I've never written a review before, but I can't stop thinking about how weird and disappointing this book was and I need to get my thoughts down. These thoughts will probably be pretty disjointed, and they'll definitely be chock full of spoilers.

I really enjoyed my time with Ilium, and was excited to see where the story would go and how the many pieces would start to fit together in the finale. Almost immediately, however, it seemed like the scope of Olympus was out of control.

Ilium has 4 different POVs; Mahnmut the moravec on his journey to Mars, the Old Style Humans Ada and Daeman on future Earth, and the scholic Thomas Hockenberry during the Trojan War. (There is also one chapter randomly from Hannah's POV, but otherwise the narrative sticks to these 4 characters.) Each story is told in 3rd person omniscient voice, except for Hockenberry's, which is 1st person.

Olympus opens with a slew of chapters from the POV of side characters, including Menelaus, Helen and Hera. When we eventually cut to the familiar Hockenberry, his narrative is now in 3rd person. This abrupt shift in narrative scope between volumes was jarring enough that Olympus initially felt to me as though it had been written by a different author working off of Simmon's notes.

All these new narrative focuses are abandoned after Part 1, however, and the POV shifts back to the crew from the first novel, with the addition of Achillies and Harman. (If it isn't clear yet, inconsistencies in POVs are a huge pet peeve of mine) We continue with these characters until the end of the novel, although toward the end of Part 3 Hockenberry's narrative abruptly shifts back to 1st person and stays that way.

All this to say, the narrative structure is a bit of a mess. Not in any way that makes the story hard to follow, but in a way that makes the storytelling feel very clumsy at times.

Now I'm going to complain about the actual plot. My biggest gripe by far is with Odysseus's arc(?) There are two Odysseuses in the novel; the one from the battle of Troy who is kidnapped by the moravecs and brought to future Earth, and an older Odysseus that the Old Style Humans discovered during the first book.

This older Odysseus has been on Earth for some time. He has some history with Savi and says he came to the future Earth after escaping from imprisonment on Circe's isle. We never learn much about what he and Savi have been up to on Earth, but I'm gonna go on a tangent about two of the things we do know:

First, the Turin Cloths. Savi and Odysseus distributed these among all the Old Style Humans, allowing them to view the battle of Ilium in real time. They do this to acclimate the Old Style Humans to both warfare and Greek culture, because they suspect that war and Greeks will both be coming to Earth soon. They're right, but it's never really made clear why they know this.

There's a moment where Ada puts on a Turin cloth and decides to access the nanobot function that allows her to interface with their flying machine. For some reason this physically transports her to Ilium. She freaks out and removes to cloth, returning to her version of Earth. This ability is never used or even addressed again, and nothing of note happens during Ada's extremely brief trip to Ilium. I still have no idea why this scene happens.

Second, the submarine. Early in the story Harman is whisked away to the other side of the world. I'm going to talk more about this later, but eventually he is told that in order to return home, he must walk along the Atlantic Breach from Europe to North America, across the sea floor. He asks Prospero why he can't just get teleported home and is never given a straight answer.

With about 150 pages left in the book, Harman stumbles on a submarine crashed on the sea floor. He becomes really curious and decides to explore it, ignoring a warning that it's filled with lethal radiation. Inside the submarine he discovers a ton of warheads filled with stable black holes, and also learns that their containment fields are deteriorating and they will destroy the earth in a matter of months.

This world ending threat comes out of nowhere and is resolved like 2 chapters later when the moravecs haul all the warheads into space and jettison them safely. It serves as nothing more than an extremely contrived way to get Harman and the moravecs in the same place. Later, when the older Odysseus tells Sycorax that the moravecs are hauling the black holes into orbit, she comments that they shouldn't have been a threat, as she'd sealed them in a stasis bubble millenia earlier. He replies that he and Savi disabled the bubble.

...Why? I guess we're meant to infer that Prospero made Harman walk down the breach so he'd find the submarine, and Odysseus disabled the stasis bubble so the moravecs would detect the submarine, all to make sure the moravecs and Harman meet up? How does Odysseus know that he should do this? It's such a contrived and stupid way to get the two groups together that I was in disbelief for that whole section.

Ok, anyways. Old Odysseus is injured by a voynix early in the book and removed from the story until the 11th hour. Meanwhile the moravecs kidnap Younger Odysseus from Ilium, promising him news from his wife to lure him aboard their spaceship. They then fly off to Future Earth on their mission to figure out what's going on.

As they approach future Earth, they're contacted by Sycorax, aka Circe, who asks them to bring Odysseus to her on her orbital isle. "AHA!" You may say. "So Oysseus is brought to Circe, is imprisoned there for a long time, then escapes backwards in time and down to Earth to go on his adventures with Savi, leading up to where he is now: injured and in a healing tank." Well that's what I thought, anyways.

The truth is dumber and doesn't make sense. Old Odysseus recovers from his wounds and reunites with Ada just long enough to demand her flying machine for "personal reasons." He flies up to Circe's isle right as the moravecs drop off young Odysseus. Then he busts in on his younger self and Circe having sex and announces that he loves her and wants to run away with her into the multiverse.

I cannot stress enough that there is NO build up to this. He explains that he's visited countless dimensions since he left Circe's isle, checked up on his wife and son, boned down on a bunch of alternate universe versions of Circe, and is now ready to commit to Dr Who Sex Adventures with her forever. How did he visit these other dimensions? How did he meet up with his wife, who has been reduced to tachyon particles and stored in a data beam? Who knows.

He then draws a gun and aims it at his younger self, which makes Circe freak out and say he's going to create a horrible paradox and descend the universe into Kaos. He kills young Odysseus anyway and there are no negative consequences and they fly off together and live happily ever after. Ok.

Speaking of sex. Good lord the sex. This book has a serious case of Men Writing Women. Female characters can't go more than a few pages without Simmons mentioning their breasts in some way. Most scenes involving women read like a horny old man's lecherous musings. This was an issue in the first book as well, and came to a head when Hockenberry took the form of Paris to rape Helen of Troy. Helen is largely fine with this when his deception is revealed, and they become lovers????? Yuck.

Simmons doubles down on this garbage in Olympos. When Harman is whisked off on his cross-continent adventure with Prospero, they stop at a tomb built atop Mt Everest. Inside is a young woman who looks just like Savi and is sleeping naked in a glass coffin. Prospero tells Harman that he must wake this woman, Moira, if he wants answers to all his questions, and the only way to wake her is to ejaculate inside her. WHAT.

WHY would you write this. Simmons could have written ANY method to wake this woman up; why was the one he settled on mandatory rape? Harman has a moral dilemma about this, not because of the rape but because he has a wife at home and he doesn't want to be unfaithful. (The narrative helpfully explains that rape is an alien concept to Old Style Humans because they can have sex whenever they want

This is the last volume of dazzling SF epic duology by Dan Simmons. The story is too long to a nonnative speaker like me, but it's worth reading. Many interesting ideas such as parallel universe, terraforming,and Quantum teleportation are packed into one book. Devoted SF fan is surely thrilled by this book. Simmons denounces violence and war in this book. That's why this epic is persuasive and moving.

2.5/5. Simmons has lost the plot. He has done this in two ways:

1) He has taken a huge sh*t on the actual plot of the novel, which as we all know began in Ilium. Ilium constructed a unique and highly imaginative storyline filled with the craziest of characters, including Greek gods, Achilles, a modern day human (and our main character for the most part), and weird, little robots, all blended into a tale that combines mythology, history, and time travel. I'll be honest and say that I have a hard time describing the plot of the two books to people who dare to ask. Simmons continues this exciting adventure in Olympos and he handles it really well for the most part. That is, the last 100 pages become utter rubbish.

So many questions are answered very poorly or, in some cases, not answered at all. Such questions include:
"What happened to Setebos?"
"How come Simmons seemed as if he was going somewhere with Daeman only to abandon his character development halfway?"
"What was going on with that whole Ariel, Prospero, and Caliban thing?"
"Why did you end the Odysseus storyline on a paradox, which you also never explained?"
"Why the unecessary porn scenes?"
"Did you really devote, like, two pages to the destruction of the Gods? Madness."

It seems as if Simmons had confused even himself by the end of the novel. It reminds me of a high schooler staying awake all night, pulling stuff from his ass just to finish an assignment due tomorrow. I expected much more.

2) Simmons is losing the plot in real-life. He has become a paranoid mess. This made worse when coupled with his blatant racism and Islamophobia, as seen in Olympos itself.

Out of nowhere we readers are told that the Global Caliphate had made the Rubicon virus to kill all Jews, but had instead failed spectacularly, killing everyone except Jews. I mean 9/11 was bad but really? Read some his other works on his websites and you'll see that one or two short stories are devoted entirely to what he feels is the biggest threat in the world: Islam. The guy even wrote a story where a time traveller comes back in time from a future infested with Muslims to warn a present-day human about what Muslims are doing to the entire world. You'll find this sort of trash reflected in the scene in Ilium where loudspeakers announce to the voynix hunting Savi, Harman and co. in the city of Jerusalem to "Ibtihad Yahud! Kill the Jews!"

Minus "Olympos" and his Islamophobic tendencies, Simmons is a good author and I plan on reading more of his works. It's a shame how the Ilium series turned out.

(Contains spoilers towards the end)

This is my least favorite book.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. "Manos: The Hands of Fate" is perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's not my least favorite. It takes more than simple technical ineptness to rise (or sink) to the rank of my least favorite. A least favorite work needs to commit some special crime. Olympos' crime is that it took the plot threads of Ilium, one of the top two or three most creative and ambitious science fiction books I've yet encountered, and bungled them to an astonishing, almost insulting degree.

Ilium, as I've just said, is an incredible book. It's perhaps Simmons' most imaginative work so far, and that's saying something. In what other single book can you find posthumans posing as Greek gods on Mars, intelligent machines discussing literature on the moons of Jupiter, a legendary Greek hero hunting prehistoric mammals on the pampas of South America, and a society of pampered partiers to whom getting devoured by an Allosaurus causes scarcely more of an inconvenience than a bad hangover? And that's just the tip of that book's iceberg of wonderful and unlikely inventions. All of these unusual and fascinating things are packaged into three more or less distinct storylines, each of them exciting, purposeful, and compelling. I found the Caliban sequence towards the end to be a somewhat abrupt and strange change of pace, but I could live with it. When I put the book down, I could not wait to dive into the sequel.

It was bad.

Hockenberry's tale in Ilium was exhilarating. Hockenberry, a seemingly rather weak character, through deception, desperation, and pure ballsiness managed the manipulate the Greeks and Trojans into turning their war against the cruel posthuman Gods. He's not given anything nearly as interesting or compelling to do here. In fact, besides flying halfway to Earth with the Moravecs and then deciding to teleport back, I don't remember him doing much of anything notable. As I found his story in Ilium to be especially compelling, this was a real let down. Simmons instead chose to spend much of his time on the Greek side of things with Achilles and his campaign against the gods. Which is unfortunate, because Achilles really does not have the depth to carry such storyline weight. Olympos should have stuck with the continuing story arcs from Ilium rather than focusing so much time and energy on this.

But, it turns out, that's what Olympos does. It sidetracks. It goes on tangents, abandoning the story arcs that made Ilium so compelling. Take Harman's storyline, for example. For the most part, it is rather interesting, and actually does contribute to the story and our knowledge of the mythos of this world. However, near the end of his journey his story arc veers wildly off course to focus on a wrecked submarine containing black hole bombs. Where did that come from? How did that contribute in any way to the plot? What mysteries did that solve? With so many interesting possibilities in this wonderful setting, why did Dan Simmons choose this non-sequiter as the climactic moment for one of his main characters? It makes me want to tear my hair out!

That is another thing Olympos does: introduce things at the last minute. We finally meet Syxorax/Circe well towards the end of the book, after hearing so much about her. Her scenes do nothing to explain things, and in fact only serve to make it less clear exactly how the Odysseus of the Trojan war became the Odysseus that Harman and company encounter on Earth. Introducing an important character like that with only a small fraction of pages left makes things feel very cramped towards the end. In fact, the entire last section of the book felt very rushed and crampled; I was reading the half-hearted and generic epilogue almost before I even realized it.

I'm just getting started with the laundry list of things that frustrate me to no end about Olympos, but by now I'm getting tired of typing and you may well be tired of reading, so I'll keep the rest brief. Major conflicts peter out to nothing. Setebos, who seems to be the ultimate evil of this story, flees and vanishes without a fight. In the final showdown between Caliban and Daemen, nothing more climactic happens than Caliban uttering a few more of his inscrutable verses. Even Zeus' demise felt meaningless and disappointing. Childishly gross as well, honestly. And finally, most of the major mysteries put forth by Ilium never get solved. I still don't know how or why the Posts of Earth became the Gods of Olympos. I still don't know how Odysseus ended up on Earth. An explanation is put forth as to where the alternate ancient Greek Earth came from, but I found it extremely weak and unsatisfying. An afterthought. Dan Simmons throwing up his hands and admitting that he doesn't know.

So yeah, this is a rather long review. But, my frustration and contempt for this book has been stewing in me for years, and I needed the catharsis of getting it all out in a place where others could perhaps commiserate with me. Thanks for reading, and may all sequels you read be better than this one.

tOlympos is a satisfying sequel to Ilium. What can I say about this book? I have no doubt that if you read Ilium, then you read this book in a desperate desire to know what happened. I loved it. It opened as many questions and storylines as the ones that were resolved. The evolution of the characters remains a standard that all authors should be held to. Are you getting that I loved it? Its not the BEST sequel I've ever read. I was completely floored by Ilium, but I enjoyed Olympos too. Some people complained that it seemed to ramble at times, but admittedly, I don't mind a ramble, so it never seemed to bother me as much as it bothered others.

Well I was intrigues by the story in this 2nd volume of the duology but was really let down by the ending. Seems the last few chapters were rushed and just chopped together. Overall the series is interesting. Recommended

The first book in this two volume series, Ilium, was great. One of my favorite science fiction novels ever. It’s the tale of gods and heroes recreating the story of the Iliad (the whole Trojan War, actually) on Mars, while ancient robots fly from their homes on Jupiter’s moons to investigate a growing danger to the solar system and an infantilized group of humans, pampered and menaced by robot servants, takes its first step toward regaining humanity. It’s an epic space opera of the best kind.

Much of the fun of a first novel in a science fiction series is in the world building. Sequels generally aren’t quite as good because they lack that element. Olympos is good, and has a lot of the things I loved about Ilium, it may not be quite as good as the first book, but it’s still very, very good and provides a satisfying conclusion to the series.

I should mention that there’s a chapter in this novel where one of the good guys has to rape an unconscious woman in order to wake her, like Sleeping Beauty, from a long technology induced hibernation. This scene is so stupid, so awful, and in such poor taste that it throws a pall over the entire novel. What was Dan Simmons thinking when he wrote that fantastically misguided chapter? It’s a shame, because the rest of Olympos is very good.

What a complete disappointment!! Ilium was amazing, beautiful, epic story-telling, but Olympos was just a complete boring mess. I kept thinking it would get back on track, but it didn't. NOTHING was explained. Don't read this if you are looking for answers from the questions in Ilium, you won't get them. There are even two characters in the story that actually do know what's going on and can answer questions, but they refuse to and just wink at each other knowingly. Kind of insulting to your reader if you ask me.

The only redeeming thing about Olympos was the moravecs, who are the only characters through these two books with a clear story line to them.

The annoying thing about Dan Simmons is that he changes the style of his writing from book to book. Which is fine in itself, but not in the middle of a series when you've already spend 800+ pages getting used to a particular narrative style, format and flow to the story, and then to change it so dramatically is jarring and took me completely out of the story. He did this with the Hyperion books too, but not to this dramatic extent.

SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Then there are the overlong battle scenes. Then there are the overlong debates with the Greek generals. I know he was paying homage to Homer, but good lord! And then a new character introduced 100 pages from the end, but never explained and just sails off into space. And there was the ridiculous-looking Big Bad that just disappears (???) And the promised ultimate Big Bad looming in the aether that never shows up (???) And the chapter with of two teenagers having sex in a car in 1950-whatever (???)

As many before me have said, this book was clearly inferior to Ilium (and Hyperion ... and most anything he has ever written).

Also the very political anti-Islam plot left me dumbstruck. What the fuck has this to do with the story ?

In fact I was so disappointed by this book that it'is simply the last one from this author that I have read. He was my favorite author before that.

Not convinced ? Go check his glorious political opinions on his forum... very disappointed indeed.

Fanciful science fiction

I have read this story multiple times, print and ebook as well as the first book Ilium. I enjoyed the first novel a bit more, as the tale gets tedious in places. The sex scenes and crude humor were less interesting but the overall story deserves a thumbs up

If you ever plan to read the Ilium duo-logy then i recommend doing it back-to-back. I picked up Olympos 18 months after Ilium and experienced a great deal of confusion. My usual go-to Wikipedia let me down so i resorted to finding spoiler reviews, which gave me snippets of names, events and what went down. I would still need to re-read Ilium to fully appreciate Olympos.

It continues in the same vein as Ilium with the three story lines still separate but slowly making their way to the inevitable convergence; the Moravecs and Hockenberry are investigating the quantum disturbances emanating from old Earth, the Trojans and Greeks are fighting the Gods of Mount Olympos and Harman, Ada and the rest of the Old-Style Humans are fighting the Voynix who've turn against them.

Much like his other science fiction classic, Hyperion, Olympos is thoroughly entertaining and packed with philosophy, psychics, history and likable characters. My only gripe is the length as at least 100 pages could have been cut.

This sequel to Ilium follows a pattern I've noticed with Dan Simmons, now that I've read his entire Hyperion Cantos - his first books in a series are really, really good, while the follow-ups are still good, but seem to lose a bit of the brilliance of the original and wind up going in strange places.

Olympos, the second book of this fat duology, continues the saga of a classics professor from 21st century Earth resurrected 3000 years later to witness a recreation of the Trojan War on a terraformed Mars. Although it's not really accurate to call this Hockenberry's saga; he is just the unifying character flitting between the subplots and separate groups of characters, but being a middle-aged temporally displaced academic with a few technological artifacts and his modest wits, he's hardly as epic a figure as vainglorious, undefeatable Achilles, tricky, crafty Odysseus, beautiful and scheming Helen, or the entire Greek pantheon, the two "gods" who created the gods, and the ever-escalating series of gods above them that these various figures meet in what turns out to be a multipart, often disconnected quest not only to unravel the mystery of this futuristic Trojan War, but save the world.

Hockenberry is the only first-person narrator, and he remains a rather milquetoast protagonist, though it's hardly his fault that he got yanked from a Midwestern university 3000 years into the future where suddenly the gods themselves want him dead.

The more interesting chapters are those describing the continuing adventures of the Greek and Trojan heroes, now that recreated plot of the Iliad has gone completely off the rails and Achilles and Hector have teamed up to go to war with the gods. The gods are really masters of magic-like nanotechnology, though their true nature and where they came from is finally revealed in this book. As Olympos opens, the sentient robots from the moons of Jupiter who'd come to investigate a big mess of quantum shenanigans taking place in the inner systems, where Mars was thought to be uninhabited and humans on Earth thought to be long extinct, are helping defend Troy from siege by the gods. Meanwhile, the remaining humans on Earth, whose miraculous ancient technology has fallen, forcing an Eloi-like civilization to learn how to actually survive the hard way, even as long-dormant mechanical beings have awoken and begun seeking to exterminate them, are also forced to contend with Caliban, the cannibalistic genetically engineered monstrosity who was one of the chief villains in the previous volume.

There are a lot of characters and subplots here, and Simmons as usual loads this science-fantasy space opera with references from Proust, Homer, Shakespeare, Blake, and numerous others. He layers subplot over subplot, multiple layers of villainous schemes, each villain being the pawn of a greater one, and then starts shoving all sorts of reality-bending weirdness into the story, involving actual divine beings, quantum reality, the last remnants of an apocalyptic war, all still while having Shakespearean and Homeric figures running around doing battle.

Simmons definitely captures the barbaric nobility of the Greeks (and sheer assholishness of the Greek gods). And while at times I really had no idea where the story was going, it was never boring. In the end, I think it got a bit bloated and meandering and it seemed that Simmons was willing to throw any weird idea that came to him into the mix, which is why this was a huge doorstopper of a novel following a previous huge doorstopper of a novel.

An epic SF saga, which I recommend, but in my opinion slightly inferior to the first book.