{"id":2873,"date":"2005-05-22T14:50:27","date_gmt":"2005-05-22T18:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/05\/22\/2873.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:04","slug":"book-report-roma-eterna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/05\/22\/book-report-roma-eterna\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Roma Eterna"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So I happen to like a lot of Robert Silverberg&#8217;s stuff. Well, not a lot percentage-wise. I&#8217;ve probably read about half the novels published under that name, and maybe fifty short stories, and I&#8217;ve liked maybe half of his stuff I&#8217;ve read. And, of course, his styles and interests vary enormously over the years, so saying &#8220;a Silverberg novel&#8221; is not telling you very much. Still, the man can write, and that&#8217;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.\n<p>So I picked up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/global_scripts\/product_catalog\/book_xml.asp?isbn=0380814889\">Roma Eterna<\/a> at the library, thinking it was a novel. It&#8217;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 &#8220;a powerful epic&#8221;, but I suppose that the phrase has no actionable meaning.\n<p>Not that the stories are bad in themselves. Well, at least one of them is. Mostly, though, it&#8217;s just excruciating going through the whole intro-to-the-alternate-history that he has to do with each story, as it&#8217;s been a year and a half since the last one. And if I read one every year and a half, I&#8217;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.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I happen to like a lot of Robert Silverberg\u2019s stuff. Well, not a lot percentage-wise. I\u2019ve probably read about half the novels published under that name, and maybe fifty short stories, and I\u2019ve liked maybe half of his stuff&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17419,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2873\/revisions\/17419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}