‘It Is One Story’
Alternative histories create a ludic space where a game of allusion, extrapolation and speculation is played. Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt depicts a world that might have developed had European civilisation been eradicated by the Black Death. This chapter examines how Robinson uses science fiction, utopia and the alternate history to examine and challenge assumptions about progress, memory, identity, culture and storytelling. It investigates how The Years of Rice and Salt portray the actors who make up the story of history, how this history is characterised and what repercussions these explorations have for reading the stories that make up contemporary “real-world” history.