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A Land Fit for Heroes #1
Escape to the Wild Wood
The first novel in a series set in modern Britain still ruled by the Roman Empire. Technology is advanced, but different from anything we could recognize. Much of the island is still thickly forested, the Roman towns linked by high-speed tubular transportation systems.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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52 people want to read
About the author
Phillip Mann
29 books16 followersPhillip Mann was born in 1942 and studied English and Drama at Manchester University and later in California. He worked in the New China News Agency in Beijing for two years but has lived in New Zealand since 1969, working as a theatre critic, drama teacher and university Reader in Drama.
Series:
* Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener
* A Land Fit for Heroes
Series:
* Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener
* A Land Fit for Heroes
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 2, 2018
I admit this is a wholly biased review. Phil Mann was my lecturer at University and one of the most inspiring teachers I’ve had in my life. I was lucky he released this book while I was studying under him as I have a signed copy with a personal note.
I also have a soft spot for alternate history science fiction and I don’t know how many people have taken on the subject of the Roman Empire enduring into the twentieth century. Mann shows the scope of his imagination in realising this alternate history as a completely different (but still recognisable) world. It goes into greater considered depth than sticking everyone in a toga and giving them a Latin name. Environments are substantially different, technology has evolved without the loss of knowledge that occurred in the Dark Ages and so forth.
It is a book that gets better as it goes along. Perhaps this is because the world is so different it takes a while to wrap your head around everything. I’d argue the characters are written slightly differently to what we’d expect from modern people to reflect two thousand years of different conditioning by society. Mann is a deep thinker and I doubt anything he writes is an accident. Not a stand alone read though. Without adding spoilers, the story was always intended to be a trilogy.
I also have a soft spot for alternate history science fiction and I don’t know how many people have taken on the subject of the Roman Empire enduring into the twentieth century. Mann shows the scope of his imagination in realising this alternate history as a completely different (but still recognisable) world. It goes into greater considered depth than sticking everyone in a toga and giving them a Latin name. Environments are substantially different, technology has evolved without the loss of knowledge that occurred in the Dark Ages and so forth.
It is a book that gets better as it goes along. Perhaps this is because the world is so different it takes a while to wrap your head around everything. I’d argue the characters are written slightly differently to what we’d expect from modern people to reflect two thousand years of different conditioning by society. Mann is a deep thinker and I doubt anything he writes is an accident. Not a stand alone read though. Without adding spoilers, the story was always intended to be a trilogy.
February 9, 2026
Phillip Mann was the British-born New Zealand author of the highly recommended Eye of the Queen and the two-volume Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener, all three extremely enjoyable, and filled with exotic and interestingly described aliens (as I remember them). Wulfsyarn is a touching story of regret and loss, but Pioneers is mostly forgettable (other than being sprinkled with New Zealand place names). Last year I read The Disestablishment of Paradise, an ambitious SF novel that, while still enjoyable to read for all of Mann’s literary qualities, was somewhat of a letdown in the conclusion through trying too hard to take the reader on a Clarkian trip that didn’t really work. He passed away in 2022 after publishing his final novel Chevalier & Gawayn.
The setting of this book, Escape to the Wild Wood, had never interested me. Although I have always been interested in Roman history, I remember Ian Watson wrote the novel Oracle about a Roman centurion being thrown forward in time, and Gene Wolfe wrote Soldier of the Mist set in Ancient Greece, but I just was not interested. Here, Phillip Mann sets the Roman Empire as having never fallen and projects togas and swords forward to the present day with the addition of expected technology like floating cars (although, towards the end of the novel, it is apparent that automatic rifles have been invented. Maybe I had started skim reading so much that earlier mention alluded me). This setting also didn’t interest and me, and the cover looked painfully bland in its representations.
Unfortunately, Phillip Mann chooses to introduce the world through the voice of a separated narrator describing the world to you the reader as being "different from ours" as though he was a wizened old storyteller talking down to kids. The tone is flat and this sort of storytelling isn't Mann's strength, and this sucks, because it takes 30 pages before anyone has a conversation - a real conversation. Mann goes out of his way to describe the setting in detail and characters finally enter with a described chariot battle under the great Battle Dome. The three main protagonists are introduced through separate chapters, Mann continues to tell with little showing or conversation; the bits of conversation that do arise don’t offer much interest.
Unfortunately, it takes mid-book to get the plot rolling, and unfortunately again, it is a rape that drives the plot through antagonisms and a personal vendetta. Much of the second half is readable, but with a change of scenery – leaving the Romanesque Battle Dome, and entering the forests of the ‘pagans’ – new characters are introduced without much depth to their personalities. So many cliche characters and absolutely no mystery to any of them as Mann tells you who they are up front before they barely even interact with the main characters. The last sequence of events is readable just through share momentum of storytelling, but I was glad I hit the final page.
If this book didn’t have Phillip Mann’s name attached to it, I would assume that it was written by a hack. I wasted $8.50 paying for this book through a library inter-loan, and will only approach the sequel Stand Alone Stan if I find it in a second-hand bookshop (although, these are rapidly disappearing from sight as quickly as NZ's twin Glaciers).
I will, however, look forward to continuing on with Tom Holland’s history of Rome with Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar and Pax. A much more compelling and bloody epic!
The setting of this book, Escape to the Wild Wood, had never interested me. Although I have always been interested in Roman history, I remember Ian Watson wrote the novel Oracle about a Roman centurion being thrown forward in time, and Gene Wolfe wrote Soldier of the Mist set in Ancient Greece, but I just was not interested. Here, Phillip Mann sets the Roman Empire as having never fallen and projects togas and swords forward to the present day with the addition of expected technology like floating cars (although, towards the end of the novel, it is apparent that automatic rifles have been invented. Maybe I had started skim reading so much that earlier mention alluded me). This setting also didn’t interest and me, and the cover looked painfully bland in its representations.
Unfortunately, Phillip Mann chooses to introduce the world through the voice of a separated narrator describing the world to you the reader as being "different from ours" as though he was a wizened old storyteller talking down to kids. The tone is flat and this sort of storytelling isn't Mann's strength, and this sucks, because it takes 30 pages before anyone has a conversation - a real conversation. Mann goes out of his way to describe the setting in detail and characters finally enter with a described chariot battle under the great Battle Dome. The three main protagonists are introduced through separate chapters, Mann continues to tell with little showing or conversation; the bits of conversation that do arise don’t offer much interest.
Unfortunately, it takes mid-book to get the plot rolling, and unfortunately again, it is a rape that drives the plot through antagonisms and a personal vendetta. Much of the second half is readable, but with a change of scenery – leaving the Romanesque Battle Dome, and entering the forests of the ‘pagans’ – new characters are introduced without much depth to their personalities. So many cliche characters and absolutely no mystery to any of them as Mann tells you who they are up front before they barely even interact with the main characters. The last sequence of events is readable just through share momentum of storytelling, but I was glad I hit the final page.
If this book didn’t have Phillip Mann’s name attached to it, I would assume that it was written by a hack. I wasted $8.50 paying for this book through a library inter-loan, and will only approach the sequel Stand Alone Stan if I find it in a second-hand bookshop (although, these are rapidly disappearing from sight as quickly as NZ's twin Glaciers).
I will, however, look forward to continuing on with Tom Holland’s history of Rome with Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar and Pax. A much more compelling and bloody epic!
June 20, 2011
Alternate history set in a Roman Britain where the Romans never left. Some interesting sexual politics and okay characterisation of both male and female characters. I wasn't sure that I would like it but I enjoyed it more as I went along. Some geeky technology both in the Roman world and also in the Pagan world that exists in the forests surrounding the Roman settlements.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews