Face of Chaos

Back in the years of my first tentative incarnations of my website, I (and others) wondered if the Internet could/would become a sort of common ground where readers could keep track of what their favorite authors were up to and, since most writers get into this business because they’re readers at heart, where writers could let their readers know what they, themselves, were reading

It was a good idea and one that Amazon and countless other Internet enterprises eventually turned into a fairly viable business model. My own contribution to the process continues to exist in fossilized form on my website. And I do intend to get back to the meat of my website now that I can do my additions and updates before I turn out lights, but there’s something to be said for the original thought of a writer writing about what’s been read.

Toward that end, I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT last night and it’s weighing on my mind.

First off, although the community of Fantasy and Science Fiction writers is fairly small, we don’t all know one another and I don’t know KSR. We may have crossed paths over the years, but not in a way that lingers in my memory. When I read his prose, I don’t hear his actual voice in my head, as I often do when reading a friend’s work, yet I was constantly aware of “writer presence” as I read this book.

I was drawn to it because, while I generally think of KSR as an SF author, this book is alternate history and the premise–that the Black Plague (possibly combined with an anthrax aftermath) knocks out 95% of the European population–is intriguing.

Knowing, from the blurbs, that the story was a chronological epic, I was pretty sure that I was going to be reading an episodic series of novellas rather than a novel, so I was alert for the narrative cues and devices that would help me organize my mental “story space” so that I could appreciate KSR’s grand design.

Initially, the setting was familiar (Mongols headed for Europe). There was a mix of historic and invented characters, a bit more magic/fantasy than I’d expected, and some interesting insights on isolation, loss, and mourning. The narrative device was reincarnation: each narrative would be populated with characters on their way to nirvana and who would be aware of their journey only in the interludes between the novellas–which struck me as a reasonable solution to the chronological continuity problem.

I thought I was heading out on a grand adventure…and my enthusiasm held for the first few novellas, but the farther the narrative progressed from the initial split (the demise of European civilization) the more detached I became from the entire enterprise until, with about half the book yet to be read, I considered abandoning it–and I rarely abandon books.

I wondered if this was unsuspected chauvinism rearing its ugly head. Am I so Euro-centric that I can’t get into a novel that has no lily-white characters like myself? Was I, at some base level, unable to accept-or, worse, uninterested in–an alternate history that didn’t include me? Has life changed so much since this book was published in 2002 that the notion of a world shaped by Islam and China cannot be contemplated?

It’s hard to be certain, but I don’t think I have to answer “yes” to any of those questions. In the end, KSR simply lost me. Yes, the reincarnation device kept me cued into the continuing characters, but the whole point of reincarnation is a sort of spiritual progress which never happened and which seemed, at times to frustrate the characters: in the interludes between the novellas, they complained of not getting anywhere…and I entirely sympathized with them. They dutifully marched through set-piece novellas that came to feel more like medieval morality plays (quite an irony there) than stories about people…or even stories about a civilization.

As one writer contemplating another, I have to admire what KSR created: the concept, the narrative structure, the reinvention of literally hundreds of nouns from the rivers of France to the elements. There’s an undeniable mastery of craft on display, but the craft isn’t storytelling, at least not after the first few novellas; it’s political theory and speculation–the sort of thing that Orwell and Huxley, among others, did better, shorter, and with compelling stories.