Roma Eterna

Rating:
Summary: Disappointment from a master
Review: Robert Silverberg is my favorite author of sci-fi/fantasy/alternate history, and Rome is one of my favorite fictional subjects. I was, therefore, quite disappointed with this sporadically interesting compilation of previously published short stories as a single work.

Given its origin, "Roma Eterna" is not so much a novel as a series of sometimes interrelated, more or less grand tableaux of incidents in the history of Roman civilization continuing unbroken to contemporary times.

Some episodes are more interesting than others: Waiting for the End and Via Roma, for example, are often suffused with an autumnal glow of nostalgia which is very enticing and convincing. Getting to Know the Dragon, on the other hand, is simply boring, while the final segment, To the Promised Land, is just plain silly.

I find two main problems with the book: 1) Silverberg violates a key ingredient in any successful alternate history by following the Point of Departure (the slaughter of the Hebrews by the shores of the Red Sea in mid-Exodus) by usually slavish imitation of real historical events between then and now. In a first-rate alternate history, the Point of Departure leads us to an entirely new world. 2) Since the book was originally short stories, every has the nature of a simple vignette, largely without any character development.

And there's a certain sameness about it all, which gets stale after a while.

As a history buff, I have other criticisms which may be irrelevant to some readers. For example, Silverberg apparently hasn't researched Rome enough to get proper names correctly -- he consistently mixes up surnames, clan names and personal names, which were logically ordered in Roman Latin and which this author mixes and matches without any order whatsoever. He should correspond with writers who really know Rome -- such as Lindsay Davis or Steven Saylor -- before attempting this sort of thing again. And then there are anachronisms, as in the final episode when the protagonist has a dream of the slaughter of his ancestors by the armies of Pharoah, while Moses holds aloft the tablets of the Law. However, the Law was given to Moses on Mt. Sinai AFTER the crossing of the Red Sea, so how could it exist in Egypt? Call me picky, but that's just sloppy writing and bad editing.

So, forget Roma Eterna. If you want to know what Silverboerg can accomplish in the full flood of his enormous talent, read the never-surpassed Majipoor Chronicles.

Rating:
Summary: What It Would Have Taken For Rome To Not Fall...
Review: Robert Silverberg's "Roma Eterna" is actually a collection of short stories he wrote between 1989 and 2003 detailing a Roman Empire that never fell. While each story is a stand-alone tale within the alternate history of the world, taken together, they read much like another recent alternate history that details a radically different history of Euroe and Asia: Kim Stanley Robinson's "Years of Rice and Salt".

It becomes apparent very early in the book that Silverberg envisions not merely one but a chain of events as being necessary for Rome to not fall: a failed Jewish Exodus, Christianity never arising, a strong Emperor heading off the Third Century crisis, a definitive destruction of the Northern barbarians and Persia and an assassination of Mohammed before he could spread the word of Allah. In the context of world history we as we know it, the chain is a pretty fragile one, but it does make for an interesting exercise in history - much like the entire book. Some of his ideas have a very real ring of possibility to them: a Rome squandering the military might of a generation on an unsuccessful attempt at invading the Americas, Eastern and Western Empires that eventually fall on each other in a series of Civil Wars, a Rome grown fat and decadent on trade throughout the world that breeds emperors even more insane and bizarre than those known historically. However, for each of these interesting and realistic twists, he allows himself more than a few historical parallels: the World Wars, Leonardo da Vinci, the French Revolution - and his modern Rome (of 1970) bears a great deal of resemblance to a modern Europe under a traditional Roman hegemony.

In all, though, I really liked this book, although I suspect it's not for everyone. In fact, I would direct scholars or fans of Roman and Byzantine history towards it before I would the average sci-fi/fantasy/alternate history fan. He knows his Roman history well, and he's not afraid to make obscure use of it. Sometimes this makes for neat touches (like having the Eastern Empire fall to the West in 1453, the year the Eastern Empire in actuality fell to the Ottomans), and sometimes it just makes for a lot of names and dates. The book is basically one great conceit to the 'what if' bundled inside an extensive history. If that's your sort of thing (and it certainly is mine), you'll love it. Otherwise, you may find youself rapidly bored or confused.

Rating:
Summary: Good diversion, but minor Silverberg
Review: Robert Silverberg, with fifty years of writing and hundreds of books behind him, has been in the business too long to write a really bad book, but this collected short story series is the kind of thing that likely didn't take much effort of his to produce. Compared to the average SF alternate history book, the book is well written and enjoyable; but, compared to Silverberg's best work (much of which is shamefully out of print) it's not what one should read to get a true view of what this year's Science Fiction Writers Grandmaster Award winner is capable of.

Rating:
Summary: A bold idea, disappointingly executed.
Review: Roma Eterna is an ambitious attempt at alternate history and the base assumption is audacious indeed. What, asks Silverberg, if the Roman Empire had never really collapsed but instead endured and prospered? Silverberg proceeds to answer this question by highlighting a series of 10 historical moments in such an alternative history that could mark key turning points in such an Empire. The vignettes themselves are often absorbing and Silverberg mixes in just enough actual history to make the venture worthwhile. Human nature, one sees, remains the same irrespective of ruler or system of government. The Empire parallels with real history like the bloody purges of Robespierre and the colonial voyages that subjugated (often brutally) the Orient and the New World. For all its ponderous bureaucratic inertia and the sheer logistic barriers, the Empire is pervasive and powerful enough to crush any attempt at true democracy - brief flickers of a "Republic" which is more an oligarchy or merchant aristocracy are as far as we go. In the end, a band of Hebrews seeks to escape to another plant as the only alternative to Rome's crushing embrace.

Bold as this attempt at alternative history is, Silverberg strangely falters thereafter. His examination of the circumstances in each of the 10 events is disappointingly shallow and the ending in particular seems highly contrived. A map of the world using the Roman names for various countries and a parallel timeline linking the Roman dates with the AD calendar would have made things easier for the reader as well. Having read several of Silverberg's masterpieces. I expected better from him. I started reading this book as if sitting down to a delicious meal; by the end, it was as if the food had been but an illusion and my hunger remained unappeased.

Rating:
Summary: Good stories, not necessarily good alternate history . . .
Review: Several reviews I've read online of Silverberg's latest work compare it to Bruce Sterling's recent _Years of Rice and Salt,_ implying that somehow Silverberg "stole" Bruce's idea of a grand alternate history progressing from ancient times to our (alternate) present. This is simply silly, since all of these stories except the "Prologue" were published previously, several in anthologies, though most of them are somewhat changed in this volume to aid the historical and narrative flow. I very much enjoyed Bruce's book, but neither of these guys has to lift ideas from the other, believe me. Anyway. The Point of Departure -- as Alt Hist buffs refer to the crucial dividing line between our "real" history and what might plausibly have happened -- is the failure of the Hebrews to escape from Eqypt under the leadership of Moses. Which means no chance for Christianity to develop. (I'm sure the fundamentalists out there will accordingly regard this book as blasphemous. . . .) Silverberg takes this to mean that Rome has the opportunity to continue as a world power indefinitely. Not that the Empire doesn't have its ups and downs, though, its good and bad centuries. After Constantine founds Constantinople and divides the Empire between Western and Eastern emperors, the stage is set for a Latin-Greek tug-of-war that will last for two millennia and several of the stories are about various stages in that rivalry. The best of these, I think, is "Waiting for the End," in which Rome, having wasted its substance on a disasterous series of attempts to conquer the New World, is simply outflanked by the Byzantines and the final, but quiet, fall of the Urbs Roma is witnessed by a Romanized Greek bureaucrat and his girlfriend. "Via Roma," about the bloody establishment of a Second Roman Republic, is also very good, and so is "A Hero of the Empire," in which a minor Roman official in Arabia Deserta has to decide what to do about a potentially dangerous rabble-rouser named Mahmoud. But there's a problem with setting stories in the far future of a world in which the Point of Departure occured in its distant past: Much of the enjoyment in reading stories like this is in seeing what happened to figures from our own timeline had circumstances been even a bit different. (E.g., Lincoln survives the assassination attempt, is later impeached, and retires to Chicago.) Once you get a few centuries down the line, though, the divergence is so great that all the characters are pure fiction with no connection to our own world, and you lose much of the "alternate history" aspect. That's what happens with most of the later stories in this volume. They're generally quite good *as stories* but the "what if" ingredient becomes pretty thin.

Rating:
Summary: Good alternate history
Review: The Exodus failed to take the Jews from Egypt into the Promised Land. Thus Christianity never surfaces as the Jewish people remain enslaved in Egypt. Still Rome rises to defeat the neighboring Barbarians. The rest is history (at least alternative) as key global events fostered by ROMA ETERNA starting in A.U.C. 1203 (A.D. 405 our time) into the next fifteen centuries occur as the Roman Empire ebbs and grows.

Robert Silverberg rewrites several of his related short stories into an epic alternative historical novel that engages the reader with intriguing theories of how much different the world would be if one pivotal event (albeit Moses leading the Jews) had a different ending. Though entertaining and easily hooking the audience, the tale still feels more like a short story collection as none of the characters (over the fifteen hundred years) feel fully developed. Still sub-genre readers will relish this fascinating saga of a seemingly eternal Roman Empire as each subsequent chapter builds off of events that chronologically (and literally) preceded it.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Very, very good....
Review: The only thing you need to know you have from the other reviews for the book, except that the scene with Moshe holding the law was in a dream. I read it in one sitting, and it's not a short book. The ending to the final chapter was, let's see, very Old Testament.

All in all, a really good read.

Rating:
Summary: Fun
Review: This is a fun book: just suppose the Roman empire had continued for another 1500 years...? The stories are light and are written with the shallow depth of a young writer (which Silverberg is not). The chapters are a series of short stories, many previously published but recast here with dollops of cross-references. Silverberg takes the charming tack of seeing everything from slightly below, from noble Romans near the Emperor but on the outs in obscure places: an historian (for the key displacement event, of course: no intolerant Christians), an adventurer in the Roman Underworld (literally), an exile in Arabia (Mecca in the 7th century...), an underofficer in an army attempting to invade the Yucatan once more, a Greek translator to a cowardly emperor, etc. This device allows Silverberg to "sneak up on" key historic events and perhaps surprise the reader as well. He turns each chapter into something of a mystery: where is this chapter going? Besides Romans and Greeks, Silverberg is inordinately fond of Hebrews, a peculiar little holier-than-thou sect that pops up here and there.

I was disappointed in my expectations. This book is not a more thorough projection of how a Roman empire could have continued and evolved. Silverberg merely adapts as somehow Roman several of the major trends and innovations of actual Western history to our present. The focus is mostly politics and religion, but written without developing significant change in ancient Roman belief and practices. He is forced to reference true ancient Romans as the heroic exemplars for his characters because only historical figures will carry moral weight to the reader'yet are most likely to have been forgotten by the lowly characters in the stories set a thousand years on. Nothing is too serious'there's little about what happened to slavery, to provincial government, the evolution of modern languages, or how they dovetail with technological developments. Because the chapters are set a century or two apart, there can be no continuity and development of his characters. Finally, the conclusion is a limp apotheosis. These may be my problems with the book rather than yours.

Rating:
Summary: It Doesn't Get Much Worse Than This....
Review: Three characteristics recommended this book to me: 1) I am a fan of Roman history 2) I love SF short stories 3) Robert Silverberg is one of my favorite authors. With this combination, I figured I couldn't go wrong and bought this book on a whim without looking at Amazon's ratings, which I have come to rely on increasingly. I'll detail why all 3 of these characteristics failed this book and forced me to rate it 1 star, the lowest rating I have ever given a book. Normally, I don't finish books that bad but my mistake was to take too few books with me on my 3 week vacation (which was a Danube cruise followed by a week in Constantinople/Istanbul since my hobby is visiting all the current countries that made up the Roman Empire at it's greatest extent). Therefore, I didn't have enough books to read and, once I finished everything else, I had to read this book or nothing during my cruise.

1) I expected Silverberg to be more knowledgeable about Roman history; reading this book, my illusion disappeared quickly but I assumed he'd learn more than a few place names and dates and the barest outlines of the empire. At least he must have visited a few of the well-known Roman sites like Tivoli and Capri since he constantly refers to them but the problem with that is he, well, constantly refers to them.

2) The SF extrapolations and even simple plot elements are virtually non-existent. These "stories" are more vignettes with the last few pages wrapping up what plot elements there are.

3) Silverberg's writing is strong, if slightly mannered. His characterization is thin and his plots, as I mentioned above, don't exist.

If you like Silverberg, I strongly recommend avoiding this book and buying some of his excellent work such as Nightwings, Dying Inside, At Winter's End, Kingdoms of the Wall, etc. If you like Roman History, read Tacitus, Suetonius, and even Procopius. If you like Alternate History about the Roman Empire, read Turtledove; he is a real history professor and an expert on the Byzantine Empire.

Rating:
Summary: It Doesn't Get Much Worse Than This....
Review: When I saw this book at the library and read the synopsis on the book jacket, I thought it looked like a really interesting concept. I was expecting a story set roughly in the present in a vast all-encompassing Roman Empire that never fell. I wanted to see the differences of culture an technology and how they would be different in modern life if they had evolved out of such a mighty empire. However, what I got instead were several short stories set in a constantly decaying, but never quite falling, Roman Empire.

Despite being a little disappointed that this was a book of short stories, instead of what I had expected, I still thought it might be interesting to see some of the things that I mentioned above, as the Empire evolves. However, while a couple of the stories were pretty good, most were just ok, and a couple (including the last) were terrible. Instead of telling stories about the greatness of the Empire and how it expands throughout the years, and the technology that comes along with it, the stories are more about how the Empire just barely hangs on (or doesn't, temporarily) despite many factors that threaten it. And the technology that I thought would be particulary interesting was barely mentioned at all. There are passing mentions of a printing press and picture postcards, and some talk of building an elevator that is never realized, but no discussion of how technological advancements were made in this alternate version of history. I was also particularly disappointed by the fact that the technology that was mentioned in the stories pretty much corresponded to when those things came about in actual history. But I would have thought, that if the Roman Empire never fell, technology would have progressed at a slightly faster, if not much faster rate, especially considering how advanced the Romans seemed to be in such things. Also without the Dark Ages that followed the Empire's collapse, I would think things would have progressed further in that time. Finally, the most annoying thing about the book was that the last story did not seem to belong at all. It was not a story about the Empire, aside from being set in it, and was completely different from all the others in the book. It was also one of the shortest and probably the worst of the stories in the book.

I wouldn't recommend this book, although if you know what to expect going into it, you may enjoy it more then I did.