This is an absolute marvel, its ingenuity is second to none genre-wise. I totally enjoyed this, though for the life of me, I anticipate explain why it has taken me more than six months to read this beautiful book? On and off of course. It wasn't as straight forward as most other Dan Simmons I've read, and yes, I did struggle just a bit at the beginning, but once I got the plot mechanism, everything flowed like a charm. The story is beautifully crafted, the characters are amazing and the warping of the events in the Iliad came off beautifully

Ilium defies description. It's epic sci-fi with huge twists, characters tempting fate, some fickle and furious Greek gods, Achilles and Hector from Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare-spouting robots from Jupiter, oh, and some trippy worm holes. It's good stuff. Video thoughts at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIeLP...

Encouraged by Runalong Womble, this read is part of an effort to clear some of the longest-shelved books from my TBR. I've been putting this one off for years. Mostly, I think, because I actually felt myself beneath it: Hyperion was stunning, and despite Simmons' latter-years decline into reactionary conservatism I'll still recommend it as a genre classic. Ilium, back when I first shelved it, felt like it ought to be even better than that. Homer, Shakespeare, shades of Huxley, I am probably not worthy etc etc.

Well, it's not all that, as it turns out. The first page, riffing hard on the Iliad, is probably as good as it gets. I would hesitate to say it's all downhill from there - but while Hyperion had an absolute literary point and knew when to quit (having said that I've not read the later Fall of Hyperion and have no plan to), Ilium sprawls and hems and haws and really enjoys the sound of its own voice.

That voice being, in the main, that of Simmons himself. Narrator Hockenberry is a shallow self-insert in my opinion, replete with knowing asides about effete liberals, and by the time he self-inserts into Helen of Troy, you can be properly bored of him. The intellectual moravecs are more interesting characters, despite their turgid trawling through literary criticism. By the time they start summarising Proust, I wanted to go watch Monty Python instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vRZT...

And the Huxley-esque "babes in the wood" strand? At times boring, at times just plain irritating, until the appearance of gibberish-spouting Caliban. And still, nothing got explained. The reader leaves the book just as in the dark as Daeman and Harman themselves.

And there are cracks in the veneer too: several times, Simmons has to use terms that Daeman wouldn't know, just to bring the reader back into play, even breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge that fact. And several times through the book the tense slips from past to present or from present to past for a few sentences, showing that this was by no means a polished draft.

The second book is thicker still. Yikes.

Completely bonkers (in a good way). Enjoyed all the POV’s, but the Troy story had me absolutely hooked and every time we left it I was clamouring to get back. Great for fans of Simmon’s other sci-fi works (such as the masterful Hyperion Cantos), I’ll be checking the sequel out sooner rather than later.

Originally published on my blog here in August 2004.

To science fiction fans, Dan Simmons is best known for his award winning novel Hyperion, which uses the poetry of John Keats as its inspiration. In Ilium, his most recent novel and a return to the genre (in which he writes occasionally), the literary references are there again. Here, though, they are made more central (being far more frequently referred to directly), and are more varied. Homer is naturally the most obvious, but there are also direct references to William Shakespeare (the Sonnets and the Tempest), H.G. Wells The Time Machine, and Marcel Proust as well as indirect ones to other sources.

In The Rolling Stones, Robert Heinlein satirises the flagrant plagiarism of some pulp science fiction authors, a character who is a writer blatantly reuses plots from the Odyssey, Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors. Here, Dan Simmons has done something which is even more clearly reuse, but he does this in a much more interesting way; his retelling of Greek myth is a springboard for a fascinating piece of science fiction.

There are three storylines in Ilium: one a retelling of Homer's Iliad, in which the Greek gods influencing the action are beings from the future; a story from the other end of history, where pampered humans have lost a great deal of knowledge but live in a world run for them by robot "servitors"; and a mission by a group of artificial beings engineered to live on the satellites of Jupiter to discover what is behind some strange quantum effects observed on Mars.

One thing that is interesting to me about Ilium is how Simmons places each story in a different part of the science fiction genre. The Iliad bits are part fantasy, part something like Lord of Light; the last humans on a depleted Earth are like a number of far future scenarios originally derived from the Eloi in The Time Machine; the outer solar system artificial beings hard science fiction rather like Kim Stanley Robinson. Even with all this complexity, Ilium does not come across as having a split personality; Simmons holds it together magnificently for over six hundred pages - which means that each strand is long enough to form a novel in its own right.

The reader of Ilium will get a lot more out of it if they have read the various literary sources it alludes to, and an acquaintance with the Iliad is even more useful. Neither is absolutely essential, as the important points are explained as the story develops. (The device of having the point of view character in the Iliad sections a Greek scholar re-animated at the scene to provide the "gods" with a commentary on how well what happens matches Homer's poem is useful in this respect.) Even without the clever folding of the literary themes, the little references to delight the knowledgeable, Ilium is an extremely well written, if slightly over long, novel. Entertaining and intelligent, definitely one of the best books I have read this year.

Perhaps more of a 3.75 than a 4 star:

Dan Simmons is one of the most underrated authors alive. Yes he has accolades, Hugos, and tons of love for Hyperion, but he’s a mad fucking genius that deserves to be talked about way more in the sci-fi pantheon.

His most recent series, starting off with Ilium, proves the point even further. However, his madness is beginning to show and this story is not without its flaws. Simmons loves to make incredibly intricate yet believable worlds that combine his deep knowledge of literary history, philosophy, science, and military theory. Simmons also loves to splash a deus ex machina in every story that romanticizes how those protagonists can “win” in those worlds. I finished Ilium this morning and was really satisfied, but as he often does, Simmons includes several last minute reveals and quick character shifts that allowed the plot to play out as it did. Perhaps I should cut him some slack on the notion that the humongous effort of stir frying The Iliad, The Odyssey, Shakespeare, Proust, Moravec theory, time travel, and quantum/wormhole theory shouldn’t work at all in the first place, but he actually does blend these all well enough to let me nitpick.

I liked it less than hyperion/endymion but for fans of those books an interesting difference here is that he spends more time ramping up the world and fleshing out separate character arcs so by the end of the reader is forced to pick up Olympos to see the payoff. It reminded of Sanderson where there’s an avalanche of plot convergence at the end that fucking hooks you. I just wish it didn’t take 500 pages to get there.

Another divergence from traditional Simmons space opera is that the concepts he covers are less speculative science and more speculative history as seen through that science. Thus, he creates a dazzling page-turner that you read to see what known histories are subverted and not what is newly explored.

There were some weak moments of prose, repetitive struggles in the Daeman arc, and some choice narcissism that I had to get over (i mean come on, he has the character based on himself literally bang Helen of Troy!), but overall this was an approachable yet mind bending space opera that was damn fun to read. My real take will be determined once I read Olympos as I think this is just one book split into two novels, but I am genuinely excited to read it.

Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. I didn’t like n  The Terrorn or n  Droodn, but I warmed up to Simmons through his epic Hyperion Cantos. In my review for the final book of that cycle, n  The Rise of Endymionn, I commented, “Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.” Simmons lives up to this judgment with Ilium, which does for the Iliad what Hyperion did for Keats and Romantic poetry (although I’d argue it goes further than that). I doubt I’ll ever refer to Simmons as one of my favourite authors, or even as one of my favourite SF authors. Yet I have no doubt he is actually a great SF author, one of the greats of our age, even if he isn’t one of my favourites. Let’s dive into Ilium and see why.

Summarizing Ilium is not an easy task, but I’ll do my best. It’s a couple of thousand years into the future. Humanity experienced a posthumanist singularity, including an event vaguely alluded to as “the rubicon,” and mastered nanotechnology and quantum tunnelling/quantum teleportation. Now, beings claiming to be the Greek gods inhabit a terraformed Mars and have recreated the Iliad in the flesh. They’ve also recreated Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first–century scholar of the Iliad, essentially to provide commentary on them? But Hockenberry gets pushed into a situation where he has to go off-book, and things soon prove … revolutionary. Meanwhile, some moravecs (self-evolving AI robots descended from robots sent out by humans) from the moons of Jupiter have arrived on Mars to investigate all this untoward quantum activity. Meanwhile meanwhile, on Earth, some slightly-not-baseline humans are living a peaceful yet empty existence devoid of culture or true learning/introspection, until of course, someone jolts them out of it. The result? By the end of the book, all hell has broken loose of course!

Look, the actual plot of this book is unimportant.

Seriously, the plot is one of the least interesting parts of the book, and I’m going to mostly ignore it. I want to talk about what Simmons is doing with regards to the intersection of classical literature and science fiction and why it’s so goddamned brilliant, and then I will slam him for some dirty male gazey bits. Read on!

For the record, I did read the Iliad (Fagles), but didn’t review it because it was … a difficult book. It’s really not a great book for reading silently to oneself in translation. It is meant to be declaimed, in ancient Greek, but that is not a skill I have. Although debates over its historicity and the extent to which it is an oral tradition abound, one thing is clear: the Iliad is, like so many epic poems from antiquity, a complex work that has been altered by each of the cultures who have translated it, studied it, and reinterpreted it through their own biased lenses. Also note that you don’t need to have read the Iliad to follow Ilium.

Ilium is, fundamentally, a story about literacy. Every relationship, every plot development, every conflict, is a facet of Simmons examining the meaning of literacy in various human societies, the role of literacy and storytelling, and the ways in which our technology might influence those two things.

I have often criticized the posthumanist stories I’ve read of late because of the tendency for the technology to be so advanced it’s basically magic. Simmons lampshades this and employs posthumanist SF to good effect by just leaning into the whole magic angle. Yes, at face value, the idea of recreating the Iliad in “real life” is absurd and impossible—but if you arrange the tech tree of our evolution just so, it becomes just incredibly improbable (and as the book explores, probability is a key underlying element of the story—not that that’s important, as I said). The Greek gods of this story are incredibly powerful, yes—but they are also illiterate. In a society where technology has progressed to the point that you can alter your form at will, communicate information through nanotechnology … what good is writing anymore?

Savi makes a remark at one point about the pre-literate meeting the post-literate when Odysseus meets Harman and Daeman, and it’s a very telling statement. Odysseus and the other Greeks represent humanity prior to the dominance of the written word. Simmons presents them as emphasizing action and embodiment over contemplation. Contrast this with Mahnmut and Orphu, whose human-like intellectual existences within their very non-humanoid bodies revolve around contemplation of Shakespeare and Proust, respectively. There is an irony that the only literate beings in this story are an anachronistic professor and robots from Jupiter’s moons! However, the moravecs have more in common with Harman et al than you might think—both have a dearth of lived experiences when it comes to the struggles of the human condition that we consider de rigeur. The moravecs, by dint of their access to the sum total of human literature, are more aware of the human condition. But as Mahnmut discovers throughout this story, he has led a very sheltered life and has not paid attention to much beyond his myopic niche interests.

Everything in Ilium is wrapped in literary texts—not subtext but actually part of the text. The antagonists, from the Greek gods to Prospero and Caliban and the mysterious Setebos, are all allusions to famous literary characters. Beyond that though, the textual references—the passages of Shakespeare dissected, the interrogation of characters like Falstaff—create the impression of a conversation between these authors and the characters of Ilium. Even Hockenberry marvels at his own role as a kind of ersatz intervener in a drama that was conceived by Homer and is now being re-staged by the enigmatic Zeus: he goes from observer to participant, driving events further away from the text of the Iliad. This makes him uncomfortable not just for the personal risk he accrues as a result but for the fact that it shifts his understanding of the people around him from characters in a farcical recreation of a tragedy to living, breathing humans whose autonomy and agency he must respect rather than ignore or co-opt. This is reinforced numerous times when he underestimates the guile or commitment of the Greeks and Trojans, particularly Helen.

As Mahnmut and Orphu debate the meanings of life explored by their literary crushes and Savi opens the eyes of her new friends to the ideas they never knew they were missing, Simmons invites us all to consider the different options with regards to literacy. Those of you who are able to read this, like me, take our literacy for granted to an extent—I don’t mean to imply that none of you struggled for this. Some of you might have had to struggle to learn to read, or struggled to get access to education in the first place. But we take it for granted that our species, our societies, are literate. Literacy is a technology, not a biological certainty. As Simmons demonstrates here, literacy is one way to add depth to a culture—but it is not the only way, and it introduces its own complications and dead-ends as well.

Whether or not our own technology takes us as far as the posthumans of Ilium get, it behoves us to consider how that technology alters our relationship with literacy. It’s already happening right now. As a teacher, I often ponder how my students (some of whom, because I teach adults in high school, are older than me) look at reading and writing differently because they have cell phones and the Internet. As a millennial, I grew up online. I am, in some ways, more comfortable reading and writing than I am speaking. My younger students, while even more attached to their devices than I am, are not necessarily more literate as a result—because the way we negotiate the digital spaces we’ve created has changed. While that sounds curmudgeonly, it’s more observation than complaint or criticism. It can’t really be either of those until we have a deeper, wider conversation about what’s happening—we need to stop saying “kids can’t read” or “kids don’t read” and instead check our assumptions about why we expect kids to read the same way we read. After all, we didn’t always read the way we do now.

Of course, the complex conversation happening within Ilium would be improved if it didn’t centre 2 dead white guys and a dead Greek poet to whom we attribute the Iliad. Simmons’ emphasis on the Western tradition of literature is an unfortunate limitation that ignores the rich history of both literate and oral traditions in countless other cultures around the world.

On top of that, I wish I could praise this book wholeheartedly, but I almost put it down only a couple of pages in, when Simmons has Daeman meditate all about the hot nude body of the woman he’s trying to seduce. Ew. And then there’s Hockenberry. It should have been redemptive, this flabby middle-aged white guy from our time running around the Age of Heroes and basically being unremarkable … but as much as I admire Simmons for undermining Hockenberry’s brief hero moments via the machinations of Helen, Andromache, and to a lesser extent Hector and Achilles … I can’t get behind Hockenberry’s utter male gaze and objectification of the goddesses and women he meets. The whole scene where he just goes and poses as Paris so he can have sex with Helen? Hello rapey and gratuitous and ew.

So … yeah. Ilium as a work of literature has vast chasms of thought-provoking ideas as deep as Olympus Mons is tall. I was enchanted by the way Simmons teases out the various contradictions around literacy. Simmons is a huge literary nerd and a talented SF author, and I love that combination. But I can’t praise that this book without calling out the intensely uncomfortable male gazey moments that are, unfortunately, all-too-common in books written by otherwise intelligent white guys. Seriously, do better.

Is this book for you? I don’t know! It’s big and convoluted and sprawling but oddly satisfying if you decide you want to put up with the lengthy digressions, the problematic stuff I noted, and the frustrating tendency to digress at length (as mentioned) but never actually reveal the really interesting stuff (what are the voynix? Who is Setebos?). I guess that’s what sequels are for.

n  n

Šį kart pas mylimą #DanSimmons kažkaip viskas ne taip. Istorija labai sunkiai įsiskaito. Labai ilgai kartoja tėtušį Homerą ir skaitai aiškiai prisiversdamas (taip pat sunkiai skaičiau ir orginalą). O vėliau visko tiek daug, kad atrodo, kad ir per daug jau. Nesiklijuoja. Neorganiškai gaunasi tie 103 pasauliai viename. O dar, autorius gale kala siurpraizą. Nes knyga baigiasi pačioj įdomiausioj vietoj. Net arka nepabaigta. Ir čia po 700 psl? Žodžiu antros dalies skaityt nepulsiu. Neužkabino. Būtinai baigsiu, bet dabar turiu kelias degančias knygas, kurių ilgai laukiu. Tai gal kur apie naujus ir pavyks pradėt (bet jei skaitysiu kaip šitą, tai pabaigsiu tik joninėms). #Recom, bet šį kart biški Soso tas Recom. #LEBooks #Ilium

I can't seem to say enough in the way of praise for Dan Simmons. The guy is a frickin' genius and one of the best writers working in any genre today.

"Ilium" is his science fiction magnum opus. It is a grand epic in the same way Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and Frank Herbert's "Dune" series were grand epics in their genre. The funny thing is Simmons's "Ilium" is a sci-fi epic ABOUT one of the greatest epics of all time, Homer's "The Iliad". Well, it's not so much about "The Iliad" as it is a very strange and wonderful re-imagining of the greatest epic poems in Western Civilization.

The book is hard to describe, but here goes my attempt at explaining it: In the distant future (it is very unclear how distant), the planet Mars has been taken over by the Greek gods. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo, et al live on their new Mount Olympus, appropriately located on the peaks of Olympus Mons. Not only that, but the ancient city of Troy, along with all its Trojan citizens, as well as all the Greek warriors, led by Agammemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles, have been miraculously resurrected to play out the entire 10-year Trojan War. Again.

Strangely enough, 20th-century college professor Thomas Hockenberry has also been resurrected (along with other scholars) to report to the gods on how accurately the participants of this Martian re-creation are adhering to the original. Having no clue as to how (or even why) he has been resurrected along with the others, frustrated Hockenberry decides to switch things up and "interfere" in the classic story.

Meanwhile, the few remaining human survivors (roughly 3,000+) on Earth are blissfully unaware of what's happening on the neighboring planet until some curiosity-filled Earthlings decide to find out where all the other billions of Earthlings went, who (or what) keeps providing them with a continuous source of food and shelter, and why they only have a 100-year life expectancy, no more and no less.

Then a 600+ year-old woman named Savi shows up, claiming to remember the days when the world was filled with people, and she introduces the Earthlings to a friend of hers, an even older gentleman who calls himself Odysseus. There's also a pair of Shakespeare-and Proust-quoting robots from Jupiter's moons who arrive on Mars, investigating some strange readings that would indicate the existence of a presence more powerful than anything they have ever studied before. Unfortunately, they are shot down by one of Zeus's lightening bolts, and immediately rescued by hundreds of adorable mute LGMs (Little Green Men).

I know it all sounds strange, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't, but it's one of those books that sucks you in and never lets up. A grand and weird blend of space opera, fantasy, hard science fiction, humor, and literary criticism, "Ilium" is definitely one of the best and most original science fiction novels I have read in a long time.

Nominated for a Hugo, "Ilium" is the first of a series, continued in the second book "Olympos".

Les Dieux Grecs existent, et vivent sur l’Olympus Mons Martien, et sont dotés de pouvoirs hors du commun. Leur passe-temps favoris est de revivre la prise de Troie (Ilium), dont ils ne connaissent apparemment pas l’issue (malgré le fait qu’on te dise 15 fois que l’Iliade existe), bordel rien que le synopsis est pété …

Stop.

Vraiment, vraiment désolée à l’abonné qui m’a demandé ce livre …
Mais je peux juste pas.
J’ai une théorie sur les livres SF qui utilisent les symbolismes greco-romains, c’est que c’est toujours nul.
Bah après Red Rising et Latium, pouf on peut en ajouter un troisième sur la liste, Ilium.
Désolée je ne comprends pas l’intérêt de ce bouquin. C’est fouillis, les trois timelines/histoires se mêlent difficilement ensemble, on ne comprend pas pourquoi on a le futur et le passé en même temps, et pourquoi les dieux de l’Olympe (de l’Olympus Mons de Mars), immortels et capables de voyager dans le temps et l’espace, se cassent le cul à rejouer sans cesse la prise de Troie, avec leur petit colloque de “scolaires” pour suivre l’Iliade. Ça n'a aucun sens.
Ca, et puis bien sûr, le sexisme mais la misogynie extrême de ce bouquin !! OK tu te tape un trip Zeus en te mettant à la place de Hockenberry Dan on le voit, mais de la à écrire le viol d’Hélène de Troie (oui c’este une parodie de Zeus et Arthur j’ai compris mais es’tce que c’ets nécessaire quand ce n’est jamais discuté ou questionné et PIRE, que HELENE LUI DIT QUELLE NA JAMAIS ETE BAISEE COMME CA), NON.
Et bien sûr c’est pas le seul endroit, les femmes sont traitées comme des vases à foutre tout le livre, non seulement l’histoire n’a aucun sens mais ça en plus ça enfonce encore plus cette horreur.

Dan Simmons, one of my favorite authors. This book has it all, it has the Trojans, Troy, and the Iliad. Aliens, robots, and Gods of all sizes. This book is a blast to read and will appeal to fantasy readers, science fiction readers, and even to historical fiction readers. A must read.

Hey, I have a booktube channel (youtube for book reviews, etc.), and I include Ilium in my top 10 fantasy books list here. Please subscribe if I've earned it!

If someone were to describe this book to me (if they even could), I don't know if I would believe how much I absolutely enjoyed it. Dan Simmons is a mad genius.

Shakespeare-quoting humanoid robots, Greek Gods, post-humans, and old-style humans somehow make the craziest awesome story imaginable.

Ilium is a story told through essentially three unrelated viewpoints. First, there's Hockenberry. This is told in first person. Hockenberry is called a "Scholic," a human from our the 20th century (our time) who was rebirthed in a future where Homer's Trojan War is being fought. His job is to report on the war ... to the Greek Gods.

At first, this is completely confusing. Why? is a question I asked myself over and over, but it begins to make sense with time. Plus, it's hard not to be fascinated with the events of the Iliad. It's also impressive how much research went into it, though that's only an assumption since my knowledge of the Trojan War is essentially from the movie, Troy (but I have read the Odyssey!).

The second viewpoint is the humans, mainly Daemon. Daemon is a self-involved fool who is unlikeable to say the least. But who wouldn't be when you have everything handed to you on a silver platter by robots called servitors (sp - I did listen to the audio so forgive me), like all humans everywhere. Pleasure is their life, knowledge ... is lacking.

The third viewpoint is that of a sonnet-loving humanoid robot called a "moravec" and named Mahnmut. Specifically, and only, Shakespeare's sonnets. It's work consists of exploring the moon of Jupiter called Europa. Mahnmut is called in on a mission with a group of moravecs to explore some occurrences on the planet mars.

At first, I was highly entertained, though confused, with the events of the Trojan war and the other parts were just above boring. Slowly, the story takes hold and it had me hook, line, and sinker.

Listening to the audiobook, I was looking forward to my morning and evening drives and not too sad to do errands on my lunch hour either. Somehow, it ALL makes sense even though it sounds like the oddest collection of classics to make up a cohesive story all its own. What does Shakespeare have to do with the Iliad or Proust (his work makes appearances too) for that matter, all set in the future with technology that gives humans everything they ever want or need?

It's crazy I tell ya. Crazy! How did I like this book this much? I'm telling you, Simmons is a mad genius. I will just sit back and let him take me on his journey. It's amazing. I question not.

Kevin Pariseau is the narrator of this audiobook and while at first I thought he over-acted the part of Hockenberry, though somehow not the other parts, I really grew to like him and found out that it was literally just the character of Hockenberry that he was playing. And it's impressive given how many Greek words and names he's got to ...erm... name.

The only problem is that Ilium is only half the story. It stops at a huge cliffhanger and I'm already heading to Olympos to see how this ends.

5 out of 5 Stars (Mind ... blown)