Mon 27 Nov 2006
I didn’t get this book.
The basic idea is “What if the Roman Empire never fell?”, and the point of departure from recorded history that Silverberg uses isn’t, say, the invasion of the Goths, but rather the Exodus. No Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, no messy Christianity to apparently cause the Empire to fall fifteen hundred years later.
Even without this somewhat weird premise, this is a strange effort. Each chapter is a mini-vignette of some period in the history of the Eternal City. Good emperors and bad ones come, great challenges are overcome, the New World is discovered, eventually pacified, technology advances, and we experience all of this through the eyes of a series of somewhat random citizens, both great and small. I had to slog my way through the last half, thinking all the time “Why do I care?”
The culmination of all of this is another failed Exodus by “modern day” Jews (who are still Jewish, despite the absence of the defining event in Jewish identify) to the stars, which itself kind of comes out of nowhere.
A bizarre and unsuccessful novel. Cool idea, but Silverberg didn’t make it happen.