Storyline: 1/5 
 Characters: 2/5 
 Writing Style: 3/5 
 World: 2/5 
 It has been a long time since a read a novel that worked so hard only to fail so utterly. When I give a book the lowest rating possible, it is not necessarily because it is without worth but because it was a dreadful read. This book was, in fact, quite an accomplishment, perhaps the single-most carefully researched and thoughtfully constructed fiction book I've ever read. The summary of the lengthy and decidedly negative review below is that it neglected both the best of the novel and the philosophical treatise. Unlike a great novel, this was never entertaining or beautiful and was seldom poetic. Unlike more serious philosophy, this was never organized, sufficiently-reasoned, or clear. What resulted, instead, was a murky and uncertain social theory that was flamboyantly uninteresting. 
 The timeline: This alternate history's departure point from medieval history comes early (view spoiler)[sometime in the 14th century, with the bubonic plague killing off all but a few isolated pockets of Europeans. From 1400 onward, then, various civilizations in mainland East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas are given license to develop without Caucasian influence (hide spoiler)]. This gives Robinson an expansive palimpsest in which to build, explore, and hypothesize. The author is ambitious, and in the course of this single book, is going to outline how the social history of the world would have developed until now - the 21st century. As an alternate history, however, I found the story only marginally interesting. I did like how Robinson steadfastly avoided the "noble savage" exaggeration as well as "white guilt." If the alternate world history was remarkable for anything, it was in how similar the Years of Rice and Salt were to actual history. Kings still succumb to megalomania, bureaucracies are still corrupt, religious reactionaries oppress women, the poor are still impoverished, the rich aggrandize, and war is waged for indefensible ends. This similarity is, in part, Robinson's point. And I liked that point. The failings of humanity are just that: human failings. The world would not have been a utopia had the slave-trading, land-grabbing, mercantilist, colony-ruling Europeans been wiped off the face of the Earth. Though an interesting and worthwhile argument, it was not especially fun to read for hundreds of pages on end. The differences were often too minute and subtle for even someone moderately well-read and informed. The similarity between the alternate and actual history extended further as well. Even with technology the same devices get built at approximately the same time period and oftentimes in the same manner. I can understand the socio-political point, but was Robinson making a technological point as well? The same science will result as a consequence of the same general social and historical conditions? Where the socio-political point seemed at least thoughtful (though unexciting) the socio-technological point (if it was one at all) seemed to be born of a lack of creativity and a real failure to take advantage of the alternate history format. 
 The format: To chronicle this alternate social history of the world, Robinson needs a unifying device - some feature to link across seven hundred years and multiple civilizations. He adopts reincarnation as a tool for this purpose, letting our main characters reappear - albeit without knowledge of their previous lives - in different forms with every "book" (chapter). The chapter often ends in the Buddhist bardo where the characters integrate events from the just-lived life with their previous existence. Stylistically, this gives an exotic and definite magical-realism flavor to the story. As a way to unite the story's ten different "books," this fails. It fails in part because the very feature that would unify the different elements is flawed as a unifying device: the characters do not remember their past lives. So each reappearance is essentially a new character. Near the end of the novel there is some metanarrative exposition that explains some mnemonics for identifying the reincarnated characters and their essential attributes, but that same metanarrative also chides the format as artificial and incomplete. What we have then is essentially ten short stories (view spoiler)[ 1300s Hungary, 1500s India, 1600s China/Central America, 1600s Uzbekistan, 1700s Japan/North America, 1800s Central China/Eastern Europe, 1800s Turkey/India/California, 1900s Central Asia, 2000s Alps/France, and 2100s Myanmar. (hide spoiler)] It would be wrong to say that the short stories were disparate or wholly unconnected without the recurring characters. The plot arc becomes less about a particular problem, people, or civilization, however, and instead a long arc plot about world development. That sort of plot is much harder to relate to and appreciate. The developments are harder to identify and integrate. Really, it is no longer a novel but a work of social theory. 
 Style: Each of the ten books chapters has a different style. Unless one is versed in the myriad Oriental literary styles of the last 700 years, I don't think there is any way for you to appreciate the attention Robinson is bringing to each episode. They are distinct enough to be obvious, however, and I assumed while reading that Robinson was emulating the literary style from that period. There is something neat and obviously well-informed in that, but as a reader it too was difficult to enjoy. The problem is that the characters in each of the parts were telling their own first-person narrative. The characters, however, all sounded, thought, and seemed largely the same - whether they be 14th century African slaves or 18th century Iroquois. The writing style for each book chapter changed, then, but not the perception of events therein. Not being an Ancient Orient literary scholar I did not particularly appreciate or enjoy the different styles throughout the novel. In fact, they primarily served to emphasize the superficiality of the device and the extremely uniform characterization. Robinson could have remedied this. He could have abandoned (or added to) the literary styles and made each part more character-centric. He could have shown us how the people of that time would have interacted with their world with emphasis on how it was different from people at other places or other times. The alternative would have been to have made this an anthology of histories of his alternate history creation. Each book chapter would have been a "discovered" piece of literature or history. In that case the emphasis would have been on the change in literary style across time and how that affected or was affected by the social history being discussed. What we were left with instead was a range of inexplicably different writing styles all presenting the same characters across several centuries. 
 Religion: I associate leftist thinkers with hostility to religion, whether they be Marxist or Maoist. Robinson clearly has his influences in something post-Hegelian, though I know of no particular philosopher or theorist that corresponds exactly with him. In fact, even after reading the 1,957 pages of his Mars Trilogy, I'm still not exactly sure what he believes. He does seem to have an inclination for the mystical elements of Oriental religions, however. I don't know what to make of it, and he doesn't give any answers here. Through the first few books chapters in The Years of Rice and Salt, I thought that he was retelling the history of the development from the premodern to the modern; from the mystical to the scientific. The problem with that interpretation is that the magical-realism evidence in the first few chapters made it clear that the mystical elements were real - there really were Hindu gods and goddesses. Only as the modern period comes and the characters embrace scientific inquiry do the chapters start to cast doubt on the actuality of the supernatural. There's also the unifying device of reincarnation, however, that is treated as very real - even in the "modern" chapters. So the novel doesn't conclude that science is superior to the mystical. It doesn't conclude that the mystical is unreal. It doesn't conclude that the supernatural can be explained by the natural. It offers no conclusions. That might have been okay except for the fact that the work needed to be about something. It wasn't about a particular plot or characters. It devoted a lot of time to the theme of religion and particularly to the relationship between religion and progress. If there was a conclusion, then it was an undefended endorsement of the progressive mystical elements of Sufism and the worldly concerns of Buddhism. 
 Philosophy - For most of the work I was simply making best guesses at what it was all supposed to be about. Afterall, we get dozens of main characters with only the slimmest relationship to the last characters. We have a strikingly different alternate history that is strikingly similar in its effects. The religious and stylistic elements are exotic but seem more adornments than anything. It was not until Book 6: The Widow Kang (about 450 pages in) that Robinson makes a clear statement. (view spoiler)[So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many and many of the world's poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived. (474) He would go on to add:My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist. To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born. (475) (hide spoiler)] To the extent that Robinson's alternate history account to that point meant anything, I had discerned and agreed with this (though not necessarily in agreement with taking 400 pages to do it). The next book chapter, however, was titled, "The Age of Great Progress." I thought, "This is it. This is where his alternate history and our world history really diverge. This is where it becomes more than a lament that we humans always find a way to undermine others to benefit ourselves. I actually put the book down at this point, walked around, and tried to prepare myself for the treasure to come. I decided then to give up reading this as a novel and to instead read it as a philosophy text. There was no event more suspenseful in the Years of Rice and Salt than reading those final musings of the widow Kang on history's advent and previewing the succeeding chapter's title promising an age of Progress. "We're going to enter history now! I so erroneously thought. The result was a disappointment. The story turned into more-of-the-same (view spoiler)[in this particular case, it was simply a short-lived Renaissance (hide spoiler)]. Robinson as a philosopher with anything clear to say doesn't appear again until the final book chapter when an elder teacher in Myanmar delivers some lectures on the practice of writing history. There were some thought-provoking ideas here and some justification for why Robinson wanted to write an alternate history, why he wanted it to be so similar to ours, and the opportunities and limits of history as a science. I was convinced that Robinson had researched the topic and made an effort to do something more than entertain with this alternate history. These musings, however, come at the very end of the novel. Any good academic presentation is going to put those ideas up front. Sound philosophy, too, is going to spend a great deal of time justifying the method instead of ticking a few points off in its favor. This wasn't a philosophy text in the normal, academic, sense. This wasn't a novel in the sense usually employed. This was an exhibition piece on the use of alternate history in scientific inquiry. Had I known that when I began the work, and I had I already read some published articles on the debates in the field, I might have found a way to enjoy this. I will not rule out doing that some day, perhaps coming back to this and thinking it one of the greatest books I've ever written. 
 I am on the search for quality speculative fiction, and it is a shame that Robinson engaged in so much creative fiction and speculation to such meager results. An impressive book. A wearying book.