Into a world without Europe

If genres are shirts, some writers are the Incredible Hulk: they keep bursting out of them. Kim Stanley Robinson writes science fiction. But when he wrote his mighty trilogy about the colonisation of Mars - Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars - what might in someone else's hands have been a nuts 'n' bolts exercise in world-building became a sweeping Tolstoyan vision of the human future, genuinely grand, exquisitely characterised, urgent and humane.

It isn't that he's embarrassed by SF, or wants to escape it. He always offers solid science-fictional satisfactions too; and he depends absolutely on the genre's "sense of wonder" and its speculative freedom. It's just that he always wants to do more with it than most people conceive to be possible.

And now comes The Years of Rice and Salt. It's an "alternative history", a book in the established sub-genre of SF which explores the world we might have had if some crucial event had worked out differently: and offers equally established pleasures, which are usually like little cognitive jokes. You get to see the apparently immutable fabric of time wittily moulded and transformed, you get the pleasure of recognising what you already know as it looks through a strange telescope.

This book makes sure you get all those nice cognitive frissons. It lets you explore the Chinese city of Fangzhang, standing where San Francisco does in our world - only on the north shore of the Bay, because only an idiot with no sense of feng shui would have put a city on the foggy south side. It shows you Muslim music-lovers getting into medieval plainchant with just the same generous incomprehension of its content as our world-music fans feel towards what Malian griots are actually singing about.

But it jumps off from a much bigger issue in world history than who won the battle of Gettysburg. In the middle ages, Europe was beginning to develop the kit of technologies and ideas that would let it dominate the world; but, as one historian puts it, "there were promising beginnings everywhere".

The Islamic world had better science, the Gujaratis built better ships, and the Chinese knew how to sustain cities that dwarfed Venice and London. Because by 1500 Europeans had an advantage that only got larger, we'll never know how those beginnings would have turned out - whether the West was really programmed for success from the start.

So Robinson simply ups the mortality rate of the Black Death bacillus, from 30 per cent to 100 per cent, and takes Europe out of the picture in the 14th century. No more cathedrals, no more Christians, no more white people. (Except in the Orkneys, much pestered by tourists. Red hair? Ugh. Blimey.)

The world that results might be a cold thought-experiment, or a politically-correct-fantasy in which everything is super without colonialism. It is neither; it is a 600-year tapestry of striving, joy, unhappiness and ambiguity in which the Muslim and Chinese superpowers contending for dominance behave neither better nor worse than in real history; just differently, because a different set of flowers has been allowed to bloom.

Robinson's inventions on the large scale are elegant and provocative. This is a charged moment in (real) history to be imagining how an Islamic Europe, recolonised from North Africa, might turn out, from the stodgy conservatism of the UAE (United Alpine Emirates) to the hopeful ferment of the Atlantic ports.

But it's his small-scale invention that really counts, his compassionate and attentive engagement with individual lives in his imagined world, because he is a writer who has always approached epic through intimacy, history through the sight of bowls on the table, with due attention paid to who does the washing-up.