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132 of 142 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well, we are definitely not in the Iliad any more, Toto, October 27, 2003
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.
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83 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What Great Sci-Fi Is All About, July 31, 2003
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.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shakespeare and Homer and Proust, Oh My!, August 4, 2003
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.
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