Muses of Roma by Rob Steiner

Reviewed by Erin Eymard.

Marcus Antonius Primus began a golden age for humanity when he liberated Roma from Octavian Caesar and became sole Consul. With wisdom from the gods, future Antonii Consuls conquered the world and spawned an interstellar civilization.

Three weeks before the millennial anniversary of the Antonii Ascension, star freighter captain Kaeso Aemelius, a blacklisted security agent from Roman rival world Libertus, is asked by his former commanders to help a high-ranking Roman official defect. Kaeso misses his lone wolf espionage days—and its freedom from responsibility for a crew—so he sees the mission as a way back into the spy business. Kaeso sells it to his crew of outcasts as a quick, lucrative contract…without explaining his plan to abandon them for his old job.

But Kaeso soon learns the defector’s terrifying secret, one that proves the last thousand years of history was built on a lie.

Can Kaeso protect his crew from Roman and Liberti forces, who would lay waste to entire worlds to stop them from revealing the civilization-shattering truth?

Rob Steiner's Muses of Roma is unlike any alternate history novel I've ever read. The premise of the novel is simple: Imagine that Rome never fell and is now bent on conquering the stars.

Steiner seamlessly blends historical fact into his story, slightly altering bits, but pulls no punches in this process. This is first evident with the quote preceding the prologue: "I found Roma a city of marble and left it a city of steel" - Marcus Antonius Primus. This is a play on Augustus Caesar's quote "I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble" (marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi). The book is peppered with enough Latin phrases and tidbits to make the Romanophile in me giddy.

The prologue starts with Marcus Antonius taking the eternal city aided by cannons and muskets. His march through Rome amidst gunfire and smoke is a surreal scene. Steiner goes on to explain that deep in the deserts of Egypt, Marcus Antonius is bestowed upon "by the gods" the secrets of advanced technologies.

One of my favorite lines from the prologue is:

He passed the Circus Maximus on his left; its large walls were pockmarked with musket shots.

I found myself trying to imagine what the people of the city would have been thinking as a man leading an army with the power of the gods marched to take the city from a man they worshiped as a god.

The shock of the prologue (especially after the author deftly explains the rapid technological advancement) serves as a warning to the reader that this is going to be a wild ride.

Fast forward 1,000 years and we are on the streets of Roma. The city has all the feel of ancient Rome even after the characters catch a bus. A young woman, Ocella, is trying to smuggle a boy, Cordus, off planet, which is where the true sci-fi aspect of the book takes hold.

We meet Kaeso, former Umbra (secret agent) and captain of the Caduceus, as he is trying to keep his spaceship flying. His crew is a hodgepodge of people running from their pasts all with their own secrets. Kaeso’s own secrets could put the lives of his crew in jeopardy. The interaction between the crew is not unlike the Malcolm Reynolds' crew in Firefly. They fight like a family and would give their lives for their crewmates.

After a disastrous job and an injury to a crew member, Kaeso’s past catches up to him and he is tasked with returning to the eternal city to retrieve Ocella and Cordus. In the process, they discover a millennium's old secret that could change the course of humanity.

I have never gotten so wrapped up in a book. I will be purchasing the remaining books in the series but only once I have time to devote myself to being locked in a room and do nothing but read this. This is not a series that one reads in small spurts. Steiner constantly pulled me in and held me captive for hours on end.

For more information, please visit the author's website and read this interview.
The reviewer purchased a copy of this book. A review was not solicited.

Cover Reveal: Muses of the Republic by Rob Steiner

Rob Steiner has revealed the third cover in the Codex Antonius series, Muses of the Republic. In case you haven't been following it (and why the hell not!), it's a sci-fi/alt history series about a Roman Empire that didn't fall. Instead it thrived, conquered the world, and spawned an interstellar civilization.

Rob hired Tom Edwards to create the cover. Edwards also created the covers for M. Terry Green's Chronicles of White World.

The ebook is out now. The paperback is scheduled to be released later this month. There's a compendium containing all three ebooks. You can get that here.

The Faber Book of Utopias

The Faber Book of Utopias
Edited by John Carey
528 pages
Faber and Faber (1999)

Anthologies are a wonderful way of exploring a genre or theme; not as a substitute for wide reading but as pointers to make your reading more rewarding. I’ve discovered some of my favourite books and authors through anthologies such as The Art of the Story edited by Daniel Halpern, and Alberto Manguel's Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, which is a wonderful collection of fantastic/speculative tales.

Given a fair number of this site's readers declare an interest in post-apocalypse and alternate history titles, I suspect they might also be interested in an anthology such as this. The Faber Book of Utopias edited by John Carey is a fascinating survey of writing dealing with one of the most recurrent concerns in speculative literature and philosophy.

As Carey explains in his introduction, utopia actually means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up, another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place. But, strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres. Both are represented in this book and Carey uses the word dystopia for the bad places simply because it now has currency.

Not every imaginary nowhere counts as a utopia, however. To qualify as a utopia, an imaginary place must be an expression of desire. To count as a dystopia, it must be an expression of fear. This book, then, is a collection of humanity’s desires and fears over several millennia. The instant we recognise that everything inside our heads, and much outside, consists of human constructs that can be changed, we want to change them. This belief in the perfectibility of human life and society encourages many noble and selfless schemes but it's also inspired a trail of folly, tyranny and attempts at social control. They tend to centre around genetic engineering, education, crime and punishment, the prevention of ageing and the avoidance of death (or painless ways of inducing it).

Carey’s scope is vast, in terms of both period and genre. The first extract, “Holy Snakes”, comes from an Egyptian manuscript written 2000 years before the birth of Christ. The last comes from Lee M. Silver’s 1998 book Remaking Eden and concerns the fate of humankind in a post-cloning America of the year 2350. In between there are fiction and non-fiction selections from Plato, Tacitus, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Milton, Hobbes, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, the Marquis de Sade, Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Italo Calvino, Julian Barnes and many more. As other reviewers have noted, while many of the selections are predictable, some are surprising: Carey has defined utopian writing widely enough to include an extract from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address” as examples. (Sidenote: Did you know there is actually a photograph of Lincoln delivering that speech?)

Each has a brief introduction which provides enough context for you to appreciate an unfamiliar piece without ruining it for you (a lesson the editors of many anthologies should learn, including the aforementioned Manguel). Carey’s impressions are sometimes radical: on Plato’s Republic he argues that, however benevolent its goals, the imagined world is maintained by a mixture of force and lies and depends on squashing the aspirations of ordinary people. This points to a theme that emerges consistently here. Utopias obviously offer warnings, promises and social critiques by encouraging us to compare imagined realms with our own. But the meaning we make of the comparison will differ depending on the nature of where, and when, we live. In the mid-twentieth century, Karl Popper criticized Plato’s Republic because he saw in such a seemingly benign utopian model the beginning of, and justification for, totalitarian states. The force of a utopia seems to rely on how readily it thrusts us into a re-evaluation of our own world and its current trends. This can change over time.

Overall this is a vast and rewarding work that should appeal to anyone interested in the idea of utopia/dystopia. Ultimately, utopias seem to be attempts to address the insoluble problems of human life, but utopians tend to falsify these problems by regarding them as simple. They build their utopias on universal human longings. But what they build usually carries within it its own potential for crushing or limiting human life. As this anthology shows, how that particular contradiction plays out can be endlessly fascinating.