the years of rice and salt by kim stanley robinson

The writing often becomes regrettably expository, weighed down by long, stodgy passages about economic and political developments. It's only.in the home stretches.that Robinson's utopian inclinations wrest the novel away from his storytelling ones. But perhaps what's most remarkable about The Years of Rice and Salt is the way it hews so closely to the lineaments of the human heart even as it fans out across such a mammoth stage. After having cut out so much cerebral work for himself, Robinson could hardly be blamed if he lost track of more intimate matters in this book. Read Full Review >įor the most part, what a novelist tries to do with any given book is far less important that what he or she actually manages to accomplish, but it's impossible to read The Years of Rice and Salt without stopping now and then to contemplate the vastness of the task Robinson has set himself. His supple, thoughtful prose is always up to the challenge, whether exciting us with ideas, thrilling us with spectacle or presenting us with moments of elegy or quiet passion. Robinson can write action and adventure as well as anyone, but in the end this is an ethical fiction about the true purpose of humanity. For Robinson, science fiction is not only a literature of ideas, but a literature whose characters have lots of them. It is always good talk, in which everyone speaks in character. If there is a weakness in Robinson's work, it is perhaps this his characters are so intelligent that they never shut up and often have fascinating conversations for page after page about the engineering of fortifications or the reconciliation of Sufism and Confucianism or, most extendedly, the ways that history works.

Even his Great Men (and Women) live in a social context and are bearers, rather than creators, of historical significance. Kim Stanley Robinson has a view of historical process that is refreshingly other to that of much science fiction.

The years of rice and salt by kim stanley robinson