De Bello Alieno

44 B.C.. Rome is the capital of the civilized world, its hegemony stretching from the Ocean to Asia, from Gaul to Egypt. No army can stand against the might of the Roman legions and their guns… Motor chariots speed through the streets, steam trains connect the remotest provinces to the Eternal City. The architect of these conquests has a name: Gaius Julius Caesar, the brilliant scientist and entrepreneur who, forced by Sulla to abandon his political and military career, devoted all his ingenuity to science and its technical application…

But far away, beyond the dark and boundless night of space, an aged and dying Race peers, with mute hostility and envy, at planet Earth, scrutinizes Rome and its conquests… From their barren and arid world, buffeted by winds and storms and shaken by earthquakes, alien beings watch, with unmoving hatred, who has what they can no longer have… They see humans grow and multiply, tame animals and cultivate the land… And then they mine coal, ply the seas with motor ships and the earth with mechanical vehicles. And they make a decision: it is necessary to stop the earthlings before they become too dangerous.

It is necessary to destroy Rome.

Born in Asti in 1968, Davide Del Popolo Riolo lives and works as a lawyer in Cuneo. He made his debut as a writer in 2014 with a science fiction novel set in Caesar's Rome, De Bello Alieno (Delos Digital), with which he won the Odyssey Award and the Vegetti Award from World Science-Fiction Italia. In 2015 he published another sf novel set in the Roman Age, There Are No Gods Beyond Time (Kipple), which won the Kipple Prize, and in 2019 Übermensch (Delos Digital), a novel about a superhero in Nazi Germany, which reached the finals of the Urania Prize and was among the ten books of the year recommended by Tom's Hardware. With the short novel legal-sf, Erasmus (Delos Digital) he won the Cassiopeia Award in 2015 and with the short story Short Manual of Conversation with the Dead, published in Andromeda magazine, the Viviani Award in 2018. His stories have been published by leading genre magazines and in anthologies such as, in 2019 alone, Strange Worlds (Urania) and Other Futures (Delos Digital), which collects the best stories of 2018. In 2020 he won the Urania Prize with the novel The Fist of Man and again in 2023 with the novel For the Ashes of the Fathers.