Thinking about this challenge was actually what prompted writing this review. Maintaining narrative continuity over so long of a timeline is a challenge for authors. This means that telling the story takes much more than the lifetime of any single character. The story has a huge scope not only in the geography it covers, but also in the time that it spans (as I've alluded to in the title of this post). As people start to resettle Europe and make contact with the Americas, some of the story takes place in those continents as well.
As in real history, the former spends most of the time split into a bunch of different polities (not necessarily hostile, just not having effective centralized power) while the latter spends most of the time as a unified empire (with varying degrees of acceptance of that unity in the provinces). Most of the story takes place in Asia, which is mostly divided between the Islamic world and China. It starts with a world in which Europe was almost entirely wiped out by the black plague and then imagines how things develop from there. The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is an alternate history novel. I usually only write reviews of non-fiction books that I read but a novel I read recently was different enough from typical fiction that I thought I'd make an exception.
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