There are survivors, at least, and many find peace. How does a science fiction story hinge on Homer's Illiad, Shakespear's The Tempest, and of course the poetry of John Keats and still manage to a rip-roaring, fill tilt action piece with more carnage than most war novels I have no idea. Surprisingly, there’s a satisfying conclusion. Dan Simmons imagination is quite simply staggering. Simmons takes “beating up your characters” to an extreme, and I was worried that there’d be nothing but a high body count at the end. But I have faith that they will, and they do. The old-style humans on Earth are being slaughtered to the point of extinction and yet another catastrophe sits under Earth’s ocean…Īs is always the case with Dan Simmons, I’m transfixed by all the separate plot lines, running in different times/universes, and I can’t begin to anticipate how they all come together.

The Jovians hope to save Earth, which is being overwhelmed by the voynix and Setebos, who feeds on horror. But the space-time-continuum (sorry, I’m taking a short-cut) has become unstable around Mars due to post-human tampering, so the organic/mechanized AI Jovians intend to pull out and leave Troy to the mercy of the gods (who have no more mercy for humans than they would for cattle). Hockenberry prevents the sack of Troy by uniting Hector and Achilles in a war against the gods, now shown to be post-humans that have forgotten their origins. Prior to the coating of the book, I was skimming the web pages as well as just required to obtain it over with, shedding any type of assumption of also a resemblance of decision, given that I absolutely recognized that I would certainly need to browse the extension, Olympos, to obtain it. Hockenberry changes Troy’s fate, as written by Homer. Taking the events and characters of the Iliad as his jumping- off point, Dan Simmons has created an epic of time travel and savage warfare.

The continuation of Ilium (see previous entry)… I had a hard time putting this book down for mundane things like eating, working, or talking to my spouse.Īt first, everything seemed controllable.

Dan simmons ilium series