When in Rome
I'm reading Roma Eterna by
Robert Silverberg; I'm currently just over halfway through. I've
had mixed feelings about his previous work, but I'm a big fan of
alternate history, of which this novel is a notable example. It
postulates a world in which the Roman Empire never fell (and in which
Christianity never developed), and takes an episodic trip through its
history starting around AD 300, jumping 50 years here, 200 years there,
each chapter providing a vignette about its era.
Silverberg clearly knows his history (better than I do, anyway; every detail he's used that I know about independently is correct). He's also a good storyteller. He paints intriguing characters with interesting conflicts to illustrate the crises and dilemmas of each phase of Rome's tempestuous progress. The first third of the book left me thrilled.
Since then, though, he's fallen into a trap that captures too many alternate histories. It's obvious that even a small change thousands of years ago would almost inevitably scramble all the details of the current world. None of us would likely exist, just for starters; the contingencies involved in individuals meeting, mating, and having surviving children are too vulnerable to temporal disruption. The famous "butterfly effect" of chaos theory (a butterfly flapping its wings in China can trigger a hurricane in the Carribean months later) applies with great force here.
But Silverberg, like too many alternate-history authors, acts as if there's some force pulling events and individuals back into the mold of our own timeline. What's worse, he builds the middle chapters around these congruences. So we get "Hey, look, it's a Roman Magellan!", "Wow, he's just like Da Vinci, only Roman!", "What if Louis XVI were Emperor of Rome instead of King of France?", and so forth. I find this implausible in the extreme, but worse, it's very lazy to steal scenarios from our world rather than inventing new ones for his Rome.
I'm going to keep reading, just to see how he ties up some threads. And who knows, the last third of the book may surprise me. I'll do a second review if that happens.
Silverberg clearly knows his history (better than I do, anyway; every detail he's used that I know about independently is correct). He's also a good storyteller. He paints intriguing characters with interesting conflicts to illustrate the crises and dilemmas of each phase of Rome's tempestuous progress. The first third of the book left me thrilled.
Since then, though, he's fallen into a trap that captures too many alternate histories. It's obvious that even a small change thousands of years ago would almost inevitably scramble all the details of the current world. None of us would likely exist, just for starters; the contingencies involved in individuals meeting, mating, and having surviving children are too vulnerable to temporal disruption. The famous "butterfly effect" of chaos theory (a butterfly flapping its wings in China can trigger a hurricane in the Carribean months later) applies with great force here.
But Silverberg, like too many alternate-history authors, acts as if there's some force pulling events and individuals back into the mold of our own timeline. What's worse, he builds the middle chapters around these congruences. So we get "Hey, look, it's a Roman Magellan!", "Wow, he's just like Da Vinci, only Roman!", "What if Louis XVI were Emperor of Rome instead of King of France?", and so forth. I find this implausible in the extreme, but worse, it's very lazy to steal scenarios from our world rather than inventing new ones for his Rome.
I'm going to keep reading, just to see how he ties up some threads. And who knows, the last third of the book may surprise me. I'll do a second review if that happens.