○   Wildcard, crossword Victory at Gettysburg becomes victory in the Civil War? It’s very hard to write a counterfactual that explores contingent outcomes with hundreds of variables in motion at once, where you’re trying to explore the total possibility space of change over time in a particular time and place. They may be the majority, but they are the trivial majority and you are the impactful minority. Postcolonial theory definitely has a very short perspectival framework. (Also, where did the Chungkuo series diverge from our history? "The Years Of Rice and Salt" posits a world where Christianity is for all intents wiped out by the plague, leaving Europe nearly uninhabit This is another of those books I tried to read two or three times previously and never could do it despite knowing I would like it once I got involved in it. Get XML access to fix the meaning of your metadata. The novel seems to depict a second, even deadlier wave around the turn of the century. This links to the last comments on postcolonial theory. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds--in India. You are significant. en Zheng features as a character in Kim Stanley Robinson's alternative history The Years of Rice and Salt. Just reading the current business press on India and China is enough to raise questions about any permanent dominance of the US and Europe. Perhaps from the 15th to the late-ish 20th century, but given what I see around me, I don’t think this will continue. Ro, Cookies help us deliver our services. But what’s interestingly is that in the end, that society essentially transits into modernity on roughly the same terms and with the same basic geist as Europe did. On the plague thing, I thought Robinson did a good job showing it came out of Asia along the Silk Road, and spread into Europe more rapidly than in actual history, as rapidly as diseases actually spread in North America and with similar effect. Listen to music from Years Of Rice And Salt like Eskimo Kiss, Amongst Your Earthiest Words the Angels Stray & more. These are the years of rice and salt. fictional at their root), but they tend to ignore the present, when the present is so fascinating and complex to begin with. ), http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2003, http://www.worldswithoutend.com/books_year_index.asp?year=2002, Trivia and study guide to The Years of Rice and Salt, Timeline of the events in The Years of Rice and Salt's world, Reincarnation list of the main characters in, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt&oldid=497890665. Given the basic similarities between his alternate history and our own, I think what’s important to look for are the differences and where they come from/what we’re supposed to learn from them…. It’s pretty tough to do. ), but the implicit message that has been conveyed (and reinforced by the counterfactual discussion as well) is that the West has ascended and will remain a dominant position.  |  The web service Alexandria is granted from Memodata for the Ebay search. the Mars trilogy.) The Years of Rice and Salt experiments extensively with these critical challenges to the genres of history and utopia. Again, this is why postcolonial theory works itself into such an intricate state of intellectual constipation, because it assumes that the non-West without the West cannot be represented within the Western logos and yet deeply desires the capacity to make such a representation. I don’t even know if the Star Trek writers realized the parallel was possible. Published by Harper Collins Publishers, London, United Kingdom (2002) ISBN 10: 0002246791 ISBN 13: 9780002246798. In the course of doing this, he reviews the basic arguments about the writing of history and surveys the basic theories of history. The SensagentBox are offered by sensAgent. Like his subsequent Science in the Capital trilogy, The Years of Rice and Salt is a meditation on pre-utopian possibilities and conditions rather than a Utopia proper. Hardcover. The suggestion is a great one, and I love the book. This is really the issue that lies behind the epistemological despair of a lot of postcolonial theory. Much more so than Steven Barnes in his alternate history series (Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart that deals with Western Europeans being enslaved in America by Africans and Arabs, I think, but both authors ultimately have the same problem, which is that they don’t know how to think sequentially through a history which is both alternate and alterate, e.g., in which a non-Western society changes over time without the dominance of the West. Two nations? Contact Us Throughout the book the Jati constantly find each other, often without meaning too, … 3 The Meanings of the Salt. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, The Years of Rice and Salt, and Galileo’s Dream.In 2008 he was named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.” The problem with postcolonial theory is that it continues to recycle itself by looking at essentially the same evidence from the 19th and 20th centuries. There I was, dewy-eyed and innocent, reading my Analog or Asimov’s, expecting, you know, a story, and I got halfway through the %$@# thing before I realized what was going on. The characters ’ believability strengthens Wolfe ’ s how Europe Underdeveloped Africa badly *, but it ’ fare! 30 to 60 % of Europe 's population, peaked around 1348-1350 Muslim kingdoms competing each. Aliens aren ’ t even know if the Star Trek writers realized the parallel possible... 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