Oceanian & Australasian Fiction, Alternate Realities - Fiction, Social Science Fiction

The Centurion's Empire

Name: The Centurion's Empire
Author: Sean McMullen
ISBN: 9781466822504

by Sean McMullen

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Overview

In the year that Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii, the Roman Centurion Vitellan set off for the twenty-first century as Imperial Rome's last human-powered time machine. He killed an unfaithful lover by just letting her grow old, but her hate pursued him across seven centuries. In 1358 he stood with a few dozen knights against an army of nine thousand to defend the life of a beautiful countess...and earned a love that would conquer death.

Now Vitellan has awakened in the twenty-first century, a bewildered fugitive, betrayed and hunted in a world where minds and bodies are swapped and memories are bought, sold, and read like books. But worst of all, a deadly enemy from the fourteenth century is still very much alive--and closing in.

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About the Author, Sean McMullen

Sean McMullen is one of the leading Australian SF authors to emerge during the 1990s, having won more than a dozen national awards in his homeland. In addition, he has sold several dozen short stories to magazines such as Analog, Interzone, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was co-author of Strange Constellations, a History of Australian SF. He established himself in the American market with the publication of the Greatwinter trilogy (comprised of Souls in the Great Machine, The Miocene Arrow, and Eyes of the Calculor). His fiction has been translated into Polish, French, and Japanese. The settings for Sean's work range from the Roman Empire, through Medieval Europe, to cities of the distant future.

He has bachelor's and master's degrees from Melbourne University, and post-graduate diplomas in computer science, information science and business management. He is currently doing a PhD in Medieval Fantasy Literature at Melbourne University, where he is also the deputy instructor at the campus karate club, and a member of the fencing club. Before he began writing, Sean spent several years in student reviews and theatre, and was lead singer in three rock and folk bands. After singing in several early music groups and choirs, he spent two years in the Victorian State Opera before he began writing.

He lives in Melbourne with his wife Trish and daughter Catherine.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Through periodic awakenings from cryogenic slumber, Roman centurion Vitellan Bavalius has acquainted himself with ninth-century England and 14th-century France. When he revives unexpectedly in the 21st century, Vitellan confronts not only the wonders of a technologically sophisticated world but also the schemes of an ancient and implacable enemy. Australian writer McMullen's chronicle of a time-traveling eternal soldier employs historic events as a background to his real story -- a tightly woven, intricately plotted tale of future intrigue that should appeal to fans of high-tech science fiction.

The Australian

One of our finest writers of hard SF.

Kirkus Reviews

Centuries before the Roman Empire, an Etruscan named Celcinius discovered a toxic golden oil, the Venenum Immortale, that enabled him to be frozen in ice and later revived; he founded a small and very exclusive society, the Temporians, and built its palace, Nusquam, high in the Alps above an ancient and stable deposit of ice. In A.D. 71, a young centurion, Vitellan Bavalius, having demonstrated his ability to survive prolonged hypothermia, becomes a candidate for the Temporians, who now rule the Roman Empire. But before Vitellan can be inducted, a raid on Nusquam destroys many of the sleepers, along with most of the Venenum Immortale stock and the secret recipe of its manufacture. By chance, Vitellan acquires the last of the oil and retires to England, where he prepares a Frigidarium and consigns himself to sleep, knowing that the village of Durvas is devoted to serving him and preserving his ice cave. He wakes in A.D. 870 but, without Celcinius's antidote, rapidly sickens. Still, he helps the future Alfred the Great defeat the invading Danes and reintroduce scholarship. Returning to the ice, Vitellan wakes again in 1358, in the middle of the England-France Hundred Years War, where he routs the marauding Jacquerie, rescues the noble Lady Anne, and acquires a bitter enemy, Jacques Bonhomme, who will also arrange to be frozen. Finally, in 2028, Vitellan wakes amid a power struggle involving Luministe cultists, his loyal Durvas keepers, and a treacherous faction intent on manipulating him—only to discover he's no longer occupying his own body. An entertaining but vastly improbable jaunt through history as it wasn't.