Roma Mater is a deep book; it discusses in detail significant aspects of the human experience. Furthermore, like The Avatar (1978) before it, Roma Mater fulfills the high expectations some critics have had for Anderson's work. The style is complex and demanding. Anderson uses the skills acquired from a lifetime of creating believable science fiction worlds to flesh out the alien world of the last years of the Western Roman Empire. As a consequence, the novel contains many detailed descriptive passages; the Andersons have both carefully researched and fully thought out their presentation of cultures very different from that of modern America. A sign of their success in their effort is how ordinary the extraordinary aspects of the Ysan world seem. Gratillonius comes off as a hard-bitten soldier who is an ordinary man placed in extraordinary circumstances. He is not a super-hero.

This enhances the universality of...