But what if the future holds not endless progress but a stuttering slide to decadence and entropy, the loss of even such simple luxuries as electricity and combustion engines, along with a collateral political decay? That's the premise of Judson's remarkable third novel (after Fitzpatrick's War [2004] and an earlier mainstream tale), which covers the years 2278 through 2323.

We begin in 2293, on Mars, listening to the assured narrator's voice of one Justa Black, a dark-skinned beauty. Justa is the lone daughter—illegitimate, her mother a nameless Syrian woman—of the famed yet now doddering and ancient Gen. Peter Black, stalwart supporter of the Empire of Pan-Polaria, which governs half of Earth's patchwork nations. Pan-Polaria is in the midst of a succession crisis. After some 10 years of horrid misrule by the insane Luke Anthony, an epicene, murderous fop given to brutal spectacles and capricious dictates who has just been assassinated, various military men are contending bloodily for the throne. Chief among these is Gen. Abdul Selin, a treacherous Turk who has always hated Black.

Gen. Black and Justa would be content to remain in exile on Mars, save for the spread of a metal-eating nanovirus that will render their environmental domes useless. They return to Earth in a makeshift mining ship, and so begins the chronicle of the final dissolute days of the Pan-Polaric polity, when Gen. Black and his loyal daughterly advisor get one last chance to shine on the big stage of public events.

But this real-time thread—which culminates in a coda encapsulating 30 years beyond the climax—is the least of the tale. Because Justa is going to jump back in her memory to when she was a teen, when Matthias the Glistening, Luke Anthony's father, still ruled wisely, and recount for us the whole sad tragedy of how the banal evil of its leaders conspired with the sheeplike folly of the masses to turn the Mexico-sited Garden City capital of the Empire, with some 40 million in population, into a stew of betrayal, double-dealing, avarice and mortality, where a noble old-school soldier like Gen. Black will survive only by wits and luck.

A witty account of a decline and fall

The notion of mapping the endgame of the Roman Empire onto the future is hardly a new one. Isaac Asimov famously called his Foundation series "the Roman Empire writ large." And A.E. van Vogt put his unique twist on such a scenario with his Linn books, recently reissued under the title Transgalactic (2006). Given the literary models of Robert Graves and various classical commentators, it's easy enough to cobble up just such a scenario and transplant it to the future.

But what Judson has accomplished here is so much more than a simple Bat-Durston camouflage of ancient history. His future is so odd and skewed that his tale more resembles a work by Gene Wolfe or the unjustly forgotten Mark Geston. We might find echoes even of John Wright's Golden Age series (without the superscience) or Vance's Dying Earth (without the layers of antiquity and magic).

Judson's future is a mix of the familiar—Luke Anthony at one point decides to base his court life on that of Tom Sawyer—and the warped: Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe have become literal deities. Much of the backstory regarding how the world got from our era to that of the novel is deliberately left vague and mysterious, lending the milieu a kind of uncanny inevitability. Its parts hang together so well that you never once doubt its verismilitude. And Judson twists the outlines of Rome's senescence into vivid new patterns.

But what really carries this book to a higher plateau is the character and voice of Justa. Wise, clear-eyed, loving and forgiving of her addled father's failings, appalled by injustice, drily humorous, canny, merciless at times for survival's sake, she is one of the best characters in the SF of the last several years. The way her dual narratives converge on her real-time moment—and then zoom 30 years ahead—is brilliant.

Amid all the garish and bloody pomp of empire, Justa's humble viewpoint is that of a tiny mammal among dinosaurs. And just as the mammals triumphed when the big reptiles died, so too does Justa's code of honor outlast those who would crush it with a single footstep.