Snap!

Yes, Mike and I are reading the same book: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's an alternate history, exploring a world where Europe was wiped out by the Black Death, and the Chinese, Japanese and Arabs inherit the earth.

I only started on it yesterday, but so far it seems interesting enough. Timurlane's mongols ride through the Moravian gate, and find the place... dead. I was wondering what Robinson would do without a landscape to write about (something readers of his Mars trilogy or Antartica will understand), but at the moment he's doing a great job of evoking the emptiness and desolation of a whole continent which has just died.

It'll be interesting to see what he does with it; maybe one of us will blog a review when we're finished.