This book gets off to a good start as far as my personal preferences for fiction go. This is an alternate history novel - a type I am rather partial to. The alternate history here relates to the Roman Empire - in this world, imagined for us by Robert Silverberg, the Roman Empire never fell.

This is not an original divergence from history. I can think of two more such works easily (by looking at the shelves that surround me as I write), those two being Peter F. Hamilton's Watching Trees Grow and Philip Mann's A Land Fit For Heroes series.

This novel takes the form of a series of linked stories, all telling of important events in the course of fifteen hundred years of the Empire. It covers the great victory over the Goths to the North lead by a truly Great Emperor; the period of decline in the Empire when the Eastern Roman Empire rose to prominence and ruled over the Empire of the West; and the subsequent re-emergence of Rome as the power base of the Roman Empire; and then onwards through the centuries of this richly imagined alternate world.

But these great events of Empire are told from very personal perspectives. The story of the threat from the Goths (the first major tale in the book) is told by a minor court official, and drinking friend of the aging Emperor's second son, and chiefly involves a visit by a representative of the Eastern Greek-lead Roman Empire. This tale sets the style for the book.

Although the history being wrought takes place on the whole World stage, the vantage point is a local one in each case. The stories are told by people on the edge of the Roman Court, a soldier here, a consular official there or a an out of favour member of the Court sent to be the Roman Governor of a desert land.

This is what makes this book work, for in bringing the scope of the book into the personal, the author involves the reader and familiarises him with the participants in the events described.

It also allows the author to deliver enough detail of the evolution in the lives of the people of the Empire through the centuries. He uses occasional, almost throwaway, lines to show the user aspects of his Roman Society.

He also develops his history in such a way as to allow anyone reading spot the parallels with the history we all read about in school days. For instance we read of the time when America was discovered (here called Nova Roma).

Robert Silverberg is an old master at writing science fiction, and with this book he certainly proves he has lost none of his sharpness. With this book, I feel the first serious contender for best book of 2003 has stepped up to stake its claim.