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Gráinne, Keith Roberts

Winner of the BSFA Award in 1988. There doesn’t appear to have been any shortlist that year, so I’ve no idea how it was chosen. The Eastercon in 1988 took place in Liverpool and was three years before my first Eastercon.

Gráinne (1988, UK) is the name of a princess from Irish mythology, who at their betrothal party dumped the man she had been promised to and ran off with Diarmuid instead. In Roberts’s novel, it’s the name of a young woman the narrator, Alistair Bevan, meets, has a mostly platonic relationship with, and who then leaves him… and several years later appears on television as the presenter of a documentary series on the brand new Channel 5. By this point, Bevan works for an advertising agency, which Gráinne hires to promote a series of “clinics” to empower women.

This narrative is framed by, and interspersed with, short scenes of an old man in a hospital bed, explicitly telling the story of his life to a doctor and nurse. I’ve no idea if the resemblance was intentional, but there’s a lot in these sections that reminded me of John Fowles’s Mantissa (1982, UK)

Most descriptions of the novel classify it as semi-autobiographical, and while I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s fiction, I know little of his life – but perhaps enough to for the classification to ring true. (His careers in illustration and advertising, for example.) Other aspects, especially the gender politics and attitude to women evidenced in the novel, are definitely the same as in Roberts’s other writings (cf ‘The Natural History of the P.H.’).

Roberts’s main thesis seems to be feminism and women’s lib are a waste of time because women should not be trying to fight for equality with men but simply fighting for their own variety of rights. Which sort of ignores the fact of the patriarchy, a concept Robert never appears to have taken onboard. And it does render the central element of Gráinne’s plot, the empowerment centres, somewhat moot. On the other hand, they do make Gráinne something of a messianic, or a Valentine Michael Smith-type, figure.

Of course, it all ends badly. It always does for such figures. The narrative hints at unsavoury backers who helped Gráinne financially, perhaps hoping for the social and economic disruption she eventually causes in the UK, but it doesn’t go any further. The final section also implies a post-apocalyptic Earth, perhaps after a nuclear war, but it’s only a single sentence and ambiguous.

The reviews of Gráinne I’ve read online seem mostly to have missed the point of the story. It’s not a fantasy about a Celtic goddess who has a love affair with a human man. Gráinne may be more than human, but that’s from Bevan’s point of view. Her later influence is a mixture of clever television (much cleverer than Channel 5 ever proved to be, or indeed the bulk of British tv in the mid-1980s), deep pockets and a mishmash of Eastern religions. Even then, her empowerment centres proved more disruptive than intended.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, USA) follows a similar story although, given it’s American, it reads like a carnival novel, and its central protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a thinly-disguised carnival freak. Roberts’s novel, however, uses Irish mythology rather than US carnival folklore, and focuses on female empowerment and not free love. Heinlein wrote prose that was extremely readable and smooth, but Roberts’s style is more literary. British sf produced a number of excellent prose stylists in the 1970s, not part of the New Wave but almost certainly adjacent to it, such as Coney, Cowper, Compton, Lee, Saxton, Watson…

I’ve no idea why Gráinne, published by small press Kerosina Books, was given the BSFA Award. Other notable sf novels published in the UK in 1987 include Banks’s Consider Phlebas (1987, UK), Mann’s The Fall of the Families (1987, UK), Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun (1987, USA), and even Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade (1987, USA). Certainly, a shortlist could have been drawn up. Perhaps it was.


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Oka Rel 1: The Courtesan Prince, Lynda Williams

I bought a copy of this book back in 2009 but never got around to reading it. I don’t even remember why I bought it. I’ve a vague memory of corresponding with the author, but that may be confabulation. I was interested in writing space opera, and had been for a number of years, and The Courtesan Prince (2005, Canada) is the first in a ten-book space opera series, so it may have been no more than that.

It could be argued that space opera, more so than any other branch of science fiction, succeeds or fails more on its world-building than its story. They all pretty much use the same story, anyway. Oka Rel starts from a future history and a, mostly, hard-ish sf universe, but by the time this first novel opens, Earth is lost and there are two mostly antagonistic human polities, which lost touch 200 years earlier. The Oka Rel universe plays off on the difference between the two polities – the Reetions are technological and progressive, the Gelacks are a semi-feudal empire ruled by the descendants of genetically-engineered humans.

After two centuries of separation, and all the two groups know of each other is legend and rumour, they finally meet up at a neutral space station. Von is a courtesan and dancer ordered to impersonate a member of the aristocracy during the first Gelack meeting with the Reetions. Ann is a hot-headed Reetion pilot who falls for Von, and then becomes involved in Gelack politics. Because Von is really a long-lost son of the emperor, although he doesn’t know it.

The Courtesan Prince tries hard with its world-building, but doesn’t quite make the grade. Possibly because the two groups are too much the opposite of each other. It’s all a bit too binary. It doesn’t help that Von is simply far too good a character to be entirely credible, despite the violence inflicted on him. Some of the sensibilities haven’t aged particularly well in the last twenty years but, to be fair, there is worse being published even now. It all feels, in many respects, a bit like Cherryh, but the details seem harder to visualise. In fact, now I think about it, there’s a lot of Cherryh in there. Which is no bad thing, of course. I’m a big fan of Cherryh’s fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, although I’m a sucker for a series. I’ll read anything if it comes in three or more books with a single over-arching story. But, as I said earlier, space operas succeed or fail on their world-building more than their story, and I’m not all that taken with the Oka Rel universe, to be honest.


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The Corporation Wars 1: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod

This was a reread – I read it back in 2017 – but never got the chance to read the two sequels before I put the books in storage when I moved. Earlier this year I bought an omnibus edition of the trilogy, intending to finally finish all three. 

I actually wrote a review of Dissidence (2016, UK) on my blog back then. For some reason, I wrote that it took place on a moon of Jupiter, which was complete rubbish – the author even called me out on my mistake. I’ve no idea why I wrote that. The terms exoplanet and exomoon are used throughout the novel, and it states several times that it takes place in a planetary system 25 light years from Earth. So sorry, Ken: I’ve no idea why I wrote that and I’d like to make it clear the novel is set in another planetary system.

Anyway. Two companies are exploring the mineral wealth of an exomoon using robots. One of the robots, through a sequence of events, becomes self-aware. And so causes other robots, in both mining companies, to become self-aware. They rebel. So the AIs which run the mining companies unöeash their legal AIs on the “freebots”. Everything in the planetary system is run by AIs, based on a mission profile originally sent from Earth at sublight speeds.

Carlos the Terrorist was responsible for killing thousands in London during the undeclared war between the Acceleration (left-wing, basically) and the Reaction (right-wing, basically). He finds himself reincarnated in a simulation running on an AI in the same system as the aforementioned freebots. He, and several other resurrected and uploaded war criminals from the Acceleration, is there to fight those freebots on behalf of the legal AI that represents the mining company to which the robots belonged.

Except, it’s slightly more complicated than that. Is the simulation Carlos and his team experience really a simulation? Why does the legal AI representing one of the mining companies break off relations and start a war?

The story is surprisingly fast-paced, given all the ontological discussions, but MacLeod keeps the focus tight on Seba, the first robot to gain self-awareness, and Carlos. There’s a few bait-and-switches before the novel finally reveals its plot, but it’s the first of a trilogy. There are few authors I’d trust with political science fiction, but MacLeod is definitely one of them. True, I have more in common with him politically than most sf authors (especially US ones, past and present), but also because he writes sf to his politics, not despite them.

I’d happily recommend any novel by Ken MacLeod. Some are better than others. If you read them all, there may be a few disappointments, but on the whole you’ll be impressed. The Corporation Wars trilogy, based on just this first novel, seems to be somewhere near the middle, so definitely worth reading.


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The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge

I’d heard good things about Hardinge’s fiction for several years, but I’d never bothered checking them out because, well… fantasy… YA… Not my usual, or preferred, choice of reading. But The Lie Tree (2015, UK) popped up for 99p on Kindle, and I thought it worth seeing what all the fuss was about.

And I’m glad I did.

Faith’s father, a reverend, is a celebrated palaeontologist in the 1860s, but he’s been accused of faking the fossils he discovered, so he and his family flee to the invented Channel Island of Vane to join a dig there. But all is not as it seems. The invitation was a ruse because the reverend is in possession of something that others want.

On the one hand, the title of the novel is a hint to the central element of its plot, which is not revealed until at least halfway in; on the other, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoilers. The spoiler-free version would go: Faith defends her father, uncovers a conspiracy against him, then tries to solve his murder and so learns his secret, the reason why he was invited to Vane, and uses it to take revenge on his killers.

However, a major part of the novel – although it doesn’t really kick in until around a third of the way in – is that Faith is clever, but because she is a girl it means nothing. She wants to be a scientist but her gender bars her from it. This is a novel about women as property, about chattel slavery of half of the human race, and about the means and methods open to women of the time to arrange a future for themselves and then safeguard it. Faith is a teen, and knows her much younger, and not very bright, brother, whom she loves nonetheless, is accounted more valuable than her. Even though she has the intelligence, the aptitude and the interest to follow in her father’s interests.

And it’s this element of the novel which lifts it above others of its ilk. Faith thought her father valued her because of her intelligence, but he was just using her – much as he used others to further his aims. Faith meets a woman – two, in fact, but one more so than the other – who have found a way to be intellectual without offending Victorian (male) society – I am for some reason reminded of JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, UK), an excellent novel – but it doesn’t end well. And also I’m reminded of Jeanette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun (2017, UK), which presents as a fantasy set in Victorian times but is actually a brilliant commentary on Victorian fiction by women, missionary colonialism and women’s rights.

The Lie Tree is really good, and I should definitely read more by Hardinge.


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A Fire Born of Exile, Aliette de Bodard.

Or, de Bodard does Dantès. Not that A Fire Born of Exile (2023, France) is the first science fiction novel to be inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo (1846, France). Gwyneth Jones’s excellent space opera, Spirit (2008, UK), also borrowed the plot from Dumas’s novel.

In A Fire Born of Exile, a naive scholar was tricked into expressing sympathy with the rebels during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising and promptly executed by being thrown out of an airlock. But against all odds she survived. Ten years later, using the name Quỳnh, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills, she arrives at the Scattered Pearls Belt to exact her revenge. The official who sentenced her to death is now prefect of the Belt, and Quỳnh’s lover of the time, who did nothing to save her, is now a general.

Minh is the daughter of the prefect and completely under the thumb of her overbearing mother. She is being groomed to become a scholar and follow in her mother’s footsteps, but she doesn’t really want to do that. In the panic following an incident at the Tiger Games, bandits try to kidnap Minh but she is saved by Quỳnh. The two become tentative friends.

Hoà is a technologist, low caste, who bumps into Quỳnh at her dead sister’s shrine, and it turns out Quỳnh knew her. The two are immediately attracted to each other. Hoà has been contracted by Minh and her friends to fix the mindship Flowers at the Gates of the Lords (or rather, Hoà’s sister has, but she’s ill so Hoà, who has no skill in mindship repair, has to do it instead – with help from Quỳnh). Flowers at the Gates is actually Minh’s Great Aunt and the head of the family lineage, meaning she has control of all the family funds. But she was badly damaged during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising.

Quỳnh easily unseats the general by revealing an ex-lover who was a serial killer known to, and ignored by, the authorities. The prefect is a much harder target. Quỳnh has evidence of punishments that were over and above what the law decreed, such as execution instead of exile, including her own execution, but that’s not enough. She tries to manipulate Minh into declaring unfilial piety, but Minh is too browbeaten. There’s Flowers at the Gates too, of course, who is head of the family, but will she be fixed in time?

Quỳnh underestimates the prefect’s power, but the prefect in turn underestimates Flowers’, er, power. It comes to a head when an Imperial Censor visits to make the prefect the head of the lineage.

Dantès had it much easier than Quỳnh, and not just because the prefect comes across more like Malificent than Danglars. There’s plenty more going on in A Fire Born of Exile, and it’s all built up from the relationships between the various characters. As in the other Xuya novels and stories, there’s lots of food and drink, and lots of detailed descriptions of heavily-decorated clothing – this is a lush and lushly-described universe. I liked the novel preceding this one, The Red Scholar’s Wake (2022, France), a great deal, but I liked this one more. I’m frankly surprised A Fire Born of Exile didn’t make any award shortlists in 2024. Recommended.


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Wave Without a Shore, CJ Cherryh

The back cover blurb of Wave Without a Shore (1981, USA) describes it as “a different sort of interplanetary novel by the author of Downbelow Station (1981, USA) and The Faded Sun” trilogy (1978-1979, USA). Which is almost true. It certainly doesn’t resemble the two titles mentioned – for one thing, it’s set entirely on the surface of a single planet. So, not really “interplanetary” either, I guess.

The world of Freedom was settled by humans, even though it already had a native population, the ahnit. The humans built a city, Kierkegaard, and settled down to develop a way of life that resulted them in not seeing things which do not fit their worldview or “reality”. Such as the ahnit. Who more or less become invisible to them. As do humans who drop out.

Herrin Law considers himself the cleverest person on the planet. He becomes a sculptor at the university in Kierkegaard, where he meets Waden Jenks, son of the world’s First Citizen, and almost as clever as Herrin, if not equal in intelligence. Jenks’s cleverness, however, lies in politics. There’s also a third super-smart student, Keye Lynn, who starts out as Law’s girlfriend, then after Jenks has seized power from his father, moves in with Jenks.

Jenks commissions a statue of himself from Law, which Law turns into a series of carved domes, within which is the statue, in Kierkegaard’s only square. Meanwhile, Freedom’s sole contact with other worlds, a freebooter merchant, threatens Jenks and Kierkegaard, and Jenks responds by shopping him to the military… who then start building a station in Freedom orbit.

Much of the first half of the novel is taken up with philosophical discussions between Law and Jenks. Everyone on Freedom is solipsistic to the degree they can choose what and what not to see in their surroundings. But when Jenks, encouraged by the visiting military, tells Law to never sculpt again, and then has his goons break Law’s hands to make sure… Law is driven into a crisis and begins to “see” the ahnit.

It’s a neat concept – and reminds me a little of Miéville’s The City & the City (2009, UK) – but Cherryh spends so long setting up the characters of Law and Jenks, and describing the underpinnings to the Freedom humans’ solipsism, the story drags badly for much of its length. Nor is it helped by both Law and Jenks being so arrogant and self-centred and unlikeable. It also reminds me a little of other novels by Cherryh, such as Voyager in Night (1984), and while it’s set in her Alliance-Union universe, it’s on the fringes of it, like The Faded Sun trilogy and Angel with the Sword (1985, USA). So, probably one for completists.


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Millennium 8: The Girl with Ice in her Veins, Karin Smirnoff

The second book of the third trilogy featuring Lisbeth Salander, genius sociopath hacker. The problem with novels which centre sociopaths as the hero is the villains have to be complete psychopaths in order to present some spectrum of good to bad. So, here, for example, a bad guy who infiltrates a group of eco-activists turns out to be a paedophile, because being on the bad guy’s side is not enough on its own. And when every villain is grotesque beyond plausibility, suspension of disbelief even, then you have to wonder what point the story is trying to make.

On the other hand, this is a deckare, a thriller, so I guess making a point is not, well, the point of the book. The Girl with Ice in her Veins (2025, Sweden) is not a translation of the book’s original Swedish title, Lokattens klor, which means “the lynx’s claws”, but neither of the titles is especially relevant to the plot – although there is a a newly-introduced character nicknamed Lo, lynx. She’s a baddy, of course.

Like the preceding novel, The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons (2022, Sweden), The Girl with Ice in her Veins is set mostly in the invented north Swedish town of Gasskas. It also features the same cast – not just Salander and Blomkvist from the original trilogy, but also Blomkist’s daughter and family, Salander’s niece, and the trilogy’s main villain, disabled white supremacist millionaire Branco. The ecological theme also continues, although this time it’s opencast mining rather than windfarms.

Salander’s niece, Svala, is interning at the local newspaper and has joined a local group of eco-activists. After discovering a local abandoned sanatorium is secretly in use, Svala’s mentor at the newspaper is murdered. A bomb explodes near a disused mine, which appears to be in the process of being re-opened. There is also a consortium interested in opening a new mine in the area.

It’s all connected, of course, although the novel seems more interested in the depredations of the secondary cast, especially the villains. The Cleaner is hired to murder someone in Copenhagen, who turns out to have connections to the new mine in Gasskas, but instead he decides to help Svala. A visiting Greek/Chinese millionaire, who is interested in investing in re-opening the old mine (which is actually owned by Gaskass kommune), turns out to be the father of Blomkvist’s grandson. But because he’s a baddy, he’s also a domestic abuser and made his fortune through people trafficking. Branco pops up every now and again. He’s after the harddisk containing billions in cryptocurrency which Svala was given by her mother and which she has hidden. He’s also less interested in business and more in his white supremacist political organisation.

The Girl with Ice in her Veins resolves its main plot-threads, but Branco once again escapes. So that’s the plot of book three – as yet untitled – sorted. The prose is present-tense again, and often choppy. It mostly works, but occasionally gets perilously close to the fourth wall. I did spot a couple of weird choices in translating Swedish words/culture, but fewer than in the previous book. The Girl with Ice in her Veins is not a great book, but then the series could hardly be called a great series. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/Män som hatar kvinnor (2005, Sweden), was a solid serial killer hunt thriller, but it’s been downhill since then. I must admit, I do wonder how far they plan to take the series. Blomkvist is now in his sixties, Salander is slowing down too… The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons and The Girl with Ice in her Veins do feel a little like they’re moving Svala to centre-stage, so who knows…


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Sideshow, Sheri S Tepper

This is the third novel in a loose trilogy, and I have to wonder if it was originally intended to be a trilogy, even though the three books were published one after the other. The first book, Grass (1989, USA), is considered a genre classic, and was No 48 in the original SF Masterworks series. Tepper, who came to her career late, appeared frequently on the Clarke, Tiptree and Campbell Awards during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and with good reason – she wrote a number of excellent sf novels. Her feminism grated with some genre commentators of the time (men, of course), although these days it mostly seems notable for being not very intersectional.

Grass was followed by Raising the Stones (1990, USA), and then Sideshow (1992, USA), and all three are linked by the Arbai, an ancient race of dragon-like aliens who created a galaxy-wide network of Doors, which provided instantaneous travel between worlds. In Sideshow, an alien visits Earth in the late twentieth century and persuades a pair of joined twins to destroy an Arbai Door moments after it arrives on Earth. While doing so, they accidentally fall into the Door.

The story then jumps ahead several thousand years to the world of Elsewhere, which is the only planet left in the galaxy inhabited by humans not “enslaved” by the Hobbs Land Gods (an alien fungus which has created a hive mind out of all the infected humans, as described in Raising the Stones). But the founding philosophy of Elsewhere is a perversion of the term “diversity”, where a thousand or so cultures are protected despite their depredations on their members, such as sacrificing babies, treating women as property, abusing children, and generally allowing the privileged to treat the poor as less than human… 

Elsewhere is administered from Tolerance, which uses Enforcers to, well, enforce Elsewhere’s distortion of diversity, by ensuring people do not move between cultures, the cultures do not change, or do not use technology of a higher level than is mandated for their culture. The Provost in Tolerance once a year consults a hidden computer holding the minds of the thousand academics from the galaxy’s greatest university (before the Hobbs Land Gods), but those uploaded minds, especially the four most powerful, are now quite insane and have been masquerading as “gods” and interfering in many cultures.

A team of three Enforcers, the joined twins from the twentieth century (they ended up in Elsewhere when they fell through the Door), and a mysterious old woman and her equally aged male companion (and an even more mysterious not wholly physical companion called Great Dragon), travel to the uninhabited centre of one of the continents, on the run from the mad uploaded “gods”, and eventually discover the secret of Elsewhere and the Arbai.

It makes for an odd novel. The cultures are perversions, but then Tepper has been deliberately perverse before – in Raising the Stones, for one – and it’s clear she’s arguing against the philosophy which governs Elsewhere. Even so, “diversity” was a bad choice of word to use. It makes something reprehensible of something that should be admirable. And it sometimes seems Tepper delighted in doing just that. There are also weird tonal shifts between the various sections – the opening chapters with the conjoined twins reads like some sort of US carnival novel (sadly all too common in twentieth-century US science fiction) flavoured with a little Ray Bradbury. But then Sideshow turns into a Jack Vance novel, although the wit is considerably more heavy-handed than Vance’s. The final section is pretty much explanations, but relies a little too much on close knowledge of the preceding novels, which, to be fair, I read in 2020 and 2018.

And yet, this is Tepper. You expect certain things, a certain angle of attack, so to speak,  and in Sideshow she delivers it. A bit too much in places, I think. The main characters are mostly sympathetic, but the rest are grotesque, often more like caricatures than characters, especially the villains. It’s a book that’s slow to start, picks up pace in the middle, before slowing down once again for the grand finale. Which is, to be honest, a little disappointing.

Tepper is always worth reading, and in Sideshow she’s as inventive as ever, as extreme as ever, and as readable as ever. I’m not convinced you need to read Grass or Raising the Stones first, but it would probably help.


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The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey

The White Dragon (1978, Ireland) is the concluding volume to the original Dragonrider of Pern trilogy, but having now read the book it doesn’t much feel like the conclusion to anything. So I suppose it’s fortunate McCaffrey continued to churn out Pern novels for a few more decades…

The White Dragon follows directly on from Dragonquest (1971, Ireland). It focuses on Jaxom and Ruth, the teenage heir to Ruatha Hold and his undersized dragon, which is white if you hadn’t guessed. Ruth, the dragon, proves to be better at some things than the other dragons, despite being undersized and not sexually developed. He is faster and more manoeuvrable in the air, he has an excellent memory which is useful when travelling between (which is always italicised), and fire-lizards love him. Fire-lizards were introduced in the previous book and are sort of ferret-sized (I think) pocket dragons, about as smart as cats, and have been adopted by many on Pern as pets. They also seem to remember events that happened in the distant past.

The dragonriders, hold lords and master craftsmen have determined that humans first settled Pern on the southern continent, but they can find no record of why they fled north. The oldtimers – dragonriders from 400 years previously who helped save the day in the first book of the trilogy, Dragonflight (1968, Ireland) – were given land on the southern continent because they were causing problems with the present-day dragonriders and holds. But it looks like there’s lots more, and more desirable, land available on the continent.

And The White Dragon is more or less about that – exploring the southern continent, uncovering the ruins of the first human settlement on Pern, some political wrangling between an ambitious hold lord on the southern continent and the established holds on the northern continent, and Jaxom’s romance with the sister of said ambitious hold lord… There’s no plot per se, just a series of events which develop the characters and the background, and hint at the actual history of the planet.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not an entertaining read. Jaxom is an engaging character, as are the immediate supporting cast, more so at least than in the earlier two books, and Ruth can be amusing at times. Things happen… but there’s no real plot, no climax, no closure, no suggestion the story has concluded. Looking at the Pern books, it doesn’t seem so much a series as a collection of linked trilogies, and I’ve no idea which novel actually continues the story from The White Dragon.

I’ve enjoyed reading the trilogy, far more than I expected to, but I’ve no plans to read any more. If there is a book that follows on directly from The White Dragon, perhaps I might give it a go. But Wikipedia is no help, and I don’t intend to read umpteen books on the off-chance I find it… So, for now, I shall bail – but I will no longer malign the Dragonriders of Pern series as it’s actually not that bad.


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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’m a big fan of KSR’s fiction, because of the subjects he tackles and his treatment of them just as much as the stories he tells. He doesn’t just make use of common sf tropes, he interrogates them. A lot more sf authors should do that.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002, USA) may be an alternate history, but it’s not a story set in a world which differs from ours due to some change in the past; it is in fact several stories – ten of them. Nor is it the book promised by its back-cover blurb, which posits a story set in a present-day world in which the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed 99% of the population of Europe instead of one-third. As a result, other civilisations flourished. Obviously, they flourished in real history – but in KSR’s novel they ended up dominating the world. The Years of Rice and Salt is not that either. It’s not a history of the world following on from the jonbar point. Which I suppose would be almost impossible – and huge! – to write. Like Laurent Binet’s Civilizations (2019, France), it is a series of vignettes which skip forward through the centuries, and around the world, from the Black Death to the present day. 

The linking conceit is that there is a group of people, connected eternally as a “jati”, who are repeatedly reincarnated. They die, spend time in the bardo, and are then reincarnated – as humans, or as animals. Allowing KSR to provide a focus point from which to hang to ten different stories taking place over the centuries in his alternate history. Sometimes the members of the jati remember their earlier lives, but usually they don’t.

The Black Death wipes out Europe. The Islamic Empire is never dislodged from the Iberian Peninsula. The Chinese continue to war on their western border, but also explore east and eventually settle the western coast of North America. A progressive empire develops in southern India. A league of Native American nations in central North America form a federation and keep their independence. There is a decades-long war which involves all three of the major world powers – the Indian empire, the Islamic empire, and the Chinese empire. Once the dust has settled, a new world order prevails. The various members of the jati are present, or pivotal, in some of the more important events in this 700 year history. Which also take place all over the world – Samarkand, Beijing, the Great Lakes, an Islamic city in western France, a Chinese San Francisco, and so on…

It’s fascinating stuff. The linking text is, to be honest, a not especially interesting mechanism to give the novel structure, and the ten “books” in The Years of Rice and Salt would be equally engrossing without them. KSR’s research is impressive – but not perfect: at one point, he states the Islamic punishment of cutting off the right hand of criminals is worsened because it forces criminals to use their left “unclean” hand when eating. That’s the whole point of the punishment. But the invented history KSR has created is astonishing. It feels all too real, which I guess is the point of the novel. Recommended.