to being studied as documents of memory for the same reason that historians have dismissed them as useless for the study of history – namely, their fundamental subjectivity. (Rosenfeld 93)

The fundamental subjectivity of alternate histories – the narrowing of perspective necessary to the presentation of a fictional account that is situated through one or multiple characters – allows these fictional texts to be analyzed for the ways in which they present the memory of history.