Ilium
Ratings101
Average rating3.8
This is book #1 of a pair, and it ends pointing the reader to the next book.
Three stories more or less intertwine. A literary scholar is watching over the Trojan war and reporting back to the gods on Olympus. He's long dead but has been revived/remade by the gods. His job is to monitor how the progress of the war matches the stories of Homer, his academic speciality.
Second thread is a Shakespeare quoting robot from one of Jupiter's moons who has a submarine and is sent on a strange journey. A second robot is a fan of Proust and the two form a sparring friendship. Third thread is a group of humans living under an existential threat in a far future Earth. Their life seems to be perfection and Elysium but it's about to fall apart.
Simmons has packed the story with literary references from Greek historians, Shakespeare, Proust, Nabokov, and some modern poets. It gets a bit overloaded at times where long literary conversations are used to steer the plot. However, his prose is good and the characters are well fleshed out for the most part, once we figure out who is human and who is something else. Also, Simmons should not try to write sex scenes.
There are time shifts that take some thought to work out as we move from ancient Troy to far future humans, to several aliens with varying levels of AI enhancement, to the gods on Olympus that mysteriously seem to have a lot of quantum science on their side.
The story moves along pretty well but it takes a long time before the three threads start to move toward each other. And the book ends with only the beginnings of some contact between the threads.
This book is amazing! Well-crafted, fast-paced, I couldn't put it down. I am obsessed with the epic poems and literature in general and loved the ease with which the author entwined sci-fi, the Iliad and Shakespeare all in one. On to the next one!
Simmons creates an intriguing world, but somehow this one didn't draw me in nearly as much as Hyperion. A world with time travel, Trojans, Achilles, Odysseus, Mars, Gods and other mysteries which are unraveled sounds amazing, leaving me unsure of what the missing piece was. Either way this did leave me wanting to read the next in the series.
Simmons creates an intriguing world, but somehow this one didn't draw me in nearly as much as Hyperion. A world with time travel, Trojans, Achilles, Odysseus, Mars, Gods and other mysteries which are unraveled sounds amazing, leaving me unsure of what the missing piece was. Either way this did leave me wanting to read the next in the series.
Didn't think I was going to like this at first, but it really grew on me. Now I guess I'm committed to the sequel, though...