Kim Stanley Robinson
How would civilization have developed if the plague that wiped out huge populations in Europe actually wiped out all of Europe? With a void of western ideas and Christianity, scientific and religious progress was made in Asia and the Middle East. How do you even tell this story, which spans many hundreds of years and thousands of miles of geography? Robinson chooses to set the story in the guise of a Buddhist jati. A jati is a group of souls that are connected somehow and continue to be reincarnated together so that they encounter each other in every life. This device allows us to travel from Asia to Arabia to the New World as each new reincarnation takes place. Very clever and very well done. I found myself looking for the reoccuring characters since it was not always obvious. I love the imagining of how Newton's laws would have been discovered in an Eastern scientific context, or how democracy might have developed. Covering science, religion, politics, economics and philosophy, Robinson provides a fascinating and entertaining look at an alternate universe.
Rating: Read it
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