Book review: Empire of the Atom

As wiki puts it, Empire of the Atom is a science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt. It was first published in 1957 by Shasta Publishers in an edition of 2,000 copies. The novel is a fix-up of the first five of van Vogt's Gods stories, which originally appeared in the magazine Astounding.

The fix-up nature isn't obvious; the various chapters fit together fairly well. What was obvious was that this was Romans-in-space, in that the people, whilst flying around in spaceships, (a) have no idea how they work; and (b) fight with Roman-level weapons; and (c) have a rather blatantly Roman-type civil structure. After a bit I realised that it was "worse" than that; that the Great Leader was really like... Augustus? (My Roman history is not good) and the evil empress is even called Livia. Then it turns out that it is pretty well ripped off from I, Claudius and everything falls into place; the Mutant is then Claudius.

Despite all that - and despite the cover, which isn't really what Our Hero looks like in the book - this is, as a Van Vogt, worth reading in a way that a Greg Bear isn't (I say this as having put down GB's Strength of Stones in favour of EotA). It's kinda interesting how VV's writing is just better.

Having said that, this is a mere potboiler, and I doubt I keep it.

VV's "concept" for their tech is Roman-level, but somehow with metallurgy capable of refining the "god metals" and using them to propel spaceships via some kind of explosive-reaction-in-chambers. This is all nonsense, and he sensibly declines to give any details. But the spaceships, whilst able to travel between planets (navigation is just waved away) are able to "float" in a wy totally incompatible with the rocket concept. Which is to say, he completely hasn't thought this out: his ship behave rather like the ones in the early Flash Gordon movies.