Roma Eterna

by Robert Silverberg

Book Overview

No power on Earth can resist the might of Imperial Rome, so it has been and so it ever shall be. Through brute force, terror, and sheer indomitable will, her armies have enslaved a world. From the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380814889
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.21 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 1.2" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

Slow moving and flawed, but the good stories were very, very good

Other readers' criticisms are accurate -- the collected stories are very slow moving, but to me it started picking up about halfway through. I've given it 5 stars because the good parts were excellent and made up for the rest. To me, the best stories were the analog of the French Revolution, the story of the last Emperor, and the very last vignette about the Jews and their second Exodus. There's no Christianity, and there's no Islam. I wish Silverberg would have given us his theories on why no religions developed to replace them. He was also vague about how the Western Roman Empire didn't fall in the third or fourth centuries A.D. He just mentioned that there were some emperors who were good generals and fought off the Huns, Visigoths and Germans. I thought at first that this was too simple, that the Roman Empire would have fallen no matter what, but then I thought about men like George Washington and Winston Churchill, who probably changed world history.

Difficult to start, but rewarding.

Honestly, I had to try to start this book three times before I was able to "get into" it. The apparent strangeness of Silverberg's Roman moral values and place names made it difficult to comprehend at first, but once I dug down and decided to finish it, I was extremely pleased by its twists and turns. What other reviewers have found bothersome about this book I found to be its greatest strengths. When writing an alternative history, what are the rules? Why shouldn't we have a Renaissance (of sorts), or similar language development? Silverberg (I have always thought) is a SciFi author, so why not include elements of that genre? Not being of the Jewish faith, I cannot speak for the "offensiveness" of those elements of the story, but I can't help but think that someone would bring it up; like it or not, the histories of Jerusalem and Rome are intertwined, and with a name like Silverberg, how could he not make use of those themes? I loved it. It took some time to get used to this different type of storytelling, but it was worth every penny.

Good solid Silverberg...

I have to admit to a soft spot in my heart for anything by Robert Silverberg, since he's written some of the books that most moved me over the years. From Thorns to Shaderach in the Furnace to Up the Line, he has written an amazing number of classic novels and shorter fare. Despite the fact that he's written many pure SF novels, he also has a fondness and penchant for writing about the ancient world. Here we get a set of short stories (which is not clear from the cover: bad publisher, no biscuit!) which display the unique tone and amazing attention to detail that characterizes much of his work. The quality is a bit uneven, with some of the stories being somewhat unreadable, but the majority of them are quite good and one or two are very good indeed. For example, the first story after the front matter ("With Caesar in the Underworld") bears the plot of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays, with a lead character of Faustus ("Falstaff"), set in the wonderfully decadent ancient Rome of this alternate history. There are little sparkly details throughout that make the story bump along, teasing you with both the puzzles that form the alternate history bits and the tidbits of fun (parallels with the lifted Shakespeare plot, for example). It... tickles. Other reviewers have complained that Silverberg doesn't dive as deeply into the history part, that the stories are all little "what if..." one-trick ponies. But I think those reviewers are missing the fact that in virtually all of these character driven stories, there is at least one other "angle" that Silverberg is playing with. Once I recognized what he was doing, it was a lot of fun to both read the stories as straight AH yarns and also be watching for the sly games. This isn't the Silverberg of the great early 70's novels. Nor does it quite match his lovely time-travel novel "Up the Line" (if you've not read that, get it with this). It's just that no one except possibly Gene Wolfe quite matches his style and careful, multi-layered craftsmanship. I enjoyed this collection (despite, as noted, some warts) and, if you like alternate history, you probably will too.

Very, very good....

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.

What It Would Have Taken For Rome To Not Fall...

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.