Although I don't include this duology in my favorites of the science fiction genre, I do have a deep appreciation for the scope and overall execution of these books. Although at times I felt Simmons could have been clearer with the narrative, other times I also felt the harder science elements lost me (especially in this volume), and the story itself perhaps got a little to big to tell coherently, I still nonetheless thought he did a tremendous job in finishing the overall tale. I loved the constant literary references, beyond Homer and Virgil, and can honestly say that I think the two moravecs may be my favorite friendship I've encountered in the genre.

Dan Simmons is incredibly ambitious. If you haven't read the first book now is the time to stop reading this and go get a copy. Trying to rewrite the Iliad is one thing but actually having it be a rewrite of the Iliad in a tragi-comedy style of Shakespeare is another entirely. I won't give away too much like how he ends the Trojan War considering at the end of the last one the Trojans and Greeks allied to war against the Gods. Does it work? Well sometimes it does. It's cool having Achilles be the hero instead of him conveniently out of the way during the conclusion of the fighting. The characters from New Earth actually evolve into something close to badass. The Moravecs, organic based robots from beyond Mars provide the comic relief and some deep review of Proust and Shakespeare. I didn't like so much the writing at times, it shifts from an archaic Iliad like style to a harsh new American style very quickly. Also he takes forever to explain certain mysteries and by the time he finally gets around to describing them it doesn't make much sense. Like the question of why the godlike post humans came to ancient Troy if they weren't even literate. All in all it was highly entertaining and I recommend it but not my favorite Dan Simmons.

A good sequel to Ilium. It had a hard act to follow and a more difficult task in tying up all the unanswered questions and running stories from the first book. It was a bit less satisfying in its experimentation with different narrative styles, characters and points of view - Ilium was more disciplined - and it felt like a weak start. But soon enough I was won over by the author’s imaginative creativity and wanted to know how everything would end.

There were great characters too. There was less of Thomas Hockenberry, PhD, which was a shame. But my other favourite characters, the moravecs, were hilarious, and there were more of them to enjoy. Helen of Troy, Achilles, Odysseus and Circe, the gods Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite and Hephaestus, the Ardis Hall characters, Ada, Daeman and Harman, were all nicely portrayed. Thinketh: even Caliban grew on me. I was not so sure about mysterious actors such as Prospero, Ariel and Moira: because they didn’t give much away, they became rather bland.

Because of the lethal voynix, calibani, Caliban and super-scary Setebos (the many-handed) and its stolen egg, there was much Stephen King style horror too. And cautionary warnings about genetic and geophysical experimentation.

In the end some of the many questions remained unanswered. For instance, the central conceit: why did the post-humans posing as gods recreate dead scholars to study the Trojan War in the first place? What were their general motivations? But even if was just an enormous shaggy dog story, what a story! And what great SF technology - brane holes, flechette rifles, quantum teleportation, the steam-punk spaceship the Queen Mab, faxing, regenerating worms, nano-cameras embedded in the skin. Thank you, Dan Simmons.

Wow - 1400ish pages (between this one and Ilium) and I’m finished

I read this book very bittily, because I couldn't get into it very well. I thought it was okay. It was absorbing enough once I forced myself to concentrate on it. The technology, to my mind, made things a bit too easy. And if some things had been cut out, it would've made it more readable and made it make more sense. For example: why, if your only motivation so far has been to get back to your pregnant wife, and you have important information to deliver, would you go into a radioactive wreck where you know you'll receive a fatal dose of radiation, just out of curiosity? You wouldn't. That threw me out of it.

(Also, inaccuracies don't endear it to me. Calypso and Circe were not the same person. Odysseus stayed with Circe for a year on Aeaea, and she willingly let him go. Odysseus stayed with Calypso for seven years on Ogygia, and she had to be forced to let him go. If nothing else, look at the two different personalities there!)

This was too long, but so worth the long hours.

The Ilium series is far-out sci-fi at its best in many ways. It's a wonderful mixture of ancient stories and characters (mostly taken from the Iliad) and some really out-there science fiction. My only warning, and it's a big one, is that Dan Simmons reveals himself to be something of an anti-Muslim bigot in the two Ilium novels. It's not a major feature of the story, and it's not something he harps on endlessly about. But it's there, it's ugly, and when it crops up it'll take you out of the story. I have no idea how to rate these books - there's no rating for "stupendous, except for the occasional racism." So, do with it what you will.

"Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens."

Hour 1 of the 37 hour-long audiobook:
Not impressed with the narrator. Another 36 hours, sigh. The Greeks are a silly lot. Glad to have made it past the first few chapters and to Hockenberry.

Hour 2... mostly bored. The gods are not much of an improvement over the Greeks.

Hour 5. Oh my goodness, another 32 hours of this... Greek gods in a SF setting really do feel silly. Especially when this inept. And Simmons‘ description of women is very dated. Getting used to the narrator though. Although narrating female voices or doing various characters at all is not his strength.

This is going well.

Hour 16 or so. I have lost the will to live. There are some interesting bits and bobs, but mostly I am just massively bored. Queen Mab is fun, that‘s about it. Sorry, DNF around 46%.

I would actually quite like to know where this is all headed, but there seems to be plenty of reviews out there indicating that this is not going anywhere. Fast, slow, with the help of nuclear explosions or otherwise.

Olympos is the sequel to Illium . And while I enjoyed the latter immensely, I really didn't care for this book. Endings are so hard to pull off especially in books this ambitious and I just wasn't feelin' it.

I enjoyed the first three parts of Olympos very much. So much so, that by the half way point I was ready to give it five stars and rank it along side 'The Fall of Hyperion' as Simmon's best work. Unfortunately, the book purposely builds up the narrative to such an intensity, that after 1500 pages of this, there simply needs to be a payoff for the reader. Whether this came in the form of a 'final battle' or an emotional, character lead scenario was up to the author. But there needed to be something that worked as a climax to release all this complex world building and character development. But there is none. The very moment I turned the page and saw Part 4, I thought:

"Ok, here we go, the final act. How the hell is Dan going to do this with less than a hundred pages?"

The answer is he doesn't. What constitutes the end is actually an epilogue. Stuff happens and a couple of months after these events we get a general view of where the characters are. Most of this doesn't even attempt to explain or develop the complicated SF he's built up over the course of the two books. Characters are scuttled away off the stage which reads like Simmons pointing at something behind you while he redesigns his set.

This was all extraordinarily disappointing because the two books up to this point are very good. The forward thinking, masterful control of narrative seen in the Hyperion books, is very much present here. The science impressed me immeasurably at times, fusing metaphysics with possible future psychics and successfully making it exciting and expansive. This was a major surprise when you consider what this book is about.

Like in his other books, the characterisation is also well handled. Admittedly, I liked some characters more than others and some of their lines and thoughts would try my patience. But they were never incomplete as characters. I have detailed images and sounds for all of them and by the end I liked a chosen few very much. For this reason perhaps more than any other, is why I felt such a wave of disappointment upon closing the book. There is no release, no closure for the lives and relationships I've formed during my time in Ilium. There is artificial separation and filling in of empty space. As if part of the narrative was lost, and it had to hastily form some semblance of what happened.

While Dan Simmons is still one of my favourite authors because of what I know he can do. This is the second book where I'm left wondering what his editor was thinking before publication. This huge, sprawling, behemoth of a narrative needed a release point and this should have been alerted to the author.

Like its predecessor, Ilium, this one is a wild mashup of capital-L Literature and crazy science fiction ideas that veer into mind-bending incomprehensibility (but the fun kind). (See my review of Ilium: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). With Ilium, I loved the wildness so much that I was willing to forgive its faults. I'm not so sure I can do that this time. My feelings about Olympos are a lot more mixed. Maybe it's because the thrill of the wildness wears off after dragging on for hundreds and hundreds of pages, or maybe all the craziness just didn't come together. Also, there are new faults.

First, the good: There are a lot of really cool ideas here, not to mention just sheer delightful craziness. It's a wild ride that gets even crazier than Ilium. All my favorites are back, like the amateur literature scholars who happen to be cyborgs from the moons of Jupiter (although they don't talk about literature as much and instead go on serious adventures, which was fun, but I miss their conversations). I even got into the old-style humans, who I didn't really care about before. Based on the reviews, I wasn't expecting many answers, but I was pleasantly surprised that you do get something of an explanation for what the hell is going on even if there are then new unresolved puzzles. I found this website helpful: http://ilium.pbworks.com/w/page/11035...

Whatever the faults (and there are many), I did find this interesting enough to keep reading nearly 900 dense pages.

Now the bad. This is even longer than Ilium and even more unnecessarily so, especially in the last third or so. At some point I thought, "Well, it seems to be wrapping up..." only to wonder why there were still over 200 pages remaining. There are just too many bizarre meanderings and unessential subplots. It's cool that Simmons had all these ideas, but he didn't have to use them all here. At first I was pleasantly surprised that Helen, Ada, and other female characters seemed to be doing more than they did before, but soon enough all the same problems with female characters were there (i.e., they're mostly passive, primarily described by their bodies, etc.).

And of course almost all the literary references are dead white guys, just like before (this time two female poets are mentioned). (MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

This time it's not just Eurocentric by omission (although at one point all non-Greeks on one of the Earths are whisked away by a blue light or something, which is a kind of omission, I guess). About halfway through readers are reminded that non-Western people do exist, because several thousand years earlier some crazy Asian Muslims established a global Caliphate dedicated to killing all Jews. No, I'm not making this up (unfortunately). I can't decide if this is blatant Islamophobia or just an inscrutable choice to add a bizarre and unnecessary historical backstory. Could something like this happen in the future? I suppose. But I have little idea what it adds to the story other than a convenient scapegoat for a few of the explanations. I have no problem acknowledging that some non-Western people are bad. But the problem is that these bad ones are really the only non-Western people who have anything to do with the plot (as far as I can tell) and they are largely historical background. They, along with some real Others from another universe (I think?), are the real threat. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it all felt like a kind of deep xenophobia that didn't sit well with me.

At least this is what I can make of all this. The wildness is fun, but it goes off the rails. While I can't claim I understood everything in Ilium, I felt like I understood less in Olympos and generally had less fun. It was still a wild ride that people who liked Ilium might enjoy, but it failed to live up to its potential for me. Pity. I really wanted to love this book. SF needs more writers with this kind of ambition, but maybe with the ability to execute it more skillfully.

See my review of this and other science fiction with ancient themes: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...

The mad man has done it again!! Dan Simmons continues his riveting triumph over the speculative fiction genre. He is a (if not the) master world-builder, thematic converger, and distiller of flavors previously unbeknownst to many fans of the genres he writes in.

In the Ilium/Olympos duology, that flavor is more fantastical than the Hyperion Cantos which leans more into traditional space opera. However, I believe this is because of the old adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic thus this duology’s fantasy feel. The unique flavor I mention is an alchemical merging of mythology, hard sci-fi, and magical realism that tastefully persuades the reader to believe in a way that Simmons’ other work doesn’t need to. Yet, as ridiculous as this intertextual feat seems, it absolutely lands in this final act.

Simmons has the audacity to take Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Proust, and the contemporary pop-culture mythos of Hockenberry’s world and smash them together with an adhesive of metaphysics and quantum mechanics. Lunacy…and yet it fucking works! If you, like me, previously thought that the Hyperion formula of Chaucer + Keats + AI theory was out-there, this takes the cake.

The thing that impresses me the most about Dan Simmons is how time and time again he proves to be the chief contemporary presence at finding the art within science. Whether it’s using the poetry of Jon Keats to frame an AI consciousness, taking computational network theorem to create a believable teleportation culture, or using quantum wave theory to explain the power of the artists’ mind, Simmons extrapolates the beauty from hard science and congeals it with his obsession for the abstract arts. I truly love him for that.

This is pretty much the end of the road for Simmons sci-fi for me, but reading the 3 hugo-nominated duologies has only motivated me more to pick up his other work. If he can do this with spec fic I can only imagine what he can do with horror, historical fic, and adventure drama.