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Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award—winning
Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, as well as The
Martians, Antarctica, The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge,
A Short, Sharp Shock, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.
The Years of Rice And Salt
It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur-the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if? What if the plague killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been-a history that stretches across centuries, a history that sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, a history that spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. These are the years of rice and salt. This is a universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world’s greatest scientific minds-in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson renders an immensely rich tapestry. Rewriting history and probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power, and even love on such an Earth. From the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Western Hemisphere, from the age of Akbar to the present and beyond, here is the stunning story of the creation of a new world.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Summer Reading List
The Soul Theif
by Celilia Holland
I've been reading Holland's novels since 1968 and they are
always deeply satisfying. This new one is about an Irish brother and
sister wandering the Viking world after an attack by Vikings destroys
their home. I've started it already, and it is filled with Holland's
usual intensely exciting and realistic adventure scenes. This time
they ballast a fantasy element of far-seeing, a power belonging to
a few women in the book. Wonderful.
The Human Front
by Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod is one of the new stars of British science fiction.
All his novels published in the US by Tor are great--bursting with
a unique mix of adventure and political speculation. The Human Front
is a shorter work, published by a small press, PS Press, in 2001.
It appears to be an alternative history in which Stalin lived well
into the Sixties and everything changes, while remaining eerily familiar.
Looks good.
Six Records of a Floating Life
by Shen Fu
I ran across this while doing research for my novel The Years
of Rice and Salt. It was written in the 1770s, and is Shen Fu's portrait
of his wife. I've already read one chapter published in an anthology
of Chinese writing (there it was translated as "Six Scenes From
a Floating Life") and that confirmed for me its reputation as
one of the great character studies in world literature. My edition
is a Penguin paperback, and I don't know if it is still in print or
not.
Build-Up
by William Carlos Williams
A revelation for me in recent years has been that the fiction
of one of America's greatest poets, WCW, is for me even better than
his poetry! New Directions keeps much of his work in print. His novel
trilogy, White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-up, is based loosely
on his wife's parents' lives as immigrants in New York, at the turn
of the last century. The first two volumes are glorious. His collected
short fiction, titled The Farmer's Daughters, is also wonderful.
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville
Every summer my family spends a few weeks on the coast of Maine,
and during that time I re-read Moby-Dick. I've been doing it for five
years now, and am about a third of the way through. One of the things
I'm finding out this time is that the book is a lot funnier than I
remembered it being from my youthful readings of it. There is a wit
and power in each sentence that is a joy to experience. One day a
friend and I towed a floating tree trunk across the lake to get it
out of the way, rowing like crazy; that night I read the chapter in
which the sailors row a whale carcass back to the Pequod. I felt that
passage in my hands!
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Summer Reading Lists
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