The Years of Rice and Salt

I decided to read Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction classic The Years of Rice and Salt (#860) for two reasons: it was listed on GoodReads list of 100 Top Science Fiction Books, and when I recently read Robert Crais's latest  Elvis Cole/Joe Pike thriller A Dangerous Man (See my post of October 23, 2019.) his dedication was to Kim Stanley Robinson.  The premise of the novel was intriguing; what if Western Civilization died out during the period of the Black Death in the Middle Ages, so that the modern world evolved from other cultures instead?  Sign me up!

Alas, I found this ponderous tome disappointing, and the writing uneven.  It began with an interesting story of a member of Tamerlane's Golden Horde discovering with his scouting party that the Hungarians they were planning to conquer were all dead.  Alas, this episode ended all too soon, and the characters spent inordinate amounts of time in the book in the bardo, a place between incarnations that does not sound like a place you would want to spend any time.  At first there is a thread to tie the characters in each episode together as they reincarnate as a group - a jati - of souls traveling together throughout eternity.  That soon peters out, and in the last three to four hundred pages, it becomes less narrative and more textbook treatises on Islamic philosophy and physics with some Buddhism and North American native cultural norms thrown in for good measure.  It was so tedious, I can't believe I spent literally weeks to finish this book.  In contrast, I actually enjoyed reading Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time (See my post of August 13, 2016.).  This I did not.