Over
the last several years, Robert Silverberg has built up a world predicated
on the idea that the Jewish exodus from Egypt failed with the result that
neither Christianity nor Islam arose and the Roman empire never fell.
The ten tales which make up this world have now been collected in a book
entitled Roma Eterna, which allows those without access to the
varied magazines and books which contained the original stories to read
them, and those with access to those volumes to have all the stories in a
single, chronologically ordered volume.
Spanning
a period of nearly 1500 years (from AD 449 to AD 1970), the stories tell
of the continuation of the Roman empire as it discovers the new world and
various technologies, facing trials never faced by the actual Roman empire
(or its Byzantine successor). Each story introduces a new cast of
characters and situations, with Silverberg allowing culture and history to
clearly continue between the stories.
The
quality of the stories is consistently high, with characters becoming
fully realized in relatively few pages. Even then, the characters
take a backseat to the amazing historical world Silverberg has created.
Even if the reader doesn't fully buy into the point of divergence
Silverberg has selected, or the way his world diverges from ours over the
centuries, it is still presented as a fully realized and intriguing world,
similar, yet very different from our own.
Silverberg
has added a brief prologue which spells out the alteration to history that
he is about to embark on. Although
it provides background to the stories which follow, it is brief, weak, not
particularly plausible, and doesn’t really add anything necessary for
the enjoyment of the tales which follow, most of which are strong,
although the final story, “To the Promised Land,” does ask the reader
to strain their credulity more than most.
Even if Silverberg’s
point of divergence isn’t plausible, the overall ebb and flow of history
is. Rome’s expansion is
neither consistent or smooth. Rome
and Constantinople rise and fall in relationship to each other and the
surrounding civilizations, whether the Germanic tribes of the earlier
stories to the Arabs and Aztecs they eventually come into contact with.
One of the strengths
of the various stories in Roma Eterna is the exploration they allow
Silverberg of historiography, rather than the specifics of the world.
Including characters such as Pisander in “Getting to Know the
Dragon.” Pisander is an
historian/architect who not only reports on the world he lives in, but
also on the methods used for that reportage.
A reader looking for a
completely plausible alternate history will quite possibly be disappointed
in the stories which comprise Roma Eterna, however, a reader who is
looking for a good story (or several good stories) and is willing to
accept Silverberg’s general outline of history, will find an inviting
and interesting world which looks at causality and our own history in a
sidewise fashion.
