100 Books Like The Years of Rice and Salt

I have never read a novel so close to prophecy.

Published in 1995, Parable starts in July 2024 amidst the election of an autocrat who, by the sequel Parable of the Talents, literally pledges to “make America great again.” I started my platform in 2015 in the same context.

This novel pulled me into its harrowing tale of how to survive civilizational collapse: the dismantling of systems, norms, and climate change that we are all currently going through.

The lesson is ultimately about embracing change, caring for and trusting each other in community, and coming up with our own ways of being together. So many of our ancestors have survived periods of collapse by the same principles. These ancestral lessons still guide me, and I believe are critical to surviving AI dystopia.

I read this book over a decade ago, and it still has its claws in me.

The writing prose is lyrical and gorgeous. The world-building, centered around a blend of Christianity and Jewish cultures and religions, is beautiful and spellbinding. The characters are each so creatively written, and the sex – oh my god – is just both tastefully and devastatingly written.

This book is a cult classic. I have recommended it to others so many times over the years.

Tim Powers is best known for his secret histories. Unlike alternate history, a secret history doesn’t change the publicly known facts of the past; instead, it tells a story hidden beneath those facts that may change their meaning.

Powers takes a strict approach to secret history that I admire and try to follow when I can: all the known historical details (who was where and when and what they were doing) must remain the same. His marvelous novel Declare applies this rule to the Kim Philby spy case. Powerful beings that have been dwelling among us provide the hidden motivations for espionage and treason from WWII into the Cold War.

Declare is fun both for its spycraft and occult details. 

Everfair is one of several recent alternate histories that challenge the usual focus on the same sorts of events in the same parts of the world and the all-too-frequent disturbing obsession with “what if the bad folks had won?” questions (South in the Civil War, Axis in WWII).

Shawl imagines a different, better history for the Congo—liberated from European control and gifted with a new source of energy. Her interesting characters from many backgrounds around the globe come together to fight for their sometimes conflicting, sometimes flawed visions for a better future.

This is the visionary aspect of speculative fiction at its most powerful. 

Smale is a fantastic award-winning writer of alternate history, and in Hot Moon we get to see that skill combined with his day job as astrophysicist for NASA. But above all this is an action story of the Cold War turning “hot” on the moon.

There are other alternate Apollo tales (e.g., For All Mankind), but I don’t know of any that have this level of space combat. Smale’s sprezzatura with the scientific details is such that I was never pushed out of the story by their complexity or by doubt in their correctness.

And like all of Smale’s work, Hot Moon never loses track of the importance of the “who” experiences technological change versus the change itself.

I’m looking forward to the next book in this series!

Technically, this is an alternate-world book rather than alternate history. Still, I may be forgiven for including it in this list because it so closely parallels the events of the French Revolution. So, it almost seems like it could have actually happened… if magic existed in the world.

I love the main character’s journey. She starts out as a somewhat unlikeable and privileged woman and is brought low in life, only to emerge as a better and stronger person afterward. I think it’s a journey perhaps many of us take—we have the security of our childhood crushed by the expectations of becoming an adult and then have to learn how to be our true selves again in order to survive. I love a good coming-of-age story.

When I picked up this book a couple of decades ago, I was blown away when I started reading. I’d never seen a story that presupposed a completely different background to America’s colonization—many alternate history books take place after Europeans colonized the Americas, so this was a fresh take on the “what if” genre.

This helped me see how the boundaries of history could be changed and shaped to fit other timelines and scenarios, and I loved seeing how various non-European cultures could be central in a reimagining of the world’s history.

I must mention this book because it was one of the first alternate histories I read as a teen, and I remember how it caused me to dream about “what ifs.”

Although traveling back to 6th-century Rome didn’t sound like a lot of fun, I loved reading about the main character's ingenuity and how he uses his modern know-how to survive in the literal dog-eat-dog world of the past. It was a good roadmap in imagination about tackling a sudden change in fortune, and the writing was personable and fun to read.

This has to be the most original and influential book ever written on landscape history – indeed it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Hoskins invented landscape history. 

He shows us that beneath the lineaments of ordinary, everyday landscapes, a fascinating past can be discerned. A few bumps and hollows in a grassy field can indicate the site of a vanished medieval village; a double line of hedgerows might signify the boundary of an Anglo-Saxon estate. With this book in hand, we can all become landscape historians! 

Most of all, I love Hoskins’s distinctive voice, eloquent and passionate in defence of the landscapes he cherishes, deploring the violence inflicted on them and those who lived in them by the ruthless forces of industrialization and modernity.

There is so much going on in this book in terms of plot, drama, and relationships, but why I especially love it is because Caris, one of the protagonists, breaks the mold of the typical powerless medieval woman. When the Black Plague comes to Kingsbridge, Caris is the only one who uses observation and common sense to realize that the disease spreads by contact. In a world that revolves around religion and superstition, this doesn’t go over well. Though forced to sacrifice the love of her life, and put on trial as a witch, Caris sticks to her guns and enacts the medical policies she knows will save lives. Eventually, she gains the townspeople’s trust, ultimately ascending into a position of power within the town. Get it, girl!