I’m leading the discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt at WisCon later this month, so this interview with him at Zone SF was useful:
On that point [ alternate histories ] irritate me no end - you know, Mark Twain guiding a riverboat up the Black Sea because the Ottomans conquered the world in 1500. It’s ridiculous because there would be no Mark Twain. I worried a little bit in my book even presenting Akbar, the emperor of the Mogul empire in 1560 because that’s 150 years past my change point.
