This book, and its predecessor Illium, are the weirdest books I have ever read. They tell the story of a post apocalyptic world, Homer's Illiad and some giant robots from Jupiter. They are so nerdy, but truly so delightful.

I didn't really enjoy this second book in the series. I listened to it as well as read. I can't imagine having to read the entire thing. While the book had promise, I found myself (after 400 pages) simply thinking "Let's get to the end." This book is a sequel, and I'm not sure that you could follow it without having read the first one.

(abandoned halfway through)

The actual story is a solid 3 stars - vaguely interesting characters, a complicated world, etc. I actually rather want to find Ilium now and read it, because I feel that it might be orders of magnitude better.

As a standalone book, this is shit - things, characters and events from the first one are mentioned but not adequately explained (example: calibani are smaller and weaker versions of Caliban; first mention is pretty early in the book, but first, albeit partial, *description* of one of these things is after they've been talked about for 300 pages)

But what really kills it is the writing (or maybe just really, really shitty editing)

This is a physical book, so i haven't marked very many extremely cringe-worthy quotes, but here are a few glorious examples:

* "he pushed her away, but she had already danced out of range" (what does it even mean? I didn't write this one down so wording may be slightly changed)

* "about twenty kilometers long, roughly the size of their Lost Era city of Manhattan" (this is like using "the size of noah's ark" instead of "4 football fields" in modern conversation - these describe roughly the same area, but it's an utterly meaningless utterance within context)

* "escape velocity from the moon Phobos is a mere 10 cm/sec, but the Queen Mab quickly kicks herself up to 20km/sec acceleration in order to start the process of climbing up and out of Mars' gravity" (Phobos' escape velocity is closer to 12. Acceleration is in distance per second per second. Mars' escape velocity is about 5km/sec, but that number is the speed you have to start with on the planet's surface to make it out to space with no additional acceleration, so "20 to start" is, uh, what?)


I may come back to this again in the distant future, after reading the first book, but generally would highly recommend you to stay away.


Edit: Oh god, I've read some of the other spoilerific reviews. This thing is rapidly approaching my burn-before-reading list. The moral being, apparently, "stay away from Simmons' sequels"

Olympos (and by extension Ilium) is a testament to good worldbuilding. It is absolutely drenched in history, meaning, and depth. There is always more to discover, and Simmons keeps that tension going expertly. In all the complexity there is an unresolved plothole or two, but that's easily forgiven. The contrast between Ilium's historical depth, Ardis' total lack of a past, and how the two slowly come together is just amazing. I will say that the Iliad loses part of the foreground position it had in Ilium to make space for more scifi, but it's so expertly interwoven that it just adds to the book's depth. And unlike Ilium, Olympos actually has a proper ending!

Watch in awe while the last, currently, written science fantasy epos of one of the most fascinating authors of our time comes to an end.

In the second part of the series, the world is more and more escalating, fractions getting mad, gods being sad, Mars getting hot, poor protagonists stumbling around between mighty entities, and the big aha moment towards the end gives a satisfying conclusion.

In contrast to the Hyperion series, the a bit stronger focus on mythology and magic makes if more fantasy than science, although whenever the two clash, the old saying that advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic is true. There would be even a third way, the often underrepresented biopunk option, that could see much more use in hybrid works, because already simple seemingly fantasy magic vs technology, especially nano, makes incredible plot goals, characters´ motivations, suspense potential, possible, and biotechnological fueled Gaia fraction would be great extra to see.

I wish Simmons would have continued writing big science fantasy series, maybe even with a bit of horror, instead of starting to just keep writing standalone novels, often with close to no real fantastic elements as far as I see from the reviews and descriptions, just some magic and stuff. The real irony is that most of his newer novels seem to be even that bad that I won´t ever read them and that readers first confronted with whatever happened to one of the greatest authors will never touch his groundbreaking Hyperion and Ilium series, which is a true shame.

Nobody knows what might have happened here, I don´t know examples of authors who downed their rating in such a way, especially not in that order and timeline and never when they´ve once been so good. Bad first works are ok, everybody has to learn, but getting weaker and seemingly even below average?! Maybe the lonely writing in the cabin in the woods in the mountains concept has had some substantial change or something, I really can´t grasp it.

And that´s such a sad development, so please, go with the classic and forget the rest of his work, do as if it doesn´t exist.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

This is an excellent follow up the the superb Locus Award winning novel, Ilium. While it is a sequel, it is perhaps more accurate to say it is a continuation of the story which began with Ilium. The story of Ilium/Olympos is truly epic in scope and mind bending. I will most definitely be reading up online about parts of the narrative during the days ahead. I'm going to miss reading this novel, now that I've finished it. I'm not going to give any spoilers away about the book, I do feel that Simmons held it all together extremely well. Olympos isn't a book that could be read enjoyed without reading Ilium first, Olympos wouldn't work as effectively as it does, without reading Ilium first. Actually, I'd also say that reading a short story by Simmons, called, The Nineth Of Av, before reading Ilium, would be useful too but it isn't essential. All in all, Ilium and Olympos contain much to admire and appeal to my tastes of scifi, fantasy, mystery, adventure and even horror. I do hope that Simmons will write another book that links to the Ilium duology. He apparently once contemplated a third book, called, 'Odyssiad'. I for one would buy that book on day one of its publication. For those who have read Simmons's Hyperion Cantos novels and really enjoyed them (like I did), but have yet to read Ilium and Olympos, I recommend that you don't compare the two different stories as you work through the Ilium duology. They contain perhaps a few similar themes but they really are very different books. It was a pleasure to read Olympos, it receives my highest recommendation.

didn't answer anything.
the quite one didn't show up.
setebos just left.
islamophobia left a bad taste in my mind.

Impossibly, Olympos is even more ambitious than its prequel - Ilium. I loved the mind-boggling sci-fi and fantasy concepts. Unfortunately, everything felt contrived.

Several characters acted in very strange ways, and the motivations behind their actions were almost always opaque. I cannot think of worse ways to cover up plot holes than characters refusing to answer the protagonist's questions. Storytelling was lost in the quest to expose mind-bending quantum theory explanations and complex intertwining between Greek myth and Shakespearean dramas.

However, I admit, the book was paced well via tense hold-your-breath moments and adrenaline packed action sequences. The plot twists, even though they felt contrived, were exciting! This book must have done something extremely well to keep me hooked for 900 pages.
I am glad I read it, but I will hesitate to recommend it.

Wow, what a weird book. The sentient robots from the asteroid belt were the most identifiable characters in it. It was definitely interesting at times, but the Trojan war bits dragged on. There are about 3 different plotlines that are seemingly unrelated. It is finally all explained, and it mostly makes sense. There were parts I really enjoyed and parts I didn't care for and some parts that were just bizarre. It took me forever to get through this. So is that a recommendation? Well, if you want to read a post-singularity novel you might like this. Or if you want to read about the most far-out imaginable "post-human" modifications. Or if you really, really enjoy reading about the Trojan War.

Simmons is a very gifted writer and I had a lot of fun reading Ilium 1-2. I felt that certain story lines went nowhere, like Caliban. I didn't feel that everything was wrapped up nice and neat in the end. And I still have a problem with the way Simmons presents female characters...always heavy on the physical (intimately) descriptions, which he doesn't do for the men. Most of the women are whiny nag stereotypes or the sexy vixen stereotype.

The Ilium/Olympos duology is some of the most fantastic sci-fi that I have read for ages. The depth and breadth of the story is so utterly satisfying that it puts other books to shame.

Ilium is difficult to get into to start with as the three different main story strands don't really start to relate to each other until 3/4 of the way into the book which makes things a bit confusing and difficult to keep up with. The story comes into its own in Olympos, and unlike a lot of Simmons characters, you really start to feel empathy with a number of the characters in the novel.

What is most interesting is that the least human characters, the Moravecs, are definitely the most human in personality, which is probably a deliberate turn on Simmons part to emphasize how far human life on earth has changed.

The old-style eloi humans really are incredibly childlike and to see them take on evil in their paradise when things come crashing down is fascinating although I was never quite clear whether it was the Moravecs or the calibani that were the Morlocks to their Eloi.

The creeping horror of the Setebos gave me nightmares, Simmons is a master of horror within sci-fi, and the mixture of greek mythology and Shakespearean characters was fascinating. It should have been an ugly mess, but it wasn't at all.

I love these books and I would highly recommend them to anyone into sci fi with a grounding in Greek mythology, Shakespearean plays (particularly The Tempest). Wonderful mind expanding, gripping fiction!

Dan Simmons' Olympos consists mainly in two threads. In the one, most of our various characters (Harman and Daeman, the moravecs, Odysseus, Achilles, et al) undertake long journeys in time and space, bringing them at an unbearably slow pace towards the future Earth. On these journeys, they endure various ordeals of little consequence, and a great deal of nothing occurs and is described at great length and in extraordinary detail by Simmons. In the other thread, we are treated to pages and pages of expository monologues from Prospero, Moira, Harman and others as Simmons attempts to explain just what the fuck is going on and unload the enormous backstory omitted from the largely-incomprehensible n  Iliumn. This exposition is heavy-handed and clumsy. Explanations proffered for the events we have followed and wondered about for over a thousand pages vary from merely stupid to jaw-droppingly, cringe-inducingly idiotic. Simmons repeatedly "solves" mysteries he has been building since the first page of Ilium in a single tossed-off sentence or paragraph. His explanation of the voynix (complete with unnecessary and unconvincing connection to the Voynich Manuscript) in particular is not just unsatisfying but infuriating, while I actually had to put the book down and walk away after he tried to explain Setebos through World As Myth bullshit stolen from Robert Heinlein and mixed with New Agey quantum mysticism.

A word on mechanics. Simmons's prose is by and large effective, and deserves no special praise or blame. Where the story falls is in the construction of the plot, which in addition to its overall incoherence proceeds in fits and starts, with long stretches of inaction punctuated by world-changing events treated in brief. Both gods and machines regularly serve as dei ex machinae, with characters brought together on the thinnest of pretexts to haul one another out of intractable jams. The novel's conclusion is full of these convenient escapes, plot holes and simple omissions, and several major threads are left unresolved.

Simmons' fascination with juvenilia is a distraction and regularly breaks the flow of the narrative, ranging from fart jokes and locker-room obscenities in the mouths of Greek gods to pervasive, explicit descriptions of sex (including rape and thousand-year-old entities in 16-year-old bodies) and of nude bodies, done throughout in a register not just clinical but often creepy.

Simmons' literary approach to science fiction does deserve praise and is something I would like to see more of. He has a strong familiarity with Homer, Shakespeare and Proust, although I was annoyed by many egregious errors in his use of Greek. Unfortunately, Simmons' sometimes-delightful festival of allusion is hamstrung by his failure to convincingly integrate the use of literary connections by his characters and in his backstory into the plot. Both literary allusion and descriptions of sexuality carry the sense that the author feels he is getting away with something, delivered with a smirk and a self-congratulatory chuckle. While his audaciously-literate story occasionally soars, it never reaches the joyful madness it could have had in the hands of a writer like Roger Zelazny (of whom more below) or Umberto Eco, someone who understood and reveled in its absurdity. Simmons takes himself far too seriously.

I mention Roger Zelazny because Ilium and Olympos really demand comparison to his classic, Hugo-winning n  Lord of Lightn. There are so many similarities between the novels — the post-human, nanotech-infused gods recreating mythology, the elaborate literary allusions, the domed/forcefield-protected citadel on an inhospitable mountaintop, the oppressed, preindustrial populace reincarnating through "divine" machines, the war between gods and men, the final injection of Christianity into the conflict — that I cannot help but think Simmons is straight-up lifting from Zelazny.

So how do the two stories stack up? On my reading, Lord of Light wins on virtually every dimension. It is much, much shorter, at about 300 pages against close to 1800 for Ilium and Olympos together. It is tightly plotted. Although like Simmons' epic the story is convoluted in time, it ultimately makes more sense and is far better structured. It is funnier and spends more time enjoying its own audacity. Zelazny's use of mythology (Hindu and Buddhist, in this case) and literature is woven more effectively into the structure of the novel than Simmons' bizarre combination of Homer, Shakespeare and nonsense. Zelazny is happy to handwave most of the science behind his creation, avoiding Simmons' ad-nauseum repetition of the words "quantum" and "Calabi-Yau", well-defined scientific terms whose meanings I don't believe Simmons understands. Above all, Zelazny embraced the lunacy he created. Lord of Light is joyful, funny, occasionally insightful and always mad, with none of the cringing, self-conscious titillation of Olympos. It's simply a better novel and a more enjoyable read.