I am not sure whether I want one of my favourite writers to get into trouble. But in a way it would be wonderful if someone actually noticed what he’d done in The Years of Rice and Salt – which I have read a Locus-ful of glowing reviews of. In an era in which the Western World is proclaiming itself as the Defender of Freedom, God Civilization and All Good Things, here’s a man who has written a novel that says to Western Civilization “you are quite irrelevant”. With the population in Europe obliterated by the Black Death, his world is shaped by China and the Arab nations, by Buddhism and Islam, and is as accomplished, as conflicted, as shot through with light and darkness, as our own. But completely different. I have the same reaction, reading the descriptions of the book, that Marie had to Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy – do “they” possibly know what’s being said here. Or is SF/F entirely toothless, and living within its own little bubble.