Sideways in Time, 30-31 March 2015

I'll be presenting a talk about Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt at Sideways in Time (https://sidewaysintime.wordpress.com/), a conference hosted by the University of Liverpool and organised by Glyn Morgan and Chuckie Patel. Keynote speakers are Karen Hellekson, Adam Roberts and Stephen Baxter. Here's my proposal:

‘It Is One Story’: Writing a Global Alternative History in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt

Alternative histories create a ludic space where a game of allusion, extrapolation and speculation is played. They make salient aspects of society, culture and history that might otherwise have remained unremarked, hidden or difficult to disentangle from “real-world” historical narratives. The jonbar point is a speculative leap that opens up an imaginative space where an estranged history that speaks back to issues of our contemporary world and our perspective on history can be traced. The influence of a “real-world” history remains a shadow throughout the alternative history, both because the reader can compare and contrast fictional, historical and experienced worlds, and because the narrative is paradoxically shaped against that history.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s (2002) The Years of Rice and Salt, scenes set in the Bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism, introduces a frame for reflecting on the game of history played out it the text. The figure of Monkey from Journey to the West emblematises the play of the alternative history. In this paper I examine the ways in which the alternate history is used to present history and the development of societies in the context of an absent Europe. I consider the use of textual strategies such as the narrative cohesion generated through the reincarnation of focal characters and explore several scenes to consider what they say about history and culture. Ultimately, I aim to explore how The Years of Rice and Salt portrays the actors who make up the story of history, how this history is itself characterised and what repercussions these explorations have for reading the stories that make up contemporary “real-world” history.