This novel postulates an interesting "what if?" A Roman Centurion stumbles on an opportunity to take advantage of a cryogenic technique and, after a fashion, travel through time. The book touches on a few interesting historical stops but the primary focus is on an imagined future 21st Century and the frantic efforts of our hero to simply stay alive in this future world. The book rambles, digresses, and seems to lose it's focus quite a lot but the story line is interesting enough to carry the reader through much of that. Should note that McMullen's imagined world of 2029, now only a dozen years away, is wildly off the mark. I was surprised, when I checked the publication date, that McMullen had set his future world such a short time away. The future he postulates would have been more convincing had it been set a couple of decades further out. . ( )

A Roman time-traveller from the past surfaces at various points in history. Worthwhile Australian sf with a different twist. ( )

Minireview: In the first century CE, Roman Centurion Vitellan finds a way to freeze himself and sleep through the years without aging, travelling through time the slow way. After brief encounters with Vikings and the Hundred Years' War, the bulk of the plot is set in the 21st century, as Vitellan and other travellers like him become objects of adoration for cults. Although the book can drift a bit, its focus on the central character of Vitellan helps keep it from sprawling as badly as Souls in the Great Machine, the only other book by McMullen I've read. ( )

This book is absolutely amazing! After taking 3 years of Latin, I loved the Roman culture in this book, which has a lot of twists and betrayals with the Romans still being the coolest people out there! ( )

http://www.leftfield.org/~rawdon/books/sf/mcmullen_sean/#the.centurion's.empire ( )