Beers of Rice and Salt

I'm getting to the end of The Years of Rice and Salt. While it's excellent as a story, I also get the sense it's painstakingly researched and corroborated compared to most alternate history. Not because of an abundance of detail but a distinct lack of it.

Robinson uses a very broad brush to outline how world events progress over the book's huge timeline, but goes into very little detail about what this very different world looks or feels like, or the texture of the cultures in different places. This is probably because a whole ton of work went into building logical historically based rationale for why events would play out the way they do in the novel, why certain cultures end up expanding or contracting in territorial holdings the way they do. 

It’s much harder if not impossible to build any kind of historical basis for those little visceral street-level details that tend to make alternate history so fun. What do primary sources say about what a Turin depopulated in the middle ages and then repopulated with Moors and Moroccans to become a Muslim center of research and education would look like circa the 1930s? Probably nothing. The truth is a lot of the tastiest morsels of historical fiction are the author just going hog wild making shit up, and I think Robinson, for better or worse, (if Red Mars is any indication) is above doing such things.