100 Books I Keep Keeping... 7 Empire of the Atom
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Empire of the Atom by E G Van Vogt (1957)
One of my mother's rather large collection of science fiction paperbacks... and now mine. It's old, it's shabby and that cover is pure 70s, isn't it?
Isaac Asimov pointed out, in the cheery The Foundation of S F Success the debt he (and others) owed to history in science fiction. And he wasn't the only one.
Empire of the Atom is (especially the first half) I Claudius picked up holus bolus and unblushingly dumped into a post-atomic-apocalypse setting: a scifi version of Tacitus/Suetonius with spaceships and atomic power (so okay, with bows and arrows too... the SF is dodgy even for 1950s standards) and starring sort-of-recognisable versions of many of the major Claudio-Augustan family - Claudius (though with less pretend idiocy and rather more logic and overt genius), Livia, Tiberius, Germanicus.... it does jump ship from Graves along the way, especially with an invasion of barbarian armies from Jupiter (wonder where that idea came from? - but it's defeated by our not-Claudius and his power over the All-Powerful Atom, of course :)
Thing is, it may be rather less than a work of genius, but purely on its own terms of unabashed pulp SF, it did work for me. It's glittery and gory and full of deeply unpleasant Rulers of the (ex-Roman) world, rather less well developed than Graves or Tacitus managed, true, but more than entertaining enough in their own pulpy way. And it has the undoubted retro charm that even dodgy Golden Age SF has for me. It's been years since I first read it, and quite a while since I last did, but I have to say that bits of it have stayed in my memory (including an odd moment snitched straight from the French Revolution and aristos being hung from 'lamp' posts) and my imagination ever since that first read (and probably did absolutely no good, literary-quality-wise, to my own writing :)