Customer Reviews

Olympos

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(31)
2 star:		(31)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I'm glad we have Dan Simmons because an author who has the courage to imagine on a grand, fantastic scale and has the guts to take a story all the way is rare and alway a pleasure.

Unfortunately, Simmons fails in this particular attempt - Illium was great, Olympos starts out convoluted, amps up on suspense around the middle and then the story falls apart completely.

I'll avoid being repetetive but let me just say that all the loose ends listed here by other reviewers are truly loose ends and not just oversights by inattentive readers.

For example: If an auhor says: "This character is told to walk the Atlantic Breach for months even though he could be brought to the other side in seconds - but there is a deeper reason for it!" - then I think the reader deserves to find out that reason at some point.

The explanation given for the existence of the Greek gods on Mars and all the other fantastically bizarre things that are going is, it turns out, thoroughly ridiculous. It's an all-purpose explanation that makes no more sense than "Well, anything is possible..."

Why was Hockenberry created by the Gods?

Why was he recording the Trojan War for Zeus?

I mean... - this is the MAIN CHARACTER and his entire existence makes no sense.

What happened to the big villain (Setebos)? He just disappears, without explanation!!!

What is Moira doing in there? First, it seems so important to wake her, then she does nothing but walk around invisible!

Why is Prospero important? What does he do? Nothing.

Why did the moravecs mount a huge expedition to Earth to end the quantum disturbance? They end up doing absolutely nothing because Setebos, as I said, just disappears...

So - many points for imagination and good writing, and a dissappointed shake of the head for a story that simply does not deliver.

Please don't get me wrong. I am a HUGE Dan Simmons fan. I am an avid fan of his Hyperion series and I am waiting with serious anticipation for a movie series to unfold. While reading Ilium, I fell in love with the slightly dorky Hockenberry and the glorious Orphu and Mahnmut, worrying and fretting about their outcomes in this finale...

I was SO disappointed. This is just not Mr. Simmons' best writing. At BEST this is a melange of notes, maddeningly short chapters that jump from one subplot to the next (you literally have 5 or 6 subplots with an added one or two thrown in in the last 100 pages just to tick you off). Then, when you are heading for that all critical showdown with the antagonists (of which there are a minimum of 4 major and a whole slew of minors including Helen of Troy), you get NOTHING. I mean, there IS no showdown. The horrific Setebos and his evil sidekick Caliban (who was supposed to be THE bad one in Ilium)...Well, let's just say that Nada, zip and "What the He**!!" were my thoughts and exclamations. It was just awful. You get some seriously disturbing scenes like semi-necrophilia/rape the stasis patient (a la Kill Bill Part 1) which frankly, leave a bad, stinky, taste in your mouth. There is a lot of mind numbing exposition/explanation of physics and brane holes and all the things that make you think that Mr. Simmons is just trying to prove he ran these things past physics/chaos/quantum theory prof friends of his. (My favorite quip from anyone like this was simply "Quantum Physicists have P-branes".)

The book starts out really well. The chapters are of good length. Then they get smaller, more frenetic and things spin in and out and back again until you KNOW the end is going to slam into you and you are not going to like it. It's the same thing I have found over the years with Anne Rice. She would start out with an amazing plot and lose it in the middle and muddle her way to the disappointing, often hard to understand end.

And MAN, if Odysseus were really alive today, there is NO way he'd have followed Sycorax through time just to get it on with her. He'd have tricked her to be with his beloved. Come ON! There had to have been SOME kind of heroic ending instead of him just turning into a horny old time traveler! Gads. Such a letdown!

And BY the way, what EVER happened to the STRONG WOMAN characters that he seemed to have in his previous novels? In this one, she leads her wounded and left for dead group of friends out of serious danger then has a baby and BAM, she is relegated to a minor character who defers to hubby by the end. (Must be all the BOOK LEARNING he could hold over her head. Maybe he didn't send her as many PACKETS????) She just turns from heroine to glowing barefoot momma with kids in the background...ick.

Mr. Simmons is an amazing writer. I would really like to see more of the Hyperion series with a fresh, new slant. I have said this before and I hope I don't see these things anymore. I do not ever want to see another literary translation of a major epic in any more of his sci fi books. The man is seriously intimidating in his love and knowledge of ancient literature but, I can't take another novel full of clips from Keats, Yeats, Proust, Shakespeare and the myriads of Iliads. Moreover, I don't want any more stories with brane holes, creches or resurrection couches. And for goodness sake, stop with the mini-chapters and zillions of characters and sub plots. Too many to keep up with.

All in all, I am seriously disappointed. I even popped for the signed leather limited edition. Oh well. I hope for many more. They can't all be divine. But no more stinkers please!!! I like you too much to see you steep yourself in more of this!

Dan Simmons is amazingly skilled as a writer. He has obviously spent much time with great literature to his benefit and his readers'. The Hyperion tetralogy still contains more archetypal images in less space than any book or series of books I know.

Ilium, the predecessor to this book, was an interesting set-up and I enjoyed it. [What's not to like when an English professor gets to become the bedmate of Helen of Troy? Shades of "The Kugelmass Episode"!]

I was eager to find out how Simmons would get himself out of the many traps he had put himself into. Nobody is a better speculative fiction Houdini than he is.

And here we are with gazillions of pages that lead to one of those "Huh?" last-volume-of-the-Dune-series endings. Lots of loose ends here and no third volume in sight.

No spoilers here, but I have to note that the trajectories of the characters seems arbitrary sometimes - Achilles especially with a bizarre wind-up.

I also find some of the writing self-indulgent in a crass kind of way. A character of immense age and power spends much time talking like an oracle and some like a trailer trash Jerry Springer guest.

In the same way, some of the important plot events happen offstage and seem designed simply to move characters around and get them in and out of the narrative.

If you enjoyed Ilium, you ought to read this one, but bear in mind that it's middling Simmons. Middling Simmons is far better than the best of many other writers. And yet, Simmons's best writing and thinking promises a book - or a series of books - much better than this one. It's a promise that he's never lived up to, not even in the Hyperion books. I hope he someday writes the book that he's capable of.

Meanwhile, consider this a kind of placeholder for that book. It's Simmons on cruise control.

After "Illium," I couldn't wait to read this.

Unfortunately, it was a huge disappointment.

The biggest problem is that almost no resolution is given to the many fantastic plots and characters. This book merely adds more stories, more figures, and never explains, resolves or wraps up any of it.

The few explanations that finally are given are absolutely ludicrous.

It's a shame because this story - which had a brilliant start - degenerates into disjointed, boring, nerdy garbage.

Suddenly, after all the cool stuff in Illium, you get robots who are Star Trek fans (a few thousand years after the series aired), a supervillain who is a big brain bug with hands as feet (how silly is that?) that feeds on human suffering (yawn), trite anti-Islamic-terrorism stuff, a silly D&D-ish sex scene, an alien giant who appears out of nowhere and - can you say deux ex machina? - resolves a few plot lines, a cool moravec army that never does anything, a verse-talking monster who... oh yeah, that's one of the unresolved plot lines, a verse-talking hologram who... oh, that's another unresolved plotline, a major character who just disappears in another silly sex scene with Odysseus, an ex-Eloi going on a completely senseless and unexplained trek through an artifical ocean canyon, a Post-Human who is finally awoken with great fuss and never does anything but walk around invisible (another big yawn there), a long, harrowing but completely unnecessary journey in a giant cable car (an aerial repeat of Hyperion's wind car) and, finally, a main character - Hockenberry - who apparently was brought back to life for a reason by Zeus (whatever happens to Zeus, anyway?) but we never learn that reason.

Also - and I should mention I'm not a gay rights activist or anything - but there is a strangely conspicuous anti-gay slur near the end of the book.

Apparently, other reviewers noticed that, too.

It doesn't fit in at all and it's almost as if someone hacked into the manuscript after the editors approved it and added it.

Perhaps that's the explanation for this whole mess of a book?

What can I say?

I guess the only thing I can say is:

"What's the point?"

I'm a huge Simmons fan and the Hyperion series is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi collections. I loved Ilium and devoured the book in one weekend. I couldn't wait for the follow-up. In fact, I pre-ordered Olympos and the new H. Potter book at about the same time, and decided that Olympos was my next must-read book.

Then, it literally took me 4 months to read Olympos. I essentially had to force myself to keep reading. Ilium was ablaze with suspense and all the characters, from the gods to the moravecs (organic machines), leapt off the page they were so alive.

Spoiler Alerts: There are numerous story threads that are left hanging, others that simply dissipate. The build-up created in Ilium, where meta-intelligences (Prospero, Sycorax, Ariel, post-humans in the guise of the Greek Pantheon) are battling for their respective interests, is not resolved in Olympos. Other characters arrive, and their motives are never fully explored or explained. Prospero floats around being cryptic. Sycorax gives up a battle she has been waging for centuries to have sex with Odysseus. Ariel appears once, acts mysterious, and disappears. The post-human Greek gods just eventually go away.

In the first book, the fabric of the entire universe is in danger because the post-humans have abused quantum reality. Additionally, the quantum distortions have allowed evil beings from other dimensions to slip into our universe. In Olympos, the evil departs, with no explanation. Apparently, the quantum instability is also resolved, also without much explanation. Primary characters from the first book are ignored in the second.

Most frustrating, the pace of the second book is lethargic through 3/4 of the novel, and then the pace picks up at frenetic speed. At the point where the pace increases, is precisely where things just stop being explained. The moravecs, which, throughout Ilium, carry the literary heart and soul of mankind because mankind has forgotten them, become, in book two, cute/fuzzy jokesters who babysit children. In book one, they had their own society!

I'm not sure how this got past the editors, but narratively speaking, this is an inferior effort from Simmons, and especially in light of the first book, which blew me away. This book left me cold and flat, and by the end, I just didn't care what happened to anyone in the book. I was just happy I could finally move on to Harry Potter.

I'll start by saying I loved the first book of the series (Illium). Read it three times. The final scene with the combined Greek, Trojan, and robot armies ready to take on the gods on Mars just blew me away. I couldn't wait for Olympos, which I hoped would give me some resolution and some answers. Somehow all the plots would wrap together and we'd get a clue how this all came about.

What do we get here? Resolution yes - some good, some bad. But very little answers. Others below have said it much better than me. But I'm feeling deprived and ripped off, so here are my major plot line complaints...

Who/what/where/when is this Sycorax person? The only hint we get is the goofy little line about her "relationship" with Prospero. There's some sense that her whole role in the story is so she can have sex with Odysseus (ala Circe in the travels), but is that really it? Is she the person who really started all this?

What happened to Setebos? Someone calls down and says The Quiet is coming and he bails? A big war between Prospero and Setebos is hinted at in the beginning, but then we hear Setebos has just been hanging out on Mars sucking bad vibes from the Trojan war (which is not happening in Mars, anyway....)

Just who was the person or persons that came through from the alternate universe? Setebos? Sycorax? Zeus (as he claims to have existed before the other gods came into being)? Demogorgon? All of them? Your guess really is as good as mine.

This whole thing starts because of the needle on the quantum flux-o-meter is in the red zone and the solar system is about to implode, but there's no resolution to this. The rest of the "gods" are left to duke it out between Mars and Illium-Earth, so that quantum stuff is still on-going. Some of the others on Earth can QT all round. Is the fleeing of Setebos and Sycorax enough to calm things down?

This isn't really a plot line, but sort of a "what the heck?" thing. We're sort of led to believe that Harman finds out about the Sword of Allah so he can realize the dark side of human nature and just what might happen if "civilization" returns. He gets all depressed about it as he's dying, but then he gets all better and civilization returns anyway, and nobody seems to care anymore. Kind of reminded me of an atheist in a foxhole who makes it through, only to proudly proclaim his atheism again.

All in all, Simmons created an enterining world and gave us enough of its history to pique our curiousity, but that's about it. I'll admit to daydreaming trying to resolve it all in my head, but overall, Olympos is very, very disappointing after the thrill of Illium.

I remember when I reached the end of Ilium, I thought to myself, "cool, I guess Olympos will be about the war of the gods vs. the Greeks and Trojans." I mean, what else could the sequel be about really? Achilles' mission to dethrone the gods, Zeus specifically, was definitely the focal point of the last 50 or so pages of Ilium, so obviously Olympos would focus on and resolve that. Well, I guess obviously not.

Olympos turns out to be a rambling, incomprehensible mess of a story. It turns out that that war between humans and gods is only the focus for about the first 100 pages, and then Simmons turns the focus of the novel into an abstract retelling of The Tempest, with characters that either we barely encountered in Ilium, or we didn't even meet at all. Overall, the story in Olympos is just too fragmented to really make the reader care about what is going on. As we try to keep track of roughly 7 different storylines, everything just starts to run together, and we slowly begin to stop caring about what is occurring.

I didn't completely hate the novel, though. Much like Ilium, it has many strong moments, but Dan Simmons never builds on those strong moments to make the entire story stronger. It seems like Simmons believe that if he thrown in a great segment every once in a while, the reader will forgive him for the rambling, incoherent mess that happens between those moments. We are ultimately asked to care about characters for reasons that we have no reason to give a hoot. With Ada and Harman, we are supposed to believe and care about their strong relationship with each other, but since they spend the entire book apart, their connection seems flimsy, at best.

By far the most frustrating part, though, is the anticlimactic finale that will leave you scratching your head. You've just sat through roughly 1300 pages of story, and there is no climax. None. The book builds throughout all of its 700 pages to what you would think will be an amazing, jaw-dropping climax, but it's almost like Simmons is enjoying being withholding. Instead of an exciting ending, we get a chance encounter/connection between two of the main storylines, and then we skip ahead to years after the conclusion of the events, and we are told in an objective, boring manner of what happened at the end.

Total disappointment.

It is amazing that a writer with the skill to craft Hyperion, after that crafts a book like Ilium and Olympus.

The good thing about Ilium and Olympus is the amount of ideas mr. Simmons has in his story. Combining Homer's Iliad with literary robots from Jupiter and 'Gods' on Mars' Olympos that use quantum and nanotechnology, what could be cooler? Even in his worst books Simmons has more ideas, literature and vivid imagination than most average science fiction writers have in their life.

However, the execution of this book is plain horrific, especially with Hyperion in my mind, that that in my opinion is one of the best science fiction books ever written. The biggest problem in my regard is the lack of motive. Characters in the book just have no motive to do the things they do.

* Spoiler alert *

Some examples of events for which no motives is given.

- Professor Hockenberry stays with the Greek troops while they are loosing, he can be hit and die every minute, they don't like him or accept him and he can choose to teleport and have sex with the most beautiful woman of earth. Why did he want to stay?

- Why did Prospero send Harman on a senseless thousands mile walk when his race badly needed him. Just for the submarine, after which he almost died and about which he could do nothing?

- Why did the evil monsters with almost eternal power that even could wreck the whole solar system just go away, even without putting up a fight. "Because it was rumored that the silent one was comming"? Give me a break.

- Why was Ilium transported to the future?

- Why was Moira revived and why did she ever went to sleep anyway? She could virtually live forever with the hospitums and she didn't need a body anyway. Again no reason.

- Why did Setebos remove all humans from the old earth and put them in a tachyon beam in current earth?

- Why, after aeons of their lifestiles do Harman and Ada want to start a family and suddenly have current day ethics?

- Why would robots be programmed to love poetry and need centuries for studying only one writer.

* End Spoiler Alert *

Besides not having motives the characters are very shallow. You have no idea what goes on in the mind of the Gods or in the heroes like Achilles. They never feel fear, nor are enthusiastic about anything. They just do stuff because they do or because it is written by Homer. All the Gods act the same, all the "ancient" people act the same, all the "new" people except for a mild variation Harman act the same.

Furthermore, there is no real danger. Mr. Simmons fell into the trap of putting lead characters in infinite danger, but always be saved in the last second. Yuck.

Then there is the issue of style. To make future beings probable they talk this pseudo-science all the time. Sentences are filled with "nano", "quantum", "brane" so much that it is clear that mr. Simmons tries to show off that he knows something about these scientific concepts. While I have the feeling he doesn't, really. Furthermore, these beings communicate with others of which they know they cannot know anything about these concepts, but just keep on talking the same way. And all characters do that. Plain ridiculous.

Also the literary reference, Simmon's trademark, is done really badly here. The references (mostly Shakespeare) go nowhere, he even throws in a mediocre poem of his wife. It all seems very forced and totally irrelevant. What a shame.

And don't let me even start on the anti-Islam and anti-gay references that come out of nowhere. Why?!?

To conclude, I really cannot recommend this book. If you just want to be shortly amused and don't care about quality you can read it. If you want to read some good science fiction I'd recommend to read Hyperion and possibly Endymion from the same writer. Those are terrific, great, splendid. The Ilium / Olympos is unworthy to be even in those books' shadow.

Please, PLEASE, mr. Simmons, start writing high quality Science Fiction again.

I have not finished this book, and I'm not sure that I will. I enjoyed Ilium, this book has been a disappointment.

The characters appear to have no will of their own. They're complete slaves to the plot and are, for all intents and purposes, empty vessels. Perhaps this isn't entirely fair, but let me give you a couple of examples: Helen's rational for attempting to murder Hockenberry is that she wants her fate to be inextricably linked to Troy. Hockenberry finds this confusing: he's not the only one. The rational used to explain away the otherwise incomprehensible behavior of the characters more or less has that effect. The author seems to imply that these classic figures are incomprehensible because their character is alien to us. I have always found that particular argument stupid. Yes; classical people had different values. Nevertheless, they are not incomprehensible. The fact that Homer's epic is still read, studied, and appreciated requires that we are able to identify with, and understand, the classic psyche. The Prospero / Setebos encounter makes little sense, either, and the presence of the Voynix with Prospero is just plain confusing. Why did Prospero go to Mars, anyway? What was the purpose of that meeting? What did Prospero hope to accomplish? It seems that the entire encounter was merely a heavy handed way to introduce Setebos as an oppositional player to Prospero. No attempt to explain the encounter was made.

For the most part, this is the way the book proceeds. Characters are inexplicably thrown into different scenes where their behavior makes little to no sense. The gods, who you would expect to become more faceted, remain one dimensional, The greeks are predicably inconsistent, and the moravecs - do what exactly? It appears that the moravecs real role in this book is to play driver while Simmons moves his character from one plot point (Mars) to the next (Earth).

I suspect that some might find the fact that women are potrayed as essentially sexual objects for male lust as objectionable. Then again, the men aren't much better considering the fact that both Zeus and Achilles are portrayed as both being complete dopes whenever sex is involved. Ideally, the greek gods should be interesting because they share human flaws - they should be complex, not violent, glorified bodying building sex fiends.

In fact, this is probably the most succinct critique of this novel; there is no "Why". It's a frustrating read. I get the sense that the author didn't actually know what he wanted to happen, and that the story got to big for him to resolve. Hashing through page after page of self-indulgent, pseudo-intellectual ramblings gets old.

Get the book if you have to, but be prepared to be disappointed. Unfortunately, I feel the Olympos was so poorly written that it actually pulls Ilium, as a much better effort, down. It fails to successfully resolve the issues presented in the first book, and the characters actually devolve into one dimnesional stereo types one would expect in a High School Sci-Fi writing project. All in all, a frustrating and unrewarding experience. The book is so bad, in fact, that I'm tempted to completely avoid Simmon's work, despite hearing how good the Hyperion series is suppose to be.

If you want a good book Sci Fi book to read, forget this one and get Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

I thoroughly enjoyed Ilium and was very much looking forward to reading its sequel, Olympos. The worlds that Simmons constructed in Ilium were vivid, rich and exciting and knowing Simmons' work I was eagerly anticipating the grand finale. It never seemed to happen. Instead, Simmons seems to lose control of the story shortly after the book begins: while Olympos, like Ilium, contains many spectacular images and scenes, they just don't seem to fit together very well.

My biggest disappointment was that the book just left me unsatisfied. Olympos promises a lot: the origin of the Greek gods, the story behind Setebos, a final confrontation with Caliban, the purpose behind the Voynix (if you've read Ilium, you know what I mean), but it never seems to deliver the goods. Sure, you get some explanations, but they just seem banal and don't fit very well into a coherent story. This is not the grand Simmons style.

The book's conclusion just seems hurried or even lazy. Here is an example of a loose plot thread that people that have already read Olympos would understand: how did Noman get to Earth? The conclusion is riddled with such loose ends. It's almost as if Simmons was past his deadline and had to submit an unfinished manuscript.

So while this book has its moments, and it was mostly fun to read, as someone who really loves Simmons' work, I reluctantly have to give Olympos only 3 stars. If it were any other author, I would probably go as low as 2.