Just finished a powerful novel of alternative history, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinthat asks the question, "What kind of world history would we have from the Black Death until now, if the plague had taken 99% of Europe's population?" Imagine a world where the two defining forces are Allah and Buddha. Like really good alternative history, like Dick and Turtledove, this novel is a philosophical character study of history as seen by the lives of those who might live it. What makes Robinson's centuries-spanning speculative history is weaving the recurrent narrative of the reincarnation of the same karmically-entwined souls through out that span of time. I just wanted to quote a selection from it.

"The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since the Pan's death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao - noth the companions of his fate, just the people had just fallen in with by accident - nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way that it had always happened, with no fate involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else had happened in history or the world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances - the village, the platoon, the work unit, monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood, - these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And now he was the old widower, the baby-sitter, the broken-down old bureaucrat-poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbors, and he liked his role among them."