Gerhard’s Reviews > The Years of Rice and Salt > Status Update

Would the gradual and unfinished defeat of patriarchy be the larger story of history? Along with, perhaps, the gradual and uncertain defeat of infectious disease? So that we have been battling microparasites and macroparasites, eh? The bugs and the patriarchs?

...if we change China, then we change the world. Because it always comes back to China, do you understand?

Kirana only shook her head. “Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future.”
“You, a historian, say this? But the future can't be known at all!”

Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: subatomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things.

In so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered.

“Here are our conquerors, a culture where women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”

Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter.

“Survived them, and the Six Great Errors, and the Three Incredible Fuckups, and the Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck. A miracle! There must be hungry ghosts holding big umbrellas over us, brothers.”

One of the Japanese men snorted. “No one can take over the world,” he said. “It's too big.”

It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world.