So I happen to like a lot of Robert Silverberg’s stuff. Well, not a lot percentage-wise. I’ve probably read about half the novels published under that name, and maybe fifty short stories, and I’ve liked maybe half of his stuff I’ve read. And, of course, his styles and interests vary enormously over the years, so saying “a Silverberg novel” is not telling you very much. Still, the man can write, and that’s a good start. And if I've only read half, and I've only liked half of what I've read, and there are still ten novels I've liked, well, that's Silverberg for you.
So I picked up Roma Eterna at the library, thinking it was a novel. It’s only a sort-of novel; he wrote a series of short stories in the Roma Eterna world, slapped them together with (evidently) almost no editing, and called it a novel. Or let Eos call it a novel. Heck they called it “a powerful epic”, but I suppose that the phrase has no actionable meaning.
Not that the stories are bad in themselves. Well, at least one of them is. Mostly, though, it’s just excruciating going through the whole intro-to-the-alternate-history that he has to do with each story, as it’s been a year and a half since the last one. And if I read one every year and a half, I’d probably like them a lot better. Or maybe not; the last-written story contains the same piece of exposition three times in ten pages. The fact that it was the first ten pages of the book made me a lot less receptive.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.