The Years of Rice and Salt is a 2002 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Not exactly what is usually considered to be a historical novel, this work instead belongs to a science fiction sub-genre known as 'alternate history' - Robinson's only venture into this area. When the actual history is treated with respect, however, such novels allow the author to examine historical forces and how events lead to subsequent events. This novel does that by positing a change to one crucial historical event.
The 'Black Death' was a pandemic that began around 1345 CE and eventually killed a third of all Europeans. In Robinson's alternate history, it is imagined instead as a much more deadly event - killing over ninety percent across Europe, effectively destroying Christian influence over world events. The dominant remaining and familiar world cultures are Islam, China, and the Indian subcontinent.
The destruction of incipient colonial empires in Spain, Portugal, France, and England has far-reaching effects in many parts of the world. India never falls under British influence. The Middle East never sees Crusades from Europe. In the Western Hemisphere, the native cultures are given more time to develop and resist colonial pressures. While political history changes radically, however, science and technology develop along similar lines to our own history.
To tie the stories together over the book's 1400 projected years, beginning in the reign of 'Temur the Lame' (Tamerlane), Robinson uses several ideas borrowed from reincarnation theories to have the same small group of 'souls' appear over and over. In between mortal lives, the characters meet in the "bardo", a place where souls go after death to await their assignments to new bodies. While together there, the story's characters can discuss their spiritual evolution, and that of the physical world to which they will soon return.
A lot of actual history is used to set up the alternate story, and the historical research is well-done. Alternate history is not usually very attractive to me, but this one is well done and thought-provoking.
