Rightfully nominated for the Hugo award, the scope and ambition of this book truly is astonishing. Many times we found ourselves taken aback—breathless—merely from thinking what the book is about before even pondering the words written on a given page. Steeped in history, philosophy, and science it absolutely requires a familiarity with these subjects from any reader—a liberal arts degree of some kind or other is almost a prerequisite.

 

The subject at hand is shockingly simple in the way many of the best alternate histories are. It supposes the events of the world transpiring had the black plague slaughtered 99% of Europe (white people). Many recent notable books (specifically, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) comment about the American Indians and their 90% mortality to European disease in the Americas paving the way for the United States we know today, which probably gave rise to this book. In any event, an author attempting to trace a new history from the times before Christ to 2002 without any white people in Europe is audacious to say the least.

 

Years opens in one of the most memorable scenes in all speculative fiction. The character Bold flees from the camp of his lord and becomes a fugitive in Europe. It is newly empty (actually the final gasps of emptying) of aboriginal peoples. Bold finds empty towns, houses, and farms as he wanders seeking food and seldom seeing other people. It is a slow, methodical, but engrossing prologue to such a book and it leaves the reader helplessly wondering, "Oh my God! What happens now?"

 

This prologue presages a series of novellas much in the style of James Michener’s The Source leaping over vast stretches of time with very specific (and excellent) accounts of characters involved in the daily pursuits of their worlds. It becomes a mosaic of an alternate history: the ascendance of Islam; the ascendance of China as a naval power; the museum curiosity of a white Celtic woman in a seraglio; the discovery of America by China and Japan; the rise of India and later certain powers of America; the onset of women’s rights by Islamic pioneers in the "new wilderness" of Europe; the scientific discoveries of atomics by Muslim Italians. For any reader who already knows how these events already took place, the contrasts are immensely enjoyable and compulsively readable.

 

More astonishing yet—and something sfreviews.net correctly points out is largely ignored by the critical press—is the fantasy element of the book; viz., the reincarnation scenes within the Bardo that separates the novellas. Eventually aiming at themes no less than the individual’s place and responsibility in history and the meaning of life in the face of death, the Bardo unites the book where nothing else could and ends up being the sweetest, lingering aftertaste for the potent and rich diet the mind just ingested.

 

So why doesn’t this book get a 7?

 

Good question. Years presents certain problems when viewed in the scope of the genre. As we said, many books are very challenging but none absolutely require the sort of erudition in a reader that Robinson requires here. Calmly, and not contemptuously, it is an elitist book. Secondly, and more importantly, the books ambition is impossible to completely fulfill—certainly not in the mere 800 pages we get here. But finally, for all of Robinson’s talents, his world is curiously idealistic and one-dimensional. Like the Martian trilogy, his characters are idealized scientists who seldom feel anything in terms of selfishness, personal ambition, cruelty, malice, or revenge. More sadly, they never venture into mirth either. This history is endlessly sober, always grim, and every moment filled with importance and Symbol with never a moment for the individual. Business, Capitalism, sports, competition for lovers, gluttonous feasts, and potential corrupted are all pursuits that are often vilified but always present in the world around us. A writer who is going to seriously try to write a new history cannot ignore these events.

 

One can argue that the nature of the reincarnation motif—that is, the fact that the same handful of characters in the jati are continually present—means that the book is necessarily one-dimensional. This is a compelling argument and we give some sympathy for. There is, of course, a body of events in the book that speak to those vices we listed. Also, many great books are devoid of humor: for example, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and the similarly nominated The Scar. But the reincarnation argument hinges on greatly preferring nature over nurture in a person and those latter two books do not aspire to retelling peoples and histories. Much like the defects in misunderstanding or ignoring economic theory in the Martian trilogy, these lacks in Years become problematic precisely because the book is otherwise so amazing.