Decline and Fall, un article de Robert Silverberg

[jerome]

Decline and Fall est un article de Robert Silverberg à lire dans le dernier numéro de la revue Asimov's. Il est en ligne ici en anglais

Il y parle de l'Empire romain.

Voici le début :

"It’s no secret that Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation series was a recasting of Roman history in science fictional form. The Roman Empire, by the time of Constantine the Great in the early fourth century, reached from Britain to the borders of Persia, and had become too unwieldy to govern from a single capital city in Italy. Recognizing this, Constantine founded a second capital for the Empire in Asia Minor—Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Drawing heavily on Edward Gibbon’s great eighteenth-century work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Isaac invented a galactic equivalent for Constantine’s creation of a second capital, and built his books around the quest, in some far-off galactic future, for that distant Second Foundation.

He was not, of course, the only SF writer to mine Roman history for story ideas. A.E. van Vogt’s Linn series (Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn), which attracted some attention when it appeared in the 1940s and 1950s, was a retelling of the early years of the Empire, the time of Augustus and Tiberius, set in a future age that followed a devastating galactic war. The basic sources for this material were the first-century Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, though van Vogt seems to have drawn much of his material from Robert Graves’ historical novel I, Claudius rather than going, as Graves had done, to the original sources.

Those are just two of many SF works derived from Roman history. (I’ve done one myself, Roma Eterna, sectionsof which were published in Asimov’s some time back.) But lately I’ve been reading the book of a great and undeservedly neglected Roman historian whose account of the Empire as it was entering its final phase, late in the fourth century a.d. could well serve as the basis of a really frightening science fiction series, for it is a nightmarish portrait of a terrifying police state of Stalinist intensity, full of chilling details that give us marvelous insight into the great realm as it tottered toward its collapse."