Roma Eterna

[zoomar]

I suspect there have been discussions of the Robert Silverberg book before, but I just got it for airplane reading a couple weeks ago.

Since I hadn't considered Silverberg an AH writer before, I was overall pretty impressed with the writing style and the way he portrayed a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Well, actually it did, several times in fact, and fought a lot of civil wars, but who's counting. I also thought most of the 1st person POV characters were well realized and some of the stories were very engaging.

On the other hand, there seemed to be a number of inconsistencies among the different stories in the collection and a lot of gaps, including one story where the main character kept referring to big-G God in his expletives which didn't seem to fit the secular/pagan culture which survives in Silverberg's eternal Rome. It was also pretty unimaginative in its alternate historical and technological timeline once you got used to the fact that everybody had an -ius and the end of their name.

Would have like to see more stories about the new world, which really did seem to have developed completely differently.

Reminded me quite a bit of Years of Rice and Salt and had some of the same flaws - ie: not really all that imaginative and different from OTL once you got past the setup.

Thoughts?

 

[alt_historian]

True, it did pretty much end up the same as the OTL modern world. Cars, planes, Japanese (or rather 'Khitaian' IIRC) tourists gawking at the pyramids.

Silverberg didn't seem to use the interestingly different setup of the discovery & exploration of the Americas. It was covered in that one story, and then seems to have been largely ignored. The problem is possibly that this is a collection of short stories written at different times, with not much done to link them.
I did like the analogue of 1848, though, as well as 'the Great Terror'. I'm interested to know who Timoleon was supposed to be, if anyone important.
And 'Tales From the Venia Woods' was great!

 

[Superdude]

Reminded me quite a bit of Years of Rice and Salt and had some of the same flaws - ie: not really all that imaginative and different from OTL once you got past the setup.

Just a nitpick, but Kim Stanley Robinson never intended the world to be different from ours- the same souls go into different bodies in different places, thus creating something superficially different. It was more an exploration of cultures and philosophies not from Europe. Thus the Long War was brought in, and explored an interesting story dynamic.

 

[Hobelhouse]

Just a nitpick, but Kim Stanley Robinson never intended the world to be different from ours- the same souls go into different bodies in different places, thus creating something superficially different. It was more an exploration of cultures and philosophies not from Europe. Thus the Long War was brought in, and explored an interesting story dynamic.

No, the soul setup was a plot device to accommodate having the same set of characters in each period. Thus you had K, S, B, I and P all in the same chapter.

 

[Superdude]

That doesn't disprove what I said...

 

[zoomar]

No, the soul setup was a plot device to accommodate having the same set of characters in each period. Thus you had K, S, B, I and P all in the same chapter.

Agree. It was also a device to give the novel an aura of serious cross-cultural thought it really didn't deserve. By the end, the "non-European" west basically became secular modern "western" societies not much different from Britain and the USA - highly unlikely in my opinion.