Ilium

Dan Simmon's imagination and his ability to craft stories are impressive. In "Ilium" he tells a very interesting sci-fi story. While never being specific about the timeframe, the story seems to start in an approximation to what I find in Warhammer 40K fiction. A period so far in the future that the past is a nearly unknown legend. What makes this unique is the juxtaposition of that far-flung future with the Trjoan War. I know, right?

Welcome to Ilium. Post-humanity has evolved into something very far removed from human. They have recreated themselves as the Ancient Greek Gods and have recreated the Trojan War. This story is then told through the eyes of several individuals. There is Dr. Hockenberry, who is a classical scholar from the 20th Century, resurrected by the gods to keep a record of the events of the Trojan War and to compare it to the Illiad. He is subverted by one of the gods to assassinate another god and this sets into motion a chain of events that will have severe consequences.

There is also a group of "old-style" humans in Daemon (I did not like this guy at all), Harman (the last man on Earth that can actually read), Ada, and some others who must find an ancient myth in the Wandering Jew to figure out just what happened to the Earth and to humanity. What they fid will shock them and change their view of everything.

Finally, there are the robot moravecs Manmhut and Orphu. These two were very cool characters and as they try to unravel what is going on with the posthumans and their plans for Mars, their interesting banter about Shakespeare and Proust was rather interesting.

I know that sounds confusing, but I didn't want to spoil this crazy story. It was a very entertaining and novel concept. Dan Simmon's writing style is always exciting, but it is obvious that his depth of interest is wide and varied.

An interesting take on the Trojan War and I thought the idea of a historian who is able to go to see great battles to compare them to the written histories to be a wonderful concept. Where does one sign up for this?

Loved it. Pretty sure I'm a die-hard Simmons fan by now. The two characters, Mahnmut & Orphu, are gonna float around in my head for some months to come. Ilium is as mind-blowing & epic as his other book, Hyperion. Far-flung futures, mentally exhausting things to wrap your mind around, sentient things, space travel--all of it. The imagination is staggering. Many other writers can do this but the characters in Ilium (and his other works) never feel flat, or one-dimensional, or boring. Simmons certainly does lean toward writing 'for men,' I say this because there are just so many dude-things in this book, not to mention the whole story of the Iliad. It reminded me of Ada Palmer's series b/c of the Iliad theme. Loved how the pace continued to accelerate, I even re-read some pages in the end b/c the battle scenes were just too juicy & sweet. My only slight complaint might be w/Hockenberry b/c as the book moved on, he would make more & more references to 20th & 21st century things, and this was kinda taking me outta the epic space opera (like, bringing up "OJ"...), but the book's so far out there that there kinda needs to be some anchor to the (our) real world. But I loved the mystery, loved not knowing what the heck was going on, loved being confused & perplexed about time travel, wormholes, quantum teleporting, and loved loved loved the reenactment of the Greeks' & the Trojans' stories! And to top it off, you get Shakespeare, and then to level that up, you get Proust (whom I knew nothing of, but am now very much curious of).

Outstanding stuff:

- descriptions of the weapons, armor, forcefields, & mind-blowing, futuristic tech
- Harman's curiosity
- Orphu of Io__need I say more?
- the conversations laced with Shakespeare & Proust
- Simmons leaving to the imagination what the moravecs look like
- Zeus, & Achilles, et. al.
- lush scenes, jaw-dropping settings
- Caliban...felt cheesy at first, but ended in sheer terror...still got the heebie jeebies

If you liked Hyperion, you'll probably like this too. If you're a first-timer w/Simmons, this is as fine a start as any. I don't wanna compare Simmons to other SF writers, it really depends on what you've read. I'm not a guy who gives five stars out willy-nilly. I stick w/award-winning authors and don't really know much about the lesser known authors & titles. Simmons ranks up there w/Herbert & Le Guin, and his epic storytelling reminds me of Card, and the plots hearken back to Asimov & Clarke.

Despite the “didn’t resolve anything” ending I’m going to give this 5 ⭐️‘s … really more of a 4.5. It was quite imaginative. It was not at all what I expected. Based on the first 2 lines of the GR intro (i usually don’t read much more) I was expecting a pure fantasy story.

What I got instead was SciFi - In far future Earth… with fascinating tech. Also, in Dan Simmons’ signature style… it had several horror elements- which I didn’t expect. There was really no fantasy at all. It reminded me a lot of his Hyperion stories (I’ve only read 2 of the 4 of those as I write this). Full RTC.

HECK. That was intense.

Σίγουρα αυτό που μπορώ να πω για το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο είναι ότι αποτελεί μια κατηγορία μόνο του. Εγώ τουλάχιστον δεν έχω διαβάσει κάτι παρόμοιο ποτέ ξανά. Εκτός του ότι έχει καταφέρει να δημιουργήσει έναν κόσμο καινούριο (δυστοπία) μας μεταφέρει με εξαιρετική ευκολία από την πολιορκία της Τροίας και τις μάχες των πολεμιστών, στον νέο κόσμο του και στον Όλυμπο (πολύ ωραίες περιγραφές των Θεών) .
Στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος του βιβλίου διάβαζα με ευχαρίστηση τα όσα διαδραματίζονταν στο Ίλιον, μάλιστα γέλασα κιόλας πολλές φορές με τον τρόπο που διηγιόταν ο Χάκενμπερι, όμως από κάποιο σημείο και μετά ξέφυγε λίγο η κατάσταση και δεν το ευχαριστιόμουν τόσο. Επίσης, στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος της με κούρασε η ιστορία του Μόραβεκ και του Όρφου, χωρίς αυτό να σημαίνει ότι δεν είχε σημεία που να μου τραβήξουν το ενδιαφέρον.
Τέλος πάντων, αξίζει συγχαρητήρια αλλά δε νομίζω ότι θα διαβάσω τον "Όλυμπο", αν και έχω λίγη περιέργεια για το τι θα γίνει με τη μάχη των ανθρώπων και των Θεών.

4.5 stars - I don't even know how to begin describing this book. Shakespeare, Mars, Trojan War, ancient historians brought back to life, post-humans, wormholes. Simmons is an absolute genius at world building and man, he has his details down pat!
If you love Greek mythology like I do then you really need to read this. Sci-fi, mythology, action, adventure, dystopian....yes!

So, the people that recommended this to me never told me it was science fiction. They also never told me it was 752 pages OR THAT IT WAS SCIENCE FICTION.

It was an excellent read. The characters are great. I had a great time reading it. All things considered, it was a lot of words. Not as wordy as other books I have read, but it could have used a little editing IMO.

Who would have thought the best part of the Iliad would have been the robots...

I love the idea of a throwback, an author who takes cues from classics and puts a new spin on them. Mieville took rollicking pulp and updated it, Susanna Clarke made fairy tales and the Gothic novel sing for a modern audience--but if you're going to adopt a bygone style, take only the best, and leave the dross.

By all means, copy Howard's verve and brooding, but skip the sexist titillation. Copy Lovecraft's cosmic horror, but skip the racist epithets. Dan Simmon's Ilium feels like 50's sci fi for all the wrong reasons--less a throwback than a relic.

Each of his intertwining stories features a slight variation on the standard science hero, that idealization of the author that we all roll our eyes at: the adventurer who is a bit dorky, out of place, more at home in the safety of a library, but who is now stuck on Mars, or floating in space, or trapped in a dystopian conspiracy (respectively), and must get by with only his smarts and good character.

Like most such stories, the plotting is convenient--instead of being motivated by their own desires, the story is imposed upon the characters. They are vessels for the reader to inhabit instead of thinking, feeling beings. The main plots roughly parallel classic sci fi texts: like n  Riverworldn, we have powerful, advanced beings recreating humans to toy with them, taking on the role of the gods. The next combines elements of Brave New World, and n  Dancers at the End of Timen: we follow a man on a dying Earth as he tries to uncover who's really behind it all.

This latter story also has a more interesting antecedent in Nabokov's n  Adan--as several characters, images, and relationships are drawn from that work, yet it is not an expansion upon Nabokov's sci fi foray, but a regression of his themes back into titillating pulp. The main character goes on and on about how hot his cousin is, and how he wants to sleep with her--however, since he is rebuffed and mocked at every turn, we have to assume that this is meant to be a satire. Yet, we’re still getting those descriptions, that same primary point of view, so I’m not sure Simmons is doing quite enough to differentiate the satire from the object of ridicule. Likewise, it’s so overstated and repetitious that it becomes tiring.

The literary turn is curious, seeming to promise that more thought has gone into this work than the average genre adventure. One character lives in a Nabokov story, the next has constant discourses on the meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets and the philosophy of Proust, and the last is full of literary interpretations of Homer. Simmons is aiming high, deliberately drawing comparison with the literary greats, trying to borrow depth from them--but it's not enough to simply invoke the names, to place their thoughts into the mouths of this or that character, if he fails to integrate these ideas fully into the structure and prose.

Simmons' languages is disappointing--overly explanatory, nitpicking in that familiar sci fi way, where everything is reductive. The inner lives of the characters, their motivations, the finer points of the plot, all are stated outright, then rehashed and restated. The reader is told what to think, how to react, and what it all means--it all becomes rather overbearing. Much of the bulk of it (and it is bulky) comes from the fact that the author is never willing to leave well enough alone. At one point he mentions Hector’s son’s nickname and what it means twice in as many pages--at which point I wondered if anyone had actually bothered to edit this thing in the first place.

A grand and strange idea needs grand and strange prose to propel it. Narrowing down and simplifying it for the crowd just isn't going to do it justice. If you’ve decided to write a complex book, with various story threads drawing on both classic sci fi and great literature, at a certain point you need to have faith that it will come together, in the end. Otherwise, the anxious urge to control every aspect and get it just right is going to strangle the life out of it, until there is no room left for mystery or strangeness.

In bad fantasy, it often feels like the author has set themselves the masochistic limitation of constructing a book solely using words and phrases cut from an antiques catalogue--which would explain why, by the end, the swords, thrones, and banners have more developed personalities than the romantic leads. Likewise, in bad sci fi, it feels like authors are forced to do the same thing with an issue of Popular Mechanics--filling out the text with little gadgets and a blurb on the latest half-baked FTL propulsion theory.

We can go back as far as Wells and Verne and see the split between social sci fi and gadget sci fi: Wells realized that it was enough to simply have the time machine or airplane as story devices, things that might change society. He did go on his preachy tangents, but they were always about the effects of technology, not particulars dredged from an engine repair manual.

Verne, on the other hand, liked to put in the numbers, to speculate and theorize about the particulars--yet here we are, still waiting on the kind of battery banks he describes as powering the Nautilus. Going into intense detail simply isn't useful in a work of fiction.

A communicator or phaser or transporter is just as inspiring and fascinating on Star Trek without bothering with vague pseudoscience for how the thing is supposed to work. In the end, focus on the story itself, on the characters and the world, and leave out the chaff. The Nautilus is no more (or less!) interesting for a few paragraphs about its engine room, so as in all editing, if nothing would be lost by the omission, best to cut it.

It’s odd to still be getting this in the post-speculative age--Dick, Ellison, and Gibson have already paved the way for the odd, literary, genre story--and their works ended up being far more predictive of the future than any collection of gadget-loving writers. Gibson didn’t even own a computer at the time he wrote n  Neuromancern, and certainly didn’t go into great detail about the technical aspect of ‘decks’ or ‘cyberspace’, but that didn’t prevent him from being remarkably prescient about how those technologies would change our world. So why, thirty and forty years after the Speculative Fiction revolution, should we end up praising a regression like this?

It's bizarre how much a modern sci fi novel can end up feeling like Tom Swift, with the character constantly mentioning his ‘shotgun-microphone baton’, ‘levitation harness’, and ‘QT medallion’--going into long theoretical digressions about how precisely his ‘morphing bracelet’ might work, on the quantum level--as if it makes any difference. And then, of course, he just gives up and says he doesn't really know--so then, what was the point of the digression?

You know you’re reading bad sci fi when the author takes a basic concept that we already understand and have a term for--like teleportation--and then invents his own, new term for it--or better yet, a whole phrase. Sci fi authors can’t seem to get enough of pointless convolution, that extra layer of complexity that doesn’t actually add anything to the story.

Or they’ll have some gadget, and every time a character uses it, they explain it all over again. Sci fi is about tech, so of course you want the bits and bobs in there, but once a piece of technology has been established, you don’t need to reintroduce it every time--we’ll take for granted that the dude still has it and that it works in the same way. If you want to write a book about robots reading Proust, that’s admirable--but don’t then turn around and treat the audience like a bunch of mouth breathing idiots who need to be reminded what the servo wand does even though it’s the fifth time we’ve seen it.

Beyond that, the technology in the world makes no sense--they have advanced in huge steps in things like teleportation and energy conversion, and seem to be able to create whole new people and races from thin air, and yet their ability to heal injuries is extremely limited, slow, and cumbrous. It makes it difficult to believe that this book was published as recently as 2003.

Then came that fateful phrase upon which so many a sci fi and fantasy review has turned:

And then there's the depiction of sexuality. It feels quite adolescent--physical instead of emotional, women described at length and men not at all--and not just in the Ada section, where it makes a certain sense as an homage, but throughout the book.

Strip it down to the bare facts of the description, and it becomes the sort of erotica Beavis and Butthead would come up with:
n  

Beavis: So this chick is like, in the bath, and she’s totally of touching her boobs.

Butthead: Yeah, and she’s super hot. And then she stands up, and she’s naked.

Beavis: Whoa, that’s cool!

Butthead: And then she puts on a robe, but you can totally see through it.

Beavis: Heh heh, that’s good, Butthead. And then, she like, rubs her boobs on a pole.

Butthead: Huhuhuh, and then she rubs her thigh on the pole.

Beavis: Like, her inner thigh …

Butthead: Yeah. And then she goes over to this dude, and she takes off the robe, and she’s, like, totally naked!

n
Is this list of body parts supposed to be arousing? If you were an alien learning the ways of human culture through sci fi novels--firstly, I’m sorry--and secondly, you could be forgiven for assuming that a 'woman' was like any other human being, except that all her limbs had been replaced by breasts, and all her locomotion was achieved by squishing them together and pressing them against things. Is this what passes for seduction? Just 'here’s my naked body, have a go'?

A few chapters later, the same characters are forced to undress together (because 'reasons'), and so we get this long, loving description of what the ladies look like, what the young man is thinking while looking at them, how naughty and exciting it is--and yet, no description of the men undressing, nothing about what the women might be thinking, what their point of view might be. In the original Ada, Nabokov uses first-person perspective, so the gaze makes more sense, but Ilium is third-person omniscient, so instead of the character's bias, we're just getting the author's.

One of these women is probably the closest we have in this book to a strong female character, and yet we only experience her through the eyes of the chubby, naive dude who keeps trying to sleep with her. Later on, we get a scene that is ostensibly about her desire, about someone she wants to sleep with--and yet, once again, the whole thing is painted in terms of what she looks like, of her body, of how a desirous man might see her--even though this doesn't seem to be coming from the man's POV. It’s such a blatant contradiction: the focus on female physical attractiveness is so pervasive that the women's sexual thoughts are presented in terms of what their own physical bodies look like.

We get an insight into his desires, which might actually have contributed something to his character, and neither are we allowed to understand what draws her to him--the description keeps turning back to her breasts and skin and hair, so that the consummation ends up feeling less like personal, carnal fulfillment and more like smacking two dolls together--except the child has only bothered to undress Barbie.

Then we get to the scene that convinced me to give up on this book entirely:

Our mooky, bookish hero has been led around by the nose for a few hundred pages, thrown into the plot without any choice in the matter and maneuvered from one scene to the next by forces beyond his comprehension--until finally, he starts to see that unless he changes his current course, it’s not going to end well for him. At last, he begins to exercise some free will, to play the role of active agent in this book instead of just a passive observer. So, what’s the first thing he decides to do? That’s right, rape a woman. That’s the first decision he makes, the first thing he does that he wasn’t directly made to do by some greater power.

But hey, at least it’s not a violent rape--no, he’s too mild-mannered for that. Instead, he just uses his super science gizmo to make himself look like her husband and then orders her into bed--though he’s so nervous he can barely get the words out, because he’s one of those shy, bashful rapists--you know the type.

He also talks about how many times over the years he hung out in disguise outside her window, just watching her and thinking about her--and then makes a joke about ‘the boobs that launched a thousand ships’, because there’s no better time for humor than when you’re about to sexually violate a stranger. Of course, he remonstrates himself for being a ‘jerk’ for thinking something so inappropriate and crass, because he’s so mild-mannered and sweet--though this momentary self-awareness in no way slows down his rape plans.

And it’s not like up to this point, he’s been some intriguing, fraught, conflicted character who the author built up to be morally questionable, someone whose actions we must come to terms with. No, so far he has been a generic reader stand-in, a pure observer of the action (that’s literally the character’s job), just a standard nerdy sci fi protagonist who barely has a personality.

To switch immediately from such a flat character to such a fraught moral situation just doesn’t work. I’m not saying authors shouldn’t explore sexual assault, or the type of person who commits it, but in order to actually deal with that idea, you have to first build up the characters to the point where they have sufficient depth to actually delve into it in a meaningful way. Otherwise, why include it at all?

There’s no reason I can see that this scene couldn’t have just been a normal sexual encounter. The assault doesn’t add anything to the book, and as soon as it’s over, the author seems happy to whitewash and ignore it. I read a bit beyond this scene just to see if the author was going to try to deal with it, but instead the victim realizes what’s happening and doesn’t care in the least, then immediately starts questioning her rapist about other things--and after that, happily has sex with him a couple more times.

Is this supposed to excuse it, somehow? Like, if a guy fires off a gun into a house that he suspects is full of children, and then we later find out that it was empty, is that supposed to make him somehow less reprehensible? 'Oh, no one got hurt, so everything's okay--move along.' If it doesn’t provide new understanding of the main character (or of the victim), and the author is happy to ignore the fact that it happened at all, and just move on with the plot, then what was the point? Why include it at all?

Of course, in a book about false Greek gods, we can't forget how often Zeus himself liked to pull this trick--a story about a man who gets godlike powers and starts treating his fellow humans like toys would have been interesting--but we're not getting the psychological buildup to support that story. Likewise, the idea that he had been forced into it could work, that he is nothing more than a pawn of the gods (which is altogether likely), but that also requires the proper setup: bits of foreshadowing and signs of internal conflict--all the details that would make such a plot turn interesting instead of merely convenient.

Then again, perhaps it’s just exploitation, pure titillation--a hallmark of cheap, thoughtless sci fi everywhere. And yet, here’s an author who spends large sections of chapters having characters discuss Shakespeare’s concept of love, or Proust’s. Clearly, Simmons is attempting to present himself as thoughtful and deliberate.

The problem is, if you don’t actually bother to explore those themes through your characters, their personalities and actions, then it simply doesn’t matter how often you have them lecture the reader on the subject--because all you’ve managed to do is write a book that tells us one thing, but where the action contradicts what we’ve been told. It’s like having a protagonist who the supporting cast constantly praises for being smart and clever, but then every decision he makes ends up being short-sighted and thoughtless.

Maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of cosmic frat bro slut-shaming. In the preceding scene, the victim gives this whole long speech about what a whore she is, how the current conflict is all her fault, and how she’s been sleeping with these different dudes because she just can’t help herself, and then she seems to be trying to seduce her husband's brother. So perhaps we’re supposed to sit here and think ‘well, this is all her fault, and she’s just been whoring around for years, causing all this trouble, so really she’s asking for it’

And yet, as any genre fan knows, that's clearly not the worst you can expect--indeed, while Simmons' portrayal of sexuality is one-sided, it's not deliberately so, like so many writers--he's not lecturing us on the inferiority of women--it's just blandly and thoughtlessly sexist. Beyond that, the reader can see that Simmons is trying very hard to do something here, and between that and the passably interesting turns of the plot, it was almost enough to keep me reading. The concept itself should make a fascinating book--this hyper-tech recreation of the Trojan War on Mars, interconnected with Nabokov's 'Antiterra'.

All Simmons' overt connections with literature are meant to establish a place in the canon (as his genre has been trying to do for a century) perhaps that's why this book was shortlisted for awards, and has been widely praised, because of its obvious attempt to connect to Great Works. And yet, it makes the same mistake as any bad writing: trying to force through repetition and overstatement instead of doing all the difficult work of integrating those ideas into the book. Simmons just isn't doing enough, it's lip service, and the approach is just too rudimentary, flawed, and old-fashioned.

This isn't a forward-looking book, as sci fi should be, its a weirdly nostalgic attempt to redeem the past of sci fi--despite how goofy, exclusionary, and horribly Gernsbackian it all was. Certainly, we should take lessons from the past, but good sci fi is always searching out the new thought or experience, exploring what it is to be human, and what it might be like in the future--the scree of gadgets is just a distraction, the same urge some shallow folk have to get the newest iphone. That isn't a mind seeking the future, it's one trapped in the ever-consumptive obsession of the present, the self, the now.

And I get it, because running on that treadmill feels like moving (especially when you buy a new, cooler treadmill every year) but all that lurching and twitching and shivering is nothing but an ague, and it'll drain you in the end.