Wordcount Wednesday Redux

I really did not think I was going to make it. Honestly. There was so much packing to do, so many little things to take care of before this week-long vacation. I kept looking at where I was in the book and where I had to be to consider it ended. And I was sure I'd need to keep working for at least another two or three days after we got back from vacation.

But I made it. Numb is in the can, so to speak. I just put the final words down on the screen.

So here's the final count. 76,294 total words, forty four chapters plus an epilogue, 319 pages total. That means that I added a whopping 12,193 words to the manuscript since Wednesday night. I honestly don't know how I pulled this off.

But the victory is a bit bittersweet. I think this is probably the messiest first draft I've ever written. Seriously. There are at least a dozen scenes that I'll need to put in when I go back and rewrite this thing. I think I made a major reveal three different times and I don't think I got the timing right with any of them. The last five chapters were sprinted through at best and need fleshing out.

But hey, the rough draft is done! I can go on vacation with a clear conscience, knowing that I made my goal. Like I said on Wednesday, I'll be looking at The Escape, a secular fantasy I wrote last November and marking up the pages as much as I can.

As for Numb, this one goes on the shelf for July. I'll come back to it in August and start cleaning it up. But for now, I did it!

Wordcount Wednesday

Once again, it's time to update my myriad readers (said with tongue firmly planted in my cheek) on my writing progress. As of tonight, I have written a grand total of 64,101 words for Numb. That means I've managed to add another 6,750 words. Good progress, I think.

But now I'm hard up against it. I really wanted to get this done by Saturday night and, as much as it pains me to write it, I suspect I won't make it. Off the top of my head, I'd say I'm 3/4 or maybe 4/5 of the way through the story. Hard to say. If I can really knuckle down I might be able to make it.

So why the rush? Well, I think I've said this before, but Sunday afternoon, I'm leaving for a week-long cabin vacation and I fear that if I don't have the book done by then, a week away from it will pretty much kill my momentum.

Next week we won't have a Wordcount Wednesday report. But that doesn't mean I won't be doing some writing related activities. Over the next week, regardless of my status with Numb, I'll be reading and marking up the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project from last year, tentatively titled The Escape. Perhaps part of what I'll be doing is trying to find a better title.

So pray for me! I hope to have this all done soon!

CSFF Blog Tour: Vanish Day Three

Well, this is embarrassing. I, once again, seem to have peaked too early. I know I promised some spleen-venting today, but as I thought about it, I realized that it wouldn't be fair to vent on Tom Pawlik or Vanish. What has me upset is not Pawlik's fault. He told the story he had and my grumbling is more at the market in general than one book in particular. Let's just put it this way: I long for the day when a Christian book can have lots of aliens in it and be appreciated and successful. There, I said it.

So let's see what I can find by rummaging around in the other blogs in the next few minutes:

• Keanan Brand has some interesting thoughts about the visibility of the Christian Writers' Guild label and on how Pawlik created suspense in his book.
• Grace Bridges has a brief interview with Pawlik that contains one of the most disgusting and apt metaphors for writing I've seen in a while.
• Beth Goddard saw through the supposed alien nature of the gray beings right away and, like me, seems to have been surprised by what it turned out to really be.
• Poor Cris Jesse believes the post office took the book's title as some sort of command. Never fear, Cris, it's worth it!
• Blog Tour Overlord Rebecca Luella Miller (we love you! Long may you reign!) suggests that this book might actually be Christian horror (I'd buy that) and she also has an interview with the author. And she hints at potential theological thorns that she'll (hopefully) elaborate on today.

I could probably go on, but I think those are some pretty good links there. Did I miss something? Go find out on your own:

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Steve Rice
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

CSFF Blog Tour: Vanish Day Two

Abandon all hope, ye who have not read Vanish by Tom Pawlik.

You have been duly warned. If you keep reading, you're going to find out a lot about the story, the resolution, and all that.

Like I said yesterday, the folks who survived the strange incident find themselves in a strange predicament: an abandoned city, strange beings on their tails, a rash that spreads from person to person, and it seems as if time has unhinged itself. They seem to be lurching forward at random for little or no reason. What could have happened? Who are the gray creatures attacking them?

That's the real mystery. They're described as tall, featureless, unable or unwilling to step into the light. Who are they? What do they want?

The one theory that gets floated early and often is that it's aliens. It explains the mysterious lights the survivors saw in the storm. The beings are clearly inhuman, so it seems logical that they'd be aliens. As much as I was rooting for them to turn out to be aliens, I knew it couldn't be true. For starters, this is Christian fiction. Aliens seem to be strictly verboten (although I'm hoping that's beginning to change). Second, the idea was floated so often and so urgently, I knew it had to be a dodge.

And what a dodge it is. It turns out that the survivors ... well ... aren't. In any sense of the word. The creatures are a sort of "reaper," bringing in a very grim harvest. And the Chicago and environs they occupy isn't the real world. It's a metaphysical region between life and death called Interworld.

It took me a while to catch on to that. Even though I knew it couldn't be aliens, I had no idea what it was going to be until Conner Hayden put it all together. Once I realized what was going on, though, I sat back and thought, Gee, I think I've read this before.

And I have. In some ways, Vanish is very similar to The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. In Divorce, Lewis plays with an old doctrine called the refrigerium, a belief that God gives "holidays" to the damned so they can get a small taste of heaven. If they repent and acknowledge their need for salvation, they're allowed in. If not, they go back to hell.

Lewis's story starts with the narrator waiting for a bus to hell. He takes a trip to Lewis's version of purgatory, which he envisions as the front porch of heaven, a place where a person "toughens up" so he or she can survive the glories of paradise. For a soul from the murky world of hell, purgatory is simply too real. The grass cuts his feet. A simple brook is too solid to walk on comfortably. The narrator in this short book works his way through purgatory, seeing the redeemed pleading with the lost souls to give up the sins that bind them and come into heaven. In the end, it turns out to be a nightmare.

For those of you who have read Vanish, I think the parallels between the two are pretty obvious. Lewis's character travels to purgatory, a land between heaven and hell. Pawlik's characters are trapped in Interworld, a region between life and death. In both stories, the main characters interact with strange beings almost beyond their comprehension. The similarities are very striking.

So I guess the question is, which is better? In terms of quick readability and entertainment value, Vanish wins, hands down. Lewis's The Great Divorce is more philosophical and artistic. But quite honestly, if I were to choose which one is better, the one I'd want to read several times over, I'd go with Lewis every time. He may preach, but he never gets too preachy (which is one weakness in Pawlik's ending).

Am I the only one who thinks so? Go find out:

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Steve Rice
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

CSFF Blog Tour: Vanish Day One

You know, I always try to come up with some clever way to say "Here we go again" whenever we begin a new blog tour. Every single month. And I've probably repeated myself who knows how many times. So let's just dig into the book, mmmmkay?

This month we're looking at Vanish by Tom Pawlik. The story centers around a number of people but mainly focuses on Conner Hayden. He, along with a small group of people in and around the Chicago area, witness an unusual sight one evening. A storm rolls in off the lake, filled with multicolored lightning. When they awake the next morning, everyone has disappeared. The survivors of this mysterious event band together, desperate to figure out what happened to their family and friends.

But answers are in short supply as even more mysteries present themselves. What is the strange rash that is spreading over some of them? And what about the gray beings that seem reluctant to come into sunlight. Conner and the other survivors travel across country, trying to survive but it would seem that things are stacked against them.

This is a very fast paced book. I knocked it off pretty quickly. It's also a very visual book. I could often picture exactly what was happening throughout, almost like a little movie playing out in my mind. It's easy to see why this book won the Christian Writers' Guild's Operation First Novel in 2006. It's a spellbinding book with a rollicking mystery that kept me guessing right up to the very end. From what I understand, there's a sequel that was just released, namely Valley of the Shadow, one that I may have to check out sometime.

So what's in store on the Least Read Blog for the next two days? Well, tomorrow I'll be slinging around some major spoilers, so be forewarned. The reason why is because as I read this book, I couldn't help but think of a very similar book by a well-known Christian author, so I thought we might do some low level contrasting and comparing. As for Wednesday, I may have to vent my spleen a little. Just a little. Not too much.

So come back over the next two days, gentle readers, for spoiler flinging and spleen venting. And be sure to see what else is going on amongst the other tourists:

Brandon Barr
Justin Boyer
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Karri Compton
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Jeff Draper
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Alex Field
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Ryan Heart
Christopher Hopper
Joleen Howell
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Margaret
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John Ottinger
Donita K. Paul
Epic Rat
Steve Rice
Crista Richey
Hanna Sandvig
Chawna Schroeder
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Phyllis Wheeler

More Than a Skeleton

And so my Maier-binge comes to a close with More Than a Skeleton. This is, by far, the weakest of novels by Paul Maier, and I'll explain why I think so in a bit.

Professor Jonathan Weber is back. It's a few years after "the Rama incident" (i.e. the events of A Skeleton in God's Closet) and Weber has encountered another enigma in the person of Joshua Ben-Yosef. He is a charismatic Jewish Christian who has appeared in Israel with a small coterie of a dozen followers. Joshua at first seems to be nothing more than a charismatic preacher, elaborating on Christ's teachings. But then he starts performing miracles. He turns water to wine. He heals a blind man. He seems to have supernatural knowledge. As the world becomes aware of Ben-Yosef, more and more people wind up asking themselves, "Is this guy Jesus?" Weber finds himself embroiled in another controversy that could wind up changing the course of Christianity forever.

Like I said, this one isn't quite as strong as the other books for a variety of reasons. In some ways, Weber comes off as kind of arrogant and even a jerk at times. The plot is a bit muddled too. Maier spends the first chapter giving a much needed (if a bit harsh) critique of dispensational premillennialism, followed by a libel trial that seemed tacked on and a bit unrealistic. As things are revealed toward the end of the book, I found myself once again thinking that the whole thing is a bit too far-fetched.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a good book. Not the greatest, but when put on the balance of Maier's other excellent novels, it comes out a bit wanting.

A Skeleton in God's Closet

I don't often remember the circumstances surrounding the purchase of a book. But I do in this case.

It was my senior year in high school. I had gone to Praise Unlimited, the local Christian bookstore, to see if there was any new music in. There wasn't. Out of curiosity, I eyed the lengthy book section. I had never ventured over there before. So I decided to take the plunge.

As you can imagine, this being the early '90s, I didn't find much of interest. Lots of plaintive women stared back at me. But there was one with a provocative title: A Skeleton in God's Closet by Paul Maier. Yeah, there was a woman on it, but there was a man too, digging something out of the ground. I picked it up and flipped it over to see what the back had to say.

I was floored. Basically, the back cover copy asked a tantalizing question: what if an archaeologist found something that would destroy Christianity?

I was on the fence. Should I get it? Well, a sticker from Thomas Nelson on the cover said that if I didn't like the book, I could mail it to them and get my money back. So I decided, since I couldn't find any music I liked, that I would take the plunge.

And I am so glad that I did. This book is still my all-time favorite. Dr. Maier brings his considerable scholarship to bear to make a great thriller centered around Jonathan Weber, a Harvard archaeologist who makes what seems to be the find of the century. But as they continue to work, they unearth more than they bargained for and, sure enough, their discovery threatens to tip the entire Christian faith into chaos.

Part of what I loved about this book is that Maier does an extremely good job of constructing his scenario. Weber's discovery is put together so well that you seriously wonder how Maier will get his characters out of the predicament. And he also does a great job of constructing what could happen if the foundation of Christianity was somehow ripped away.

I keep coming back to this book and re-reading it because I do enjoy it so much. Although there was a recent event that tracked so closely to the plot that I almost wrote to Dr. Maier to accuse him of being a prophet. Thankfully, that incident has been largely forgotten.

But as you can see, this book isn't all that forgettable for me. Give it a try.

So I guess my Maier binge is almost over. All I have left is More Than A Skeleton.

Wordcount Wednesday

It's been a weird week. Unfortunately, our home computer has spent more time at the Geek Squad than in our home thanks to a weird, persistent slow-down problem. It's a long story and I won't go into it here. Suffice it to say, I've gotten to know one Geek in particular over the past three weeks. Well, it went back in Monday and just came back today, fresh from a "restore." In other words, wiping everything and reconstructing it from the ground up. I spent the afternoon re-installing a bunch of the programs I use and ... well, let's just say I've been distracted.

That's not to mean that I haven't been able to write. God bless the person who invented laptops, especially the team that constructed mine. It's been traveling from church to home with me, which allowed me to write 5,041 words this week for Numb. This brings my total up to 57,351. I think I should still be able to be done by a week from this Sunday, when I begin a week long vacation. At least, I hope I can make it.

Last week, Robert Treskillard, a colleague of mine from ACFW whose daughter is brave enough to wear kilts to a national writing conference, asked me what my end goal is for Numb. When I started working, I set a finish line of 70,000 words or so. Again, I have no idea if I can make it or not, but we'll have to see.

The Flames of Rome

It would seem that I'm on a Paul Maier binge right now. That's okay, because The Flames of Rome is a great novel.

It starts in the hey day following the Emperor Claudius's conquest of Britain. The story revolves around Flavius Sabinus and his career and life. Things seem very good for Sabinus and Rome in general until Claudius is succeeded by his stepson, Nero. While Nero had a good start (thanks in large part to his tutor, Seneca), he descended into debauchery and madness, dragging much of Rome with it.

When a fire breaks out in Rome, consuming a good protion of the city, Nero needs someone to blame. It falls on the Christians, who he then murders in a number of them.

You may have noticed that while I say the novel revolves around Sabinus, I've spent most of the review speaking about the politics of the day. That's because while Sabinus is the main character, her moves mostly through the upper echelon of Roman society. The details Maier layers into the story from history (all well documented with endnotes) is incredible and helps bring the era to life.

Once again, though, craft is the Achilles heel of an otherwise good book. It's a bit weak in terms of simple craft. The historical details more than make up for it, though.

A word of caution, though. Nero was a horrific individual with some rather ... how shall I say this ... Well, I can't think of a polite way to put it. He was a pervert, pure and simple, and Maier dosn't pull any unches when it comes to describing his debaucheries. Nero's not the only one with such proclivities. Be warned, this is not a book to give to a younger reader and people who are sensitive to such things might want to avoid it.

For the rest of us who want an unflinching look at first century Roman society, this is the book for you.

Pontius Pilate

What a difference a few years make.

Pontius Pilate is one of the first Christian novels I ever read, maybe fourteen or fifteen years ago. It's an interesting concept: rather than writing a straight historical novel, Dr. Paul Maier (an eminent Biblical scholar and historian) set out to write a "documented historical novel." He set a few important rules for himself: use accurate names (if it isn't known, it's not given), no contradicting any known fact (even for the sake of dramatic license), and only using "constructed history" when he absolutely had no evidence one way or the other.

So Maier sets out to tell the story of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect who judged Jesus and sentenced Him to crucifixion. But Maier takes a long running start at the trial, explaining the climate of Tiberius's reign, what Pilate experienced as governor, and what he may have seen after his return to Rome. Maier shares his research in a series of extensive endnotes. According to the second edition preface, nothing discovered in recent years has contradicted anything in the book.

If you're looking for a great book to help illustrate the political and societal pressures Pilate faced while acting as the Roman representative in Judea. Where the book is weak is craft. There's a lot of telling, lots of info dumping to explain historical data. If you're looking for information, those things are fine.

In spite of this, it's a good book to read. Everyone should.

The facts are these...

... the Piemaker got the raw end of the deal. And so did we, the viewers.

Jill and I watched the final episode of Pushing Daisies tonight. I'm going to miss this quirky, well written show. Snappy dialogue, bizarre plots, and incredible sets. Every show was a delight.

But sadly, I think we deserved somewhat better.

What I mean is this: it's obvious what the producers of this show did. When they found out that they were getting the ax, they had only shot a season finale (complete with what I think would have been a terrific cliffhanger, sure to bring me back in the Fall). So they had to manufacture a series finale with a bit of a voiceover and some hastily thrown-together effects.

It didn't totally sit right with me. Maybe it's the fact that I'd rather see where the show would have gone past the cliffhanger. Maybe it's the rather ironic ending of "there-is-no-ending, just-new-beginnings" business. Whatever the case, it could have been handled a bit better.

Oh well. What's done is done. Now to gear up for the final episodes of Eli Stone and Kings.

Looks like my Fall TV viewing schedule is going to be a might empty.

Good news, everybody!

Futurama is coming back!

Now for the bad news. I don't have Comedy Central. That may have to change.

Wordcount Wednesday

I'm about two thirds of the way through Numb. That's a guess, not a certainty. This week, I added another 4,549 words, bringing the grand total to 52,310. This has me a bit nervous. Three years ago, I started writing a story for NaNoWriMo, one set in the same universe as this book. I made it to 50,000 words (barely) to win the month, but the story then petered out and I've never gone back to it.

Now I'm not saying that I'll be abandoning this story any time soon. But again, I wish I had made it further.

Worse, I know I'm not going to be making a lot of headway through the rest of June. Starting tomorrow, I'll be attending the Minnesota South District Convention in St. Paul for three days. A week after that, I'll be in Madison to perform a wedding for one of Jill's friends. And a week after that, it's a week at a cabin up north in Minnesota with my family.

Maybe I need to kick it into gear, see if I can't get this done before we head up north. We'll have to see.

There's a Zombie on your lawn!

Okay, so about this time last week, I was extremely depressed. My computer had to go into Best Buy for servicing. Bad timing, since The Sims 3 was coming out the very next day and I had been looking forward to playing that for a long time. But since the computer was acting so slow, I knew it had to be done. So off it went. For three or four days.

That posed quite a problem for me. I'm a gamer and I had no way of playing games. I would bring my laptop home from work but that was only good for checking e-mails and browsing the web. By Thursday, I was getting desperate. I had to play something.

Well, I knew that while my laptop could not handle the graphics load from The Sims 3, it could handle a casual game. And an on-line friend of mine had been playing this game, so much so that he posted a weird music video about it. I finally decided I had to check this game out for myself.

So I downloaded the free trial. Once the hour was up, I immediately bought the game. And even though the computer came back and I could finally play The Sims 3, I found I preferred to play this silly little casual game instead.

What is this remarkable game? Plants vs. Zombies.



Just a quick note: the above video is not the music video that enticed me to play the game. It's the official trailer, but you still get the idea.

Part of the reason why this game is such a blast is because it's so deceptively simple. Zombies are trying to invade your house. Your only line of defense are your plants. Set up your defenses as best you can and try to survive wave after wave of the shuffling undead.

But this is a PopCap game, and PopCap really knows how to make addictive games. With each successive levels, you get more and more plants to take out more and more powerful zombies. Part of the strategy is figuring out what plants you need to face what zombies. If you don't have the right plants, you're going to be facing a difficult battle.



Even though I've beaten the "adventure mode," I'm still playing the game obsessively because (and here's the true genius of this game), there are dozens of mini-games and puzzles to solve, each ridiculous, each hilarious.

So if you're a fan of casual games or just want to play this game to see the aforementioned music video, you can't go wrong with this one.

The Road

I don't get it. There, I said it.

I just got done reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I had heard great things about this book. What, exactly, I don't remember now. Maybe that should have told me something.

For those unfamiliar, McCarthy describes the journey of a man and his son through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A horrible something has happened. What, we're never really told. There's a lot of ash everywhere and there were apparently a great number of fires (one city is described as being somewhat melted). The father and son must pick their way across the ruined landscape, scavenging for whatever they can find, trying to avoid the other survivors.

It turns out that most of humanity has become little better than animals. It sort of reminded me of Lord of the Flies only writ large and much more disgusting. I'd like to think that humanity would behave better after a massive disaster such as whatever happened, but I know my theology all too well to believe that. McCarthy's depiction of the breakdown of society and how people would behave is disturbing especially since it's so believable.

But that's as far as my comprehension ended. What was the overall theme of the book? Man's inhumanity to man? How fragile this thing was call "society" really is? How much a father is willing to sacrifice for his son?

I guess I'm no literati. The tale was intriguingly told. McCarthy's prose is, at times, poetic even when it's brutal. But this is the end of the road for me. And none too soon.

awesome awesome awesome awesome....

This is why I trust the folks at Bioware more than George Lucas when it comes to Star Wars.



Now I know I can't be trusted with MMORPGs. But I am salivating right now. Seriously. My keyboard is all wet and gross and I don't care.

Wordcount Wednesday

Why did I think this was a good idea again?

I didn't make as much progress as I hoped. I had unofficially set a goal of writing 2,000 words a day over the past week. I did not even come close.

So as of right now, on Numb, I've written a grand total of 47,761. That means that over the past seven days, I've written a new 5,772 words.

It's not all bad. While I may not have made a lot of forward progress, I rethought a few structural problems with the story that I'll have to fix on the rewrite.

Now I know that I promised a talk about what we can learn about writing from video games. Unfortunately, I have to put that off for a while. I apparently somehow managed to get 47-some-odd virii on my desktop computer, which means that I was unable to get the pictures/footage of the games I needed for the discussion. For some odd reason, today has reminded me of this.

Oh well. Maybe next week. Or some other time in the future. But tune in next week to see how much farther I can make it.

Darth Bane: Rule of Two

I know I've mentioned that I'm a Star Wars fan in the past. The interesting thing I've noticed over the past couple of years is that I've slowly lost interest in anything revolving around the two movie trilogies. I used to be an avid reader of the Star Wars novels, but after I finished the New Jedi Order series, I didn't really care what happened to Luke, Leia, Han, and the rest anymore. The same thing is true about the Clone Wars era. I can't be bothered. Yet the esoteric past of Star Wars, the vastly unexplored historical backstory of the Star Wars movies, well, sign me up for that!

Which brings me to this book, namely Darth Bane: Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn. This is a sequel to Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, a book I reviewed a little over two years ago. The story picks up where the previous book left off. Darth Bane and his newly acquired apprentice, Zannah, are trying to leave Ruusan in the wake of the war between the Jedi and the Sith. In the process of the story, Bane is encased by parasitic bugs that make him somewhat indistructible and he tries to figure out how to construct a Sith Holocron to preserve his teachings. Zannah, now technically Darth Zannah, goes along with her master's plans.

It didn't take me long to read this book, mostly because it's literary junk food. All filler and fun, no real heft to it. In some ways, the book wasn't all that good because the plot is kind of nebulous. What, exactly, is Bane trying to accomplish? We don't have the faintest clue. The characters too are a bit flimsy. At least with Sith Lords like Darth Sidious, we knew what he wanted. Galactic domination. That's a worthy goal of an evil Dark Sider, right? Yet Bane and Zannah's motivation is something of a mystery. Why did both of these peopel fall to the Dark Side? What are they trying to accomplish? Who knows.

I saw this afternoon that there will be a third Darth Bane novel. Maybe that will shed some light on what the "big picture" is for Bane and Zannah. If not, that's okay too. I'll still read it. Although, like with this one, I'll probably wait to get it from the library.

Roma Eterna

You know, on paper, Roma Eterna by Robert Silverberg should be my kind of book. It's counterfactual history, something that I really enjoy. And it's based around the Roman Empire, a subject that I'm fascinated by. And yet this book sapped my will to live. If it hadn't been for our home computer acting up, I might not have ever finished it.

It's an interesting premise: Silverberg posits a world where the Roman Empire never fell. It just kept on going. And yet the way Silverberg tried to tell this story fell flat in so many ways.

First of all, there's the structure. Rather than pick one time period and stick with it, Silverberg keeps jumping through time. The book is essentially a series of unconnected short stories, the only thing in common being the setting. Just when you're starting to care about the characters in the story, that story ends and they're never mentioned again. Or, if they are, it's an off-handed reference that really doesn't go anywhere.

Second, there's the repetitious nature of Silverberg's backstory. If he told me one more time that Maximilianus III subdued the barbarians once and for all, I'm pretty sure I would have torn my hair out. He did this time after time after time. And I kept thinking, I know, I know, you told me this ten pages ago!.

That's another problem. Lots of telling, not a lot of showing. It made for weak storytelling.

But the thing that really bothered me the most was Silverberg's point of historical departure. He posited that the reason why the Roman Empire never fell is because Christianity never existed. Now I've got theological problems with that that I won't go into here simply because those reasons aren't the reason why my suspended disbelief kept trying to unsuspend itself. I know that historians have suggested that Christianity brought about the fall of the Roman Empire. Given that possibility, it's within the realm of reason to believe that a lack of Christianity would mean a longer lasting Empire. The merits of the argument are beyond the scope of this book review and I leave that particular debate to people with more abbreviations behind their names than I.

No, there are two major reasons why I didn't like this point of departure. The first has to do with the idea of trajectory. Silverberg removes Christianity from the historical scene by having the Exodus fail. No Exodus, he reasons, no Isreal. No Isreal, no Jews. No Jews, no Christianity.

So that might work, but my problem here is that that leaves 1,200 years (at least) where things would be substantially different. No Exodus, no kingdom of Israel, right? Well, that leaves a power vacuum in the ancient world that would have to be filled. Who knows what might have arisen in the land of Canaan. A Philistine Empire? Would Egypt, who was the nominal overlords of the region at the time, maintained their hold, thus allowing them to resist the Assyrians and Babylonians? Who knows?

Silverberg's premise of removing the Exodus and only removing Christianity is far-fetched to the point of ridiculousness. It's entirely possible that by undoing the Exodus, the Roman Empire might never have arisen. The butterfly theory and all that.

The second reason why this point of departure is so ridiculous to me is because of what Silverberg does in his introduction. He has two Roman historians meet and discuss ancient history and one of them says something along these lines: "Well, what if that Moses guy had succeeded? Well, then, a religion may have arisen, based on resurrection, that would have appealed to Roman society and radically changed our society."

Um, excuse me? That's an awfully big intellectual leap for someone to make. Too big of one, if you ask me. Sure, Silverberg is trying to explain what's missing, but that could have been made pretty clear in short order rather than with the ham-fisted way he did.

According to Silverberg's biography, he's an award-winning author. Quite frankly, based on this book, I can't imagine why and I don't really care to learn. For me, if I want to see some good counterfactual storytelling in this same vein, I'll re-read Harry Turtledove's Agent of Byzantium. Much better and not quite so ludicrous.