The Years of Rice and Salt Kim Stanley Robinson 9780006511489

The Great Plague destroyed Europe. Now the world's a different place ... From the award-winning author of the Mars trilogy, 'the ultimate in future history' (Daily Mail), comes the most ambitious alternate history novel ever written.

As Bold Bardash, a horseman in the army of Temur the Lame, rides west across the steppe and on to the Magyar Plain, he comes across a town in which everyone lies dead. Long dead. Plague has struck Europe. Kali's black blanket has fallen over the lands of the West and nothing will ever be the same again.

Into this empty land pour the opportunists: the merchants, slavers and warlords. The Chinese cross the oceans in their huge fleets; the Arabs traverse the deserts by camel and mule and the mediterranean by dhow. The last Europeans are killed or enslaved - consigned to the seraglios of the sultans. So die the ancestors of Da Vinci and Copernicus; Columbus and Machiavelli; the Spanish Inquisition and the Conquistators; Shakespeare, Newton and the Pilgrim Fathers; Einstein and Hitler. And the world becomes a different place.

In this extraordinarily ambitious, poetic and powerful novel, Kim Stanley Robinson takes us on a journey through seven hundred years of history as it never was, but might have been.

Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952 and, after travelling and working around the world, has now settled in his beloved California. He is the award-winning author of The Orange County Trilogy, The Mars Trilogy (Red, Green and Blue Mars), Antarctica and a number of highly-praised short story collections.

'One of the finest working novelists in any genre'
GUARDIAN

'If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson'
NEW YORK TIMES

Praise for THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT:

'A dazzling work of speculation with all the qualities of a great historical novel - it is by turns thrilling, tragic, funny and thoughtful'
SCOTSMAN

'A 600-year tapestry of striving, joy, unhappiness and ambiguity ... this marvellous book may be the most hopeful thing you read for a long time.'
EVENING STANDARD

'Stunning'
GUARDIAN

'A huge, complex and highly enjoyable book'
NEW SCIENTIST