If there is one lesson science fiction teaches us, it is that just as non-crab crustaceans will eventually evolve a crab-like body plan, so too will every state eventually transform into a thinly veiled version of Rome (Republic or Empire). This outcome seems almost inevitable regardless of the state’s original political structure, its technological base, or even whether it is confined to one world or spread across many planets.
Don’t believe me? Why, consider these five works featuring Roman carcinization.
Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov (1950)
A scientific mishap propels Joseph Schwartz through space/time to a desolate world. What at first appears to be an alien planet is none other than Schwartz’ native Earth, transformed by time and atomic war. A once-verdant world is now a dying planet, its impoverished population reduced to a bare twenty million people.
As Schwartz discovers, the Earth is now a province of the Galactic Empire. Empire and Earth enjoy the same cordial relationship that existed between Vespasian’s Rome and the Zealots’ Judea. Earth craves independence. As the Empire has one populated planet for every human living on Earth, the balance of power favors the Empire… thus the crime against humanity that certain Earth extremists are now plotting.
Asimov was kind enough to record his formula for success in the form of a poem:
So success is not a mystery, just brush up on your history, and borrow day by day.
Take an Empire that was Roman and you’ll find it is at home in all the starry Milky Way.
With a drive that’s hyperspatial, through the parsecs you will race, you’ll find that plotting is a breeze,
With a tiny bit of cribbin’ from the works of Edward Gibbon and that Greek, Thucydides.
This approach worked out quite well for Asimov. One could say it was the foundation on which his reputation rested.
The Day of Their Return by Poul Anderson (1973)
Having reinvented Roman Imperial governance to end the chaos that followed the collapse of the Polesotechnic League, the Terran Empire faces the same dynastic instability that plagued the Roman Empire. Hugh McCormac’s recent attempted coup failed and McCormac fled. McCormac’s native world Aeneas has been occupied.
Although the Terran Commissioner Chunderban Desai is surprisingly humane and competent for an Imperial official, Aeneas is a hotbed of discontent. It is an ideal planet on which Terra’s rival, the Roidhunate of Mersia1, can stir up trouble. And so, Mersia’s greatest agent, telepath Aycharaych, is dispatched to transform Aeneasian myth and legend into a weapon against the Empire.
I bet you thought I’d use one of Anderson’s James-Bond-like Dominic Flandry novels2. I much prefer Aycharaych to Flandry and The Day of Their Return is as close as Anderson got to an Aycharaych novel. There is a very Bond-like element to this novel3: for some reason, Aycharaych goes undercover on Aeneas under his real name.
The Myriad by R.M. Meluch (2005)
25th-century America prevails, much to the irritation of the League of Earth Nations. America’s only serious rival is the surprisingly Romanesque polity based on the former American colony Palatine. When Palatine requests American assistance with the alien Hive, the USS Merrimack is dispatched to aid the upstart colonists. AMERICA! Unless you’re from Palatine, in which case SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS.
Investigating the Hive leads Merrimack to a globular cluster4, whose three inhabited worlds seemingly lack faster-than-light drives, yet clearly possess some superluminal means of transportation. The explanation to this paradox will put history itself in parallel.
Palatine is surprisingly Romanesque because it is literally Roman. It seems some Romans spent 1800 years hiding amongst the post-Imperial barbarians until the opportunity arose to re-establish Rome. Surprisingly, that is not the most implausible element of the novel.
With the Lightnings by David Drake (1998)
Both Lt. Daniel Leary of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy and librarian Adele Mundy face professional challenges thanks to a common source. Having quarreled with his powerful father, Lt. Leary no longer benefits from his father’s influence. Adele’s family having quarreled with the senior Leary’s political faction, Adele is the sole survivor of the violent purge that eliminated the Mundys of Chatsworth. Despite the common cause of their problems, Daniel and Adele seem unlikely allies, let alone friends.
Enter the wildly misleadingly named Alliance of Free Stars. The Alliance’s current project involves provoking discord on Republic ally Kostroma. Kostroma is the very world on which Adele is employed as a librarian. Kostroma is the very world Daniel is stationed. Bad luck for the Alliance.
While most descriptions of the RCN series hammer the parallels with Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series (or if the reviewer has not heard of O’Brian, C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series), Cinnabar’s political culture appears to owe quite a lot to Rome. More specifically, there appear to be echoes of the Crisis of the Roman Republic, a terrible time to live but a wonderful time for adventures. But perhaps I read too much into Cinna and Cinnabar.
First Citizen by Thomas T. Thomas (1987)
Late 20th-century America’s bold repudiation of its debt and courageous amendment forbidding federal taxes transformed the economy, although perhaps not in the positive manner Americans would have preferred. Economic turmoil was accompanied by nuclear terrorism and a wave of presidential assassinations. At least Americans did not have to worry about being bored.
Calamity for America is opportunity for James Corbin. Ambitious and amoral, Corbin uses military adventures and political gambits to claw his way up the American hierarchy. Of course, his ascendance makes Corbin a target… but that only means Corbin must strike first and far more ruthlessly than his rivals, something Corbin is willing and able to do.
It’s no mistake that James Corbin and Julius Caesar share initials. Corbin’s career maps onto Caesar’s (although Corbin has more tactical nukes at his disposal than Caesar did). This suggests that Corbin is right to be optimistic about his odds of winning. But it also hints that his lifespan5 once he becomes First Citizen may be rather short….
There are hardly the only Roman reenactments SF has to offer. In fact, I hear Megalopolis owes something to Rome. The above may not be your favorite examples (Megalopolis does not seem to be anyone’s favorite example, although as I have not seen it, I cannot comment further). Feel free to mention your favorites in comments below.
- Mersia’s ambivalence towards Terra can be traced back to a particularly dickish ploy by star trader David Falkayn and company some centuries earlier, as described in 1967’s Day of Burning. Terran-Mersian rivalry eventually led to the death of billions and a millennia-long dark age, but at least Falkayn’s quarterly report looked good.
- The first Dominic Flandry story pre-dated the first Bond story, so really James Bond is Dominic Flandry-esque.
- The Day of Their Return also features a very Poul Andersonian element. The planet Aeneas is lovingly, extensively described. This, for a planet featured in a single short novel. As far as I know, Anderson never revisited this setting.
- The globular cluster mostly contains metal-poor Population Two stars, but there are also three metal-rich Population One stars. Wandered in by accident?
- Canadian Content laws compel me to suggest that people unfamiliar with Caesar’s career consult Wayne & Shuster’s “Rinse the Blood off My Toga.”
Cinnabar is basically Rome on the scale of the capital city intrigues but otherwise the British Empire versus a thinly veiled Napoleonic France.
That said, most of Drake’s works are homages to classical battles (Rome, Greece, Rhodes, etc) thanks to his Classics degree or homages to Vietnam War incidents thanks to his time serving in that war. The Leary books are mostly British Empire pastiches, as noted. Although he does have a series of books that’s basically a George Washington In Space thing, and Arthurian Legends with high technology books.
You could also say that Cinnabar takes the role of Rome and the Alliance that of Carthage in the ongoing struggle between those ancient polities. The naval culture is taken wholesale from that of the British Navy in the 19th century, hence all the Aubrey-Maturin comparisons, largely because Rome was never a far-reaching maritime power and we don’t really know anything about whatever naval culture they had anyway. Because Drake took his battles drom a variety of conflicts between numerous polities over many centuries the actual Cinnabar-Alliance war isn’t really congruent with any specific historical conflict
IIRC Aycharaych was the sole survivor of his species, so he may have thought using an alias was kind of pointless. (“Oh, it’s the *other* guy who looks uniquely like that, John Smith!”)
Spelling nit: while”Merseia” is clearly Persia with an M, it also has an extra e.
Do we know that “Aycharaych” is his real name?
Obligatory Canadian content Pavlovian response: I told him, Julie, don’t go, I begged him don’t go, I said it’s the Ides of March, beware already! But would he listen to me? Nooo…
Heh – I’ve loved that sketch ever since I first heard it at age 11!
“You know you have the right to remain silent…”
Rome as in a city or analogue thereof (e.g., Trantor), or Rome as in empire?
An increasing number of historians think that the state centered in Constantinople alias New Rome was too the Roman Empire, that calling it “the Byzantine Empire” was political libel. If so, and if Rome as in empire, then “Belisarius in space!” stories count.
In that area, yeah, @Dvandom is right, Drake et al. The “The General” series is a duplicate of the Mediterranean basin circa Justinian wrapped in gauze to thinly “disguise” it. East Residence is Constantinople, Old Residence is Rome, Lion City is Naples, et cetera, and Raj Whitehall is Belisarius, Tsetas is Narses, Barholm is Justinian, et cetera.
“An Oblique Approach” et seq. is set in our timeline’s empire of Justinian, when Procopius was being nice, when time-traveller meddling starts.
The “Byzantine” Empire always called itself Roman. Gibbon just needed an end point for the western empire, deliberately and posthumously divorcing it from larger and wealthier eastern empire.
That Byzantium preferred to call itself ‘Roman’ should not blind us to the fact that it was a rather different beast from the Empire as ruled from Rome – if only in being even more Hellenistic than the Western Empire ever was and not only Christian, but devoutly Christian to boot.
It’s fair to call Byzantium the heir of Rome and perhaps even the Roman Empire, but it most assuredly was not ANCIENT Rome and it’s important to recognise the difference as rather more than a mere distinction.
Well, the eastern half of the empire was always more Hellenistic even in the heyday of Rome (which is why the New Testament was originally written in Greek). The Roman Empire was far too huge to be a monoculture, and it was that cultural and political diversity that allowed its eastern half to carry on and thrive for a millennium after its western half disintegrated. It’s wrong to call it the “heir,” because that implies it was something separate. In fact, it was a direct continuation of what had always been part of the empire.
Look at, say, Star Trek Discovery‘s 32nd century. A galactic disaster fragmented the Federation, and founding worlds like Earth, Ni’Var (the former Vulcan), and Andoria abandoned their Federation ties and became single-world states. But the Federation as an institution clung on in a greatly diminished form, its government centered in a well-protected space station. When Discovery‘s 23rd-century characters came forward into that future and sought out the remnant of the Federation and Starfleet, they accepted it as the continuation of their own Federation and Starfleet even though it no longer included Earth, the center of those institutions in their own day. It was not simply an “heir,” it was the part that hadn’t fallen when the rest did.
I haven’t followed “Star Trek: Discovery” closely, but I wonder about that… I live in the United Kingdom, which used to be in the European Union but now it isn’t. I see myself as Scottish.
Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” portrays a future America where federal government institutions are a lot less visible.
The European Union has only existed under that name for 31 years. Most of its member populations probably still think of themselves by their own national identity first and EU members second. And let’s face it, even when it was a member, Britain clung to its historic identity as a separate island culture even more than most. It’s not the same as a union, federation, or empire that’s existed for hundreds of years as an integrated culture, so that the overall culture’s identity is primary.
And there’s more to national identity than the government. Americans usually think of ourselves as Americans first above other group identities like our state or ethnicity or religion or party. Even bigots who see other races, religions, or parties as un-American enemies still define themselves as the “true” Americans; they equate their identity as Americans with their ethnic or religious or partisan identity, rather than seeing it as a separate or subordinate identity. I’m not sure the Federation is the same; when we see member cultures like Vulcans or Trill, they often seem to prioritize their planetary or species identity above their Federation identity. But it probably got more unified by the time it fragmented in the 31st century.
Belated reply: Would that apply to the “Discovery” 23rd century characters? As in Europe – I suppose that some Star Trek political units perhaps have more of a distinct identity than others. I would expect that 32nd century Vulcans still practise “logic”, and Trills compete to earn a symbiote, or is it the other way around by then? But other peoples might become… cosmopolitan. And Europe has freedom of movement between states. But not freedom of language, not quite. Star Trek presumably still has perfect invisible translation… So then – are you a person of the Federation, or are you a person of Earth? Or perhaps a person of Starfleet. So, should I take it that anyone from the 23rd century who decided that they belonged on 32nd century Earth would have a very, very long ride to get to Earth?
Well, nobody on the starship Discovery has a very long ride to anywhere because of its special magic-mushroom instant propulsion. They did get back to Earth pretty soon after rediscovering the Federation, and helped renew ties to the point that Earth (in the person of Stacey Abrams playing the Earth President) rejoined the UFP at the end of the following season. But the point is that while the 23rd-century crew still considered Earth their home, they also considered the Earth-less, Vulcan-less, Andor-less, Trill-less Federation of the 32nd century to be the Federation, rather than some separate “heir” to the Federation.
Yeah. The Eastern portion of the Roman Empire was the rich and powerful part from Caesar’s time onward, and Constantinople was built to be an imperial city while Rome stopped being the capitol of the West even before 476.
One could argue, and Mehmet II did, that the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was a change of regime but the empire was still the empire. Among the titles he claimed, qayṣar-i Rūm, Caesar of Rome. People within arm’s reach found his argument convincing, people farther away did not. However, if we accept the claim, that means Attaturk succeeded in something the Augustian Romans never managed, which was to restore the Republic after an interregnum of 1941 years.
While I’m sure there was a great deal of cultural continuity within the region between the Constantinople era and the Istanbul era — the final conquest was more the end of a long process of change than its beginning — I wouldn’t read too much into a ruler asserting to be an heir to the Caesars, because then we’d have to give credit to all the Kaisers and Czars and whatnot. Rulers make up all sorts of titles and claims to assert their right to rule; it’s just propaganda.
BTW, are there enough “Belisarius in Space” stories to count as a genre, or to have an article for?
Is this a typo, or a subtle pun?
Why do people keep putting empires in space? Neglecting that the Roman Empire survived until about 1453 (it just moved its capitol from Rome), its long life seemed more despite its mode of government than because of it.
As another group of Roman-oid empires: Leckie’s Raadchai Empire and Martine’s Teixcalaan Empire. Of course one could argue that all empires are isomorphic, with only trivial differences like names.
“Neglecting that the Roman Empire survived until about 1453 …, its long life seemed more despite its mode of government than because of it.” At least a strong and effective regional power with central control and a changing but not changing wildly political system for, what, over a millennium depending on what counts? How could its structures be so called so bad? I saw a statement that the historical question shouldn’t be “what caused the Fall of the Roman Empire?”, but “what kept it around and so effective for so long?”
Wot, no love for Harry Turtledove’s extensive and exhaustive Videssos cycle, or even Walter Jon Williams’ Praxis setting (which incorporates a very Roman approach to dynastic/family politics, even if the militaria is much more redolent of Patrick O’Brien)?
The setting of Theodore Judson’s The Martian General’s Daughter has a strange similarity to Rome under Marcus Aurelius/Commodus!
“Aycharaych” as in HRH?
I think that was the original intent, but I believe it was established that the “aych”es rhymed with German “eich.” I get the impression that Anderson revised the early Flandry stories in later reissues to be more plausible than they’d been originally, so maybe he clarified the pronunciation to make it less obvious.
On my wall is a copy of the Wendy Pini cover from Galaxy of the serialization, which is where I read the story. My understanding was that HRH was supposed to refer to HR Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff for you youngins. Whether that was a positive or negative reference was never clear.
A E van Vogt’s “Empire of the Atom” and “The Wizard of Linn” were not only set in a future empire that was based on Rome’s, the books’ plots were a thinly disguised rip-off of Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius” novels.
I’m glad you mentioned it, I was going to if you hadn’t.
Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock retells the story of Julian the Apostate in post-apocalyptic America (sorry about the conquest of Canada)
Obligatory Canadian discontent
Moral support from an equally discontented Mother Country.
Warhammer 40000 borrows heavily from the Roman Empire, among things. The legions, including two ‘lost’ and never reconstituted.
Not to mention the ‘Second Rome’ (Byzantium) and the ‘Third Rome’ (Tsarist Moscow) and just about every possible tyranny to boot.
How could you miss out Ar, in John Norman’s ‘Gor’ novels?
Several of Bujold’s Penric and Desdemona stories take place in a late Roman analogue empire, shortly after Not!Belisarius is blinded on the orders of Not!Narses because his success as a general might have threatened the Emperor’s power.
From TV, there’s the planet from the ST: TOS episode “Bread and Circuses,” and of course, the Centari from Babylon 5.
The former wasn’t thinly veiled, it was straight-up Space Rome. The thinly veiled Romans in Star Trek were the Romulans.
I generally assume this, and the similar thing of transparent pseudonyms, (e.g. Alucard), is done for the convenience of the audience. In ‘reality’ the covert agent is using a completely fictitious name that is nothing like his real one.
I love the Romanitas series by Sophia McDougall – takes place in modern times under the premise that the Roman Empire didn’t fall.
Emery Robin’s The Stars Undying, being a retelling of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, has an excellent Space Rome Analogue, particularly in its framing as successor to Space Alexander the Great Analogue.
Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan Empire has already been brought up, and how about Milly X Chang’s To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods, which blends and re-skins a number of real world imperial/colonial conflicts, but uses Dimension-conquering techno-Rome as its placeholder for the West.
Lilith Saintcrow has a new one out – Hell’s Acres, in which the Romans never left Britain. Great worldbuilding and a lot of asskicking and a nicely tense “meet violent” love story. Highly recommended!
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer !!!!
Also, Caesar’s Bicycle – time traveling with no scruples about Interfering With the Past; and the Masonic Empire in ADA Palmers brilliant Terra Ignota series, starting with Too Like the Lightning (why isn’t everybody talking about these books??)
James writes:
“One could say it was the foundation on which his reputation rested”
And I hope everyone else sees what he did there. Maybe it would be more clear if he would have written:
“One could say it was The Foundation on which his reputation rested.”
In any case: I remember there being an interview in which Asimov basically said that he came up with the idea of The Foundation after reading Gibbon. It’s basically Asimov asking himself: what would the later days of the Roman Empire look like in space – and what if smart people try to get together to deal with what seems to be a historical inevitability?
I like the way Aycharaych specifically mentions the Taiping Rebellion in his initial interview with Desai. Like a pool player calling out the pocket…
and now that I notice it, giving his home planet as Jean-Baptiste (John the Baptist) is just a little extra thumbing of the nose.