“I Saw Through Time”: Falling into Other Histories

Abstract

Robinson’s alternative histories explore the collective project of remaking history as a moral, political, and spiritual imperative. “The Lucky Strike” (1984) and “A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions” (1991) reimagine the moral and ethical implications of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. In The Years of Rice and Salt Robinson rewrites the bedrock values and assumptions of modernity without the Christian West: the Black Death in the 1350s wipes out Europe’s population, and the Islamic Middle East and China become dominant world powers. By recasting ideas of utopia in the Buddhist idiom of reincarnation, the novel frames the quest for social and economic justice as a form of spiritual progress. Shaman centers on life for a small band of hunter-gatherers in what is now Southern France during an ice age thirty-five thousand years ago. In exploring the lives of the Chauvet cave-painters, the novel emphasizes the complexity of this socio-climatological world, defined by the pack’s complex relationships to the animals its shaman-artists depict.