Customer Reviews

Ilium (Do Not Use) (Gollancz)

5 star:		(106)
4 star:		(57)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I reached the point long ago where I became rather fiercely committed to the idea of reading a novel without knowing too much about the story. Book covers are immediately discarded upon purchase (sometimes not to be found for months later when they surface again all crumpled and wrinkled), and I passionately avoid reading the back covers of paperbacks until after the book is read, at which point I am usually grossly offended. Consequently, I picked up Dan Simmons' "Ilium" simply because I heard it was a retelling of the Trojan War in general and Homer's "Iliad" in particular. Since I teach that epic poem in my Classical Mythology class and have always considered myself to be an "Iliad" person rather than an "Odyssey" person, that was enough to get me to pack this book away for a recent trip when I could commit myself to some serious continuous reading. So I was rather surprised to learn that a retelling of the "Iliad," after a fashion, is but one of three story threads that start to come together over the course of this 576 page novel, which is itself but the first half of the saga envisioned by Simmons.

The Trojan War is being reenacted on an Earth created by a race of metahumans who have assumed the roles of the Greek gods of classical mythology, who apparently live on Mars. Our vantage point to this exercise is Thomas Hockenberry, a scholar who is pretty sure he is dead and remembers little of his life on earth, but knows Homer's epic poem chapter and verse, and along with the rest of his colleagues is cataloguing where the action diverges from the "Iliad." It seems that Homer played around with the chronology when he wrote his epic thousands of years ago, which begs the question of why Hockenberry is now watching it played out and getting involved in a way that goes well beyond academic interest, beginning with a night in the bed of Helen of Troy herself. Meanwhile, a couple of robots with a propensity for quoting Shakespeare and Proust are leaving Jupiter to head to Mars to check out the strange readings they are picking up and back on Earth a group of humans living in a post-technological world where mechanical servants take care of their every needs are starting to rethink the way things are. When the latter meets up with Odysseus, we have another substantial clue that (surprise, surprise) these three plot threads are all parts of the same puzzle.

I have to admit that my interest for the non-"Iliad" parts of "Ilium" took a while to be kindled, mainly because my fascination with how the Trojan War was playing out was so great. Hockenberry has been studying the Trojan War for nine years and as the novel begins he and his colleagues are excited because they have finally reached the start of the "Iliad," when Agamemnon, King of the Acheans, arrogantly insults the great warrior Achilles over Briseis of the lovely arms. However, this becomes almost a minor consideration for Hockenberry the Muse he serves brings him to the goddess Aphrodite, who wants the scholar to kill the Athene herself.

From the opening paragraph, where Simmons does a pointed take off on the famous beginning of Homer's epic, Simmons dances his story in and around the "Iliad." The question of how a mere mortal such as Diomedes could dare to attack the gods themselves on the battlefield, and actually wound then, is not answered: he is injected with nano-technology by another deity. However, it is when we get to the fateful point where Homer's story is effectively derailed and Hockenberry makes the inevitable declaration to Dorothy's little dog that we are no longer in the "Iliad" and are now charting new ground.

Ultimately Simmons is more like Euripides than Homer. It was the Greek dramatist who set up the ironic foreshadowing of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles in "Iphigenia at Aulis" and who created an emotional counterpart in "The Trojan Women" to the end of the "Iliad," where Hector's corpse is brought back to the city. Homer's epics were not holy writ for the ancient Greeks, and the tragic poets could use his characters to tell their own stories, which is exactly what Simmons is doing (there is one part that struck me as a deadly serious twist on Aristophanes' "Lysistrata"). I have the feeling that the conclusion will be more like the "Odyssey," especially since the "original" fate of Troy, Achilles, Hector, and the others are well over the rainbow, but now I am curious to see not only what happens next, and who wins the new war that has begun, but also because I want to find out who is behind the curtain.

I'm not a big fan of the science-fiction/fantasy genres. What I am a fan of, actually, is Dan Simmons. He is the only author who can constantly hop genres all the while remaining fresh and appealing to all of his fans.

Following his great epic Hyperion/Endymon, Simmons comes back with another mind blowing science-fiction saga. Ilium is as good if not better than its predecessor, and it is bound to become a classic of the genre, because Ilium is like nothing you've read before. Simmons has done the impossible by creaing something completely fresh, new and highly interesting.

The book is separated in three major stories that are all loosely linked to one another. The first story is set on earth, where the post-humans are about to discover that there is much more to life than their uncomplicated, empty existence. When three of these post-humans go on a trek to investigate their originators, they will uncover a dark sercret that will threaten everything they thought they knew.

The second story concentrates on a group of robot-like Shakespeare-quoting things who are going on a mission to Mars to try and understand why the planet has terraformed itself. But when their mission goes wrong, they will soon be left stranded on this strange planet.

And finally, the final story (and most interesting one) is about a scholi (a professor who goes back in history to observe) who is serving as a witness to the greatest battle of all time, the one depicted in Homer's The Iliad. But the scholi will soon realize that one little shift in events can render the whole future uncertain.

And this is probably the heart of Simmons's incredible novel. Beautifully written, this book is all about the power of transformation in time, in space and on a personal level. Simmons recreates history and invents a future in a way that no other author has dared to do before. He goes back to the literary classics to create a futuristic world that is highly influenced by the literary world of the past.

The whole novel finishes on a climactic level that will hopefully be concluded in the next installment, Olympus. But as it now stands, Ilium is a great read. Although the book is big, I gobbled it up in just a few days. I just couldn't put it down.

I can't begin to express how original this book is. It's refreshing to see that imgination isn't fully lost in today's world of mediocre publishing. Truly original literature is hard to come by, so grab this one up and be ready to partake in an experience you won't soon forget.

Dan Simmons is the most consciously literary of science fiction writers. He not only borrows ideas for stories; he uses the forms of the great stories of western civilization and even quotes from them in the story. If there really are memes, anyone reading "The Hyperion Cantos" risked infection with John Keats' poetry and John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

With "Ilium," the infectious risk is Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey;" Shakespeare's sonnets and "The Tempest;" and - gulp - Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Lost." Yowza.

"Ilium" is three seemingly unrelated stories from the 40th Century, stories from three different possibilities of what man might become. There are the Moravecs, inhabiting Jupiter's and Saturn's moons, man-machine hybrids, with a lingering taste for the works of Shakespeare and Proust. There are the Eloi - an appreciative nod to H. G Wells here - who turn out to be all too horrifyingly Eloi, a "post-literate" and possibly degenerate normal human race. And there are the gods of Olympus - Mons Olympus - who may be post-humans, engaged in a bloody re-enactment of the Trojan War.

We see the story through the eyes of Moravecs, a few of the humans and one of Scholi, the observers of the gods, re-constructed college classics professors, sent to report to the gods on the re-enacted Trojan War. And we watch as the Scholi - one in particular - are dragged from their roles as observers to participants, and as the three stories merge into one. It's a superb piece of plotting and narration.

There are resonances from "The Hyperion Cantos," but they do not distract. There are no emotional bombshells equivalent to F. Paul Dure's experience - for my money, nothing in science fiction touches the story of F. Paul Dure - but there are stunning surprises. You *will* cheer Achilles' final line.

The final message, or one of the final messages, may be a little grating: that even as late as the 40th century it is and will be a case of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. But you can't fault the story-telling. Simmons is in line for another Hugo nomination.

This is the first book of a projected two book series (note to those new to Simmons: the four-book Hyperion cantos was also projected to be two books). A lot of the mysteries are left unanswered at the end of this book. We'll have to hope the second book resolves them. I can't wait.

Highly recommended.

I loved the Hyperion cantos, and couldn't wait to dive into Dan Simmons' most recent foray into sci-fi. Thankfully, I'm not too disappointed--the concept is interesting, and the plot itself is executed fairly well--but the novel leaves plenty to be desired in writing style, characterization, and basic writing skills.

My biggest caveat with Ilium is the weak characters. Something about the narrative style in this book just doesn't grab me like it did in Simmons' other books, and as a result the characters seem to be ill-defined sketches, only minimally fleshed out when it's convenient to the story. Even the protagonist Hockenberry, a scholar from our time who the reader is clearly supposed to most strongly identify with, is just a set of eyes and ears on the Trojan plains, with no personality to speak of. I found myself not really caring what happened to the characters, something I didn't expect after the rich stories of Paul Dure and company in the Hyperion novels.

What makes this so annoying is that there were also a few spots where Simmons tries TOO hard, and unsuccessfully, to get the reader to identify with the characters and story. There were a few references to 9/11 that weren't really necessary (particularly when one character refers to a murderous entity as "a September eleven god," an analogy unlikely to be used 3,000 years from now), and a quick reference near the end to grisly news coverage of the second war against Iraq. At one point, a slew of creatures are mobilized to attack by recordings of Muslim calls to jihad. It's difficult to make such references without appearing to stretch for connections to the reader's world, so it's no surprise when Simmons ultimately fails in this regard.

The final weakness isn't the worst, but it grated my nerves the most--it appears that there was simply no proofreading done before sending this novel to press! There are words repeated erroneously ("and and hand" early in the book), punctuation symbols left out, and quite a few inconsistencies in character and storyline. In the third to last paragraph of the book, one character's name is substituted for another's in a clearly erroneous manner, forcing the reader to leave the book focusing on just one example of the countless such errors. Hopefully later editions will have fixed these problems.

The story itself isn't so bad, although the writing pace seems a bit rushed--some of the 60-odd chapters are so short and unnecessary to the story flow that one wonders why they weren't just combined into following chapters. I do, however, like how Simmons joined two of the three plots together near the end, and the hints joining the last storyline to them are evident and satisfying.

...

Ilium is one of the best books I have ever read in my lifetime! One doesn't often read stories combining science fiction, the Classics of Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust, and a pantheon of meddlesome Greek gods, but Dan Simmons not only did it, but he did it well.

The story weaves three distinctly different tales of post-humans resembling the "Time Machine's" Eloi: gentle souls with no knowledge of their past, no desire to know their future; a society of sentient robots from Jupiter on a mission of destruction to Mars; and the previously mentioned Greek gods, wreaking havoc from their mount on Olympus. In the center of all this action is an innocent scholar, Thomas Hockenberry, who is drawn into a web of deceit when one of the gods decides to kill one of their own and enlists Hockenberry to do their dirty work. Things quickly begin to unravel when the plan is put into action and the three stories come together on a collision course guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat for the entire ride!

Ilium is simply a wonderful book. Simmons' prose immerses the reader fluidly between ancient Troy, deep space, and everything in between. The scope and grandeur of Simmons' other works (most notably the Hyperion series) is present in full-force and one almost finds oneself cheering on the heroes as the story reaches toward fulcrum.

At moments some of the characters actions or dialogue seemed a bit out-of-character, but over the course of the book this serves to make them more real, more human. Characters change their minds for reasons that, at times, even they do not understand. They grow and develop before your eyes as their worlds are radically changed and they forced to action. Not all of them undergo such changes, of course, and the ones who do not seem noticeably flatter. This does not diminish much from the overall enjoyment of the book. In fact, the annoying editorial typos (particularly several instances of the word "that" appearing when clearly "than" should have been printed) detracted more. There were a startingly number, even for a first printing.

Those familiar with Simmons' other work will recognize some carryover ideas such as the quantum wavefronts and the mind. There are others, but I don't want to give too much away. There are also enough new ideas worked into this story to give the imagination plenty chew on.

It will remain unclear whether Ilium-Olympos surpasses Hyperion's breathtaking scale and scope until the second volume is released, but I imagine it will be well worth the wait.

Also worth noting are the Acknowledgements on The Iliad, Shakerspeare, and Proust. I was familiar with about half the works cited and may pick up some of the others.

like many fans of Dan Simmons, my great anticipation for this novel largely derived from the fact that it marks his return to science-fiction. and after a handful of long, delicious reading sessions, i'm not disappointed.

Simmons has yet again created a future full of wicked technology, new worlds, and a host of mysteries that compel you to keep reading until the final page. i was a bit anxious about the concept of mixing the events of the Iliad in a space-opera, however Simmons pulls it off well - similar to Guy Gavriel Kay's caveat with Arthurian legend in his first series.

of course, any present and/or future forays that Simmons makes into science fiction risk comparison with his all-too-worthy Hyperion cantos. under this lense, Ilium matches Hyperion pound for pound with one exception: the characters in the former just don't stand out as much as they did in the latter. it has been years since i read Hyperion, and yet i still think often of Kassad, Silenus, Lamia, Weintraub, the Shrike, and others.

then again, the more i mull over Ilium, the more i think such comparisons aren't entirely fair. the framework for this novel is quite different, and Simmons is obviously a different writer now than he was then. the book feels less intimate than Hyperion, while at the same time it achieves an epic mood that the latter only flirted with. indeed, this book succeeds as a science fiction mish-mash of Iliad, Odyssey, and Simmons own dose of heady story telling, attaining an almost mythical quality that picks you up and carries you away.

all these words, and really what i want to say is this: read this book!

(This is a review of Ilium & Olympos, its sequel, together. This might be a bit unfair to Ilium, as it mostly reflects my frustration with Olympos, but I think it is useful to know what you are getting into with those big multi-volume storylines).

Dan Simmons has had very mixed results since Hyperion 1 & 2. Hyperion shined in sequentially linking several of the best SF short stories ever written (the time-separated lovers, the reverse-aging story, etc...) in the overall framework of an epic struggle. Who could forget the president of the Hegemony calmly waiting to be torn apart by rioters, after shutting down the farcaster network? Simmons, who combined those short stories from an earlier book of his, has never quite reached those heights again. Endymion, anyone?

Ilium starts out giving you the impression that Simmons is back in form, gloriously entering into the Trojan war. But things go downhill from there, as the moravecs and post-history humans threads are added. Bluntly put, none of the stories, including later Trojan war bits, are very compelling. They are overlong and their characters are uninspiring, especially in Olympos. And, despite constantly shifting from one to the other, you don't understand how the different threads relate until the last 20% of Olympos. Even then the end-of-book revelations are hasty and underwhelming after 1200+ pages of buildup. Zeus and the pantheon, whose reason for being tantalizes you throughout, are sketchily explained away. Odysseus, easily one of the most intriguing characters in ancient literature, is sadly underused. Not only does Simmons take forever to get to the point, there isn't much of a point at all. The musings about the quantum nature of reality? Hmmm, not enough, by a long shot, to carry the book and more like a Deus Ex Machina to magically take care of all the tangling loose ends.

Proust, Shakespeare and Iliad references abound. I did read the Iliad, but Proust has a nice reputation for being extremely long and difficult to read (a la James Joyce). Too bad, because the long-winded dialogues about them mostly didn't make much sense to little ol' me.

Simmons has also swapped Endymion's annoying criticism of Christianity for a pointless series of cheap shots against Islam (google the "Time Traveller" entry on his blog and you'll see his viewpoint in all its glorious bigotry). Pointless, because the anti-Muslim rants are not put in context or argued, they are just there. And not all that relevant to the overall story.

One thing I will grant this book is that it is well enough written that it makes for compulsive reading. Hence 3, rather than 2, stars (I would really rather give it 2 1/2). Overall: too clever for its own good, sloppy ending, without the brilliance and focus of his earlier work.

A number of people have observed that the science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s was, at its core, optimistic. Although nuclear war lurked in the background, there was an optimism in the work of writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon. Mankind was evolving toward something better. Our current stage of aggression and war was a childhood that, if we survived, we would outgrow. In the 1980s science fiction started to turn inward. William Gibson's Neuromancer was set is a distopian future, the work of an angry young man (according to Gibson's description). Dan Simmons became famous with his book Hyperion, in which millions of humans were enslaved in a distant future, while in the current time of the plot people were hunted by a killing machine called the Shrike.

Dark futures could be seen as a hallmark of Dan Simmons work. Literary allusion is another theme. In Hyperion there are allusions to the work of the romantic poet Keats. Dan Simmons book Ilium is heavily based on Homer's Iliad, the story of the Trojan war. The Iliad is itself a dark tale. Troy is destroyed, many of its men killed, its women raped and sold into slavery. The war did not turn out well in the end for many of the Greeks. Agamemnon, the Greek king who defeats Troy, returns home, fated to be murdered by his wife, Clymenestra (although this is not part of Homer's tale).

Ilium is beautifully written and Simmons' story is compelling. In Ilium the Greek Gods watch (and sometimes meddle) as the Trojan war unfolds. The Gods have resurrected various classic scholars from the twentieth and early twenty-first century whose job it is to record the Trojan war. The war as it plays out on the plains of Troy largely follows the story Homer related, but the scholars are forbidden to tell anyone, even the Gods, of Homers account before the events have come to pass. The book weaves together three plots lines. The story of the Trojan war is told by an early twenty-first century classics scholar named Hockenberry. In Ilium much of humanity has been wiped out by the "Rubicon virus" while other humans have evolved through technology into post-humans. "Old-style" humans remain on earth and one plot line in Ilium relates to them. The final plot line involves Moravecs (biomechanical sentient beings, named after Hans Moravec). The Moravecs have been "seeded" throughout the Jupiter system and the asteroid belt. A group of Moravecs has been sent on a mission to Mars by their government, which is concerned that massive quantum disturbances on Mars imperil the solar system.

Ilium is set in the same "universe" as Simmons short story The Ninth of Av which was published in his story collection Worlds Enough and Time. One of the characters in this story, a woman named Savi, plays an important part in Ilium.

Ilium is a book for the patient reader. The constant switching back and forth between the three story lines can take concentration and at times I found that I had to flip back to a previous section to find a detail I had forgotten. The structure and reasons behind the story line are revealed slowly as well. The Greek Gods reside on Olympus Mons, on Mars. At first I thought that Troy and the Greeks were somehow also on Mars. It was not until the end of the book that I understood the spatial and temporal relationship between the Gods and the Trojan war. Ironically, some of the later arriving characters in the story were confused as well ("How did we end up on Earth?").

In reading Simmons' work I have sometimes wondered if he knew in advance how the story would unfold. In reading the Hyperion books I wondered if Simmons knew, even in broad outline, how this long complex story would evolve when he wrote the first book.

Ilium is the first book of a two part story, which is supposed to be finished in Olympos, so the complete story cannot be judged at this point. As with most Dan Simmons books the story is compelling, but there have been cases were the plot of a compelling Dan Simmons story fell apart at the end (for example, his book Summer of Night). If Olympos is as good as Ilium and Simmons manages to pull all the plot lines into a profound whole these books will be some of Simmons best work.

After being sidetracked for several years, Dan Simmons returns to sf with a bang!

If you are one of those people who think Simmons' Hyperion novels are some of the best works in sf, then you do not want to miss this new novel. if you are a "newbie" to his works, then this book will certainly do an admirable job of convincing you to go read his past sf masterpieces.

The story begins thus: on an earth long since depopulated after the departure of the "post-humans", eloi-like "old-style" humans waste their lives away in a literal paradise on earth, pampered and protected by servitor machines. But, guided by an adventurous old man who is due soon for his "final fax", four companions search for clues to the whereabouts of an ancient spacecraft, which they hope will take them to the PostHumans and away from their abjectly banal lives.

Meanwhile, on Mars, god-like beings from the Greek pantheon have resurrected scholars to study and record the events surrounding the siege of ancient Troy by Achilles and the Greeks. the scholars, who are terrorized by their masters and easily killed on a whim, are given the ability to morph and blend in with the trojans and greeks, and their goal is to record discrepancies between recorded history and the actual events unfolding before them. but the gods are a warlike and scheming group, and political intrigues swirl as gods/goddeses favor either the trojans or the greeks. one of the scholars, a 21th century professor and expert of Homer's Iliad, is chosen by Aphrodite to assasinate her rival, Pallas Athena.

And bearing down upon the lot of them, four sentient machines from Jovian space rush in to investigate large and unexplained quantum flux events emanating from Mars. Far from being cold and unpleasant beings, these descendants of the early machine explorers from earth are a lively and erudite lot, quoting Shakespeare and arguing about the works of Proust.

Dan Simmons strength is his ability to mesmerize readers with his visions of far future science, while retaining (and celebrating) the essential humanity of his characters. Note, however, that he is NOT on par technically with writers such as Vernor Vinge, who are researchers in real life, and you will not find many explanations on HOW all these far-future gadgets may work.

In addition, Dan Simmons sometimes gets too "westernized" in his viewpoints (the last Hyperion novel being a notable exception), and readers may be wondering where all the non-anglicized people (and their ideas and languages) have gone. This might also present a problem for people not familiar with Shakespeare, Proust, or the Iliad, simply because they will not be able to fully appreciate the dexterity with which Simmons meshes lierature with hard sf.

However, these ultimately do not detract at all from his exceptional story-telling, and the depth and beauty of this work shines through on every page. I literally had to SLOW down and stop reading because I hated how fast I was coming near the end of the book. My only consolation was that this is a two-parter, with the upcoming novel Olympus concluding the epic.

Almost everyone will find something to enjoy. Devotees of ancient literature will be overjoyed by how Simmons has created an intricate melding of his sf storylines with the far older tales of Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and Helen of Troy (along with all the Gods and Goddesses like Zeus, Athena, Hera, Ares, et al). People with an interest in the Social Sciences can compare his vision of a future human society devoid of purpose to that developed by HG Wells in the Time Machine. Finally, anyone with an interest in computers, robots, and artificial life will be absolutely fascinated by the sentient machines he calls "Moravecs" (which I found was the name of a robot researcher from Carnegie Mellon University).