Ilium

By: Dan Simmons

Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau

Length: 29 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing - and often influencing - the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy.

Thomas Hockenberry, former 21st-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new assignment for the wary scholic, one dictated by Aphrodite herself.

With the help of 40th-century technology, Hockenberry is to infiltrate Olympos, spy on its divine inhabitants...and ultimately destroy Aphrodite's sister and rival, the goddess Pallas Athena. On an Earth profoundly changed since the departure of the Post-Humans centuries earlier, the great events on the bloody plains of Ilium serve as mere entertainment.

Its scenes of unrivaled heroics and unequaled carnage add excitement to human lives devoid of courage, strife, labor, and purpose. But this eloi-like existence is not enough for Harman, a man in the last year of his last 20. That rarest of post-postmodern men - an "adventurer" - he intends to explore far beyond the boundaries of his world before his allotted time expires, in search of a lost past, a devastating truth, and an escape from his own inevitable "final fax." Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian space, four sentient machines race to investigate - and, perhaps, terminate - the potentially catastrophic emissions of unexplained quantum-flux emanating from a mountaintop miles above the terraformed surface of Mars.

©2003 Dan Simmons (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Confusing

I found this book terribly confusing. Just when I felt I had a sense of a character the author would wildly stagger off to another adventure with other characters and scenes that weren't well defined. I felt that the author threw lots of words and descriptions to try to convince the listener that the reality of the story had some substance. In believable fantasy and sci-fi the pseudo science is at least consistent or based on descriptions that make the story's world real. But it seemed transparent and flimsy. I could not finish the book having lost interest in it about half way through. The concept seemed interesting but the execution was not well done in my opinion.

Morvaks, LGM, Trojans and more...

At first I'm listening to this book and I'm, "What?" And then it's over.

I love this author, especially his great characters. I read Hyperion and listened to the rest of the series. This book was a great counter weight to the other works I've read and listened to so far.

Exceptional

Simmons manages to capture your attention and to entertain while he weaves multiple stories and improbable characters together. I’ve read hundreds of sci-if books, and many different renderings of Greek mythology; and I have to say that Ilium and Olympos are up there on my list of favorites.

Slow to start, but a fun world

The process of introducing all the characters is slow and confusing. But once you meet the old lady it starts getting fun.

Worthwhile listen

Not nearly as interesting as the Hyperion series but still good! It gets slow in a few places but picks up toward the end.

narration

Kevin Pariseau has made another great Dan Simmons story harder to get through than necessary.

Wildly imaginative, painfully self-indulgent

I enjoyed and admire Simmons' "Endymion" series a bunch. This isn't that. I was eager for this one to be over. His knowledge of Shakespeare, Proust, "The Illiad" and "The Odyssey" is impressive. But this book would have been less of a slog if somebody had put a hand on his shoulder as he had it in progress and encouraged him to rethink the scope; maybe limit the number of toppings. I won't be starting the sequel. Pariseau does a very fine job with the performance. He must have enormous stamina.

Awesome book!

Excellent character dialogue from the narrator's. This story kept me wanting more. can't wait to get the next book!

Excellent series

I loved the Hyperion series and was sad it ended. Now there is Illium. An excellent new story. And there is Olympos to look forward to. Am satisfied. Until Olympos finishes.

Achaeans and robots and post-humans, oh my

(3.5 stars) I think there was some Star Trek episode in which characters from a fictional work were brought to life by advanced technology and wrought havoc, until Kirk remembered his classics. This novel is that idea on steroids. We get Shakespeare and Proust-quoting robots from the moons of Jupiter, and classical Greek gods who dwell on Mount Olympus -- on Mars -- and use nanotechnology and quantum doodads to intervene in a parallel universe in which the events of The Iliad are taking place, almost exactly as Homer described them.

Dan Simmons set a high bar with Hyperion, which remains one of my favorite science fiction novels (I’m less enthusiastic about its followups). That book proved that space opera can play games with literary intertextuality, and it also had a great universe and some page-turning mysteries. So I was half skeptical, half optimistic about this one.

I’ll give Simmons credit for having the skill to suck me into the story, in spite of my skepticism. The Iliad storyline, in which a 20th century Homeric scholar named Thomas Hockenberry was somehow resurrected by the gods to be an expert observer of the Trojan War (which only Zeus can foresee the outcome of), seemed well-researched and was a lot of fun, though it was helpful that I had recently read a translation of the Iliad. Hockenberry, ever the jaded academic, manages to manipulate the poem’s characters, who stay in character, towards breaking free of their prescribed fates.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, where about two thousand years have gone by since our time, a small population of “old-style” humans lives lives of leisure and ignorance, cared for by machines that post-humans left behind when they departed centuries ago. A group of these humans has begun to suspect that things have not always been this way, and embark on a hunt for answers on a planet that’s changed quite a bit since our time. With a little help from their new friend, Odysseus. The third thread concerns two moravecs from Jupiter, where their kind has evolved over the centuries, who crash-land on a now-terraformed Mars, and soon discover that knowledge of Shakespeare (not to mention Proust’s thoughts on the strangeness of time) might apply to their situation.

In terms of writing, I thought this one was only sometimes up the dark brilliance of Hyperion, but still a good ride. Simmons is at his best when he’s immersing the reader in a scene (as he does fantastically in some of the Troy sequences) or doing clever mashups (as with a creepy space station monster who speaks in Shakespeare mode), and less so when he’s going through the workmanlike process of having characters run or teleport around the map in order to connect pieces of his far-flung plot and themes (look for the annoying SF trope of invoking “quantum” to explain the essentially magical). How Simmons will pull everything together in the second, final book remains for me to see, but I find the ideas he seems to be going for interesting. Might old myths and legends, which have stayed in our collective memory so far, still be haunting us in whatever post-human, post-post-modern future is to come? "We're not fighters", says one character. "Oh, yes you are," replies another, "it's still in your genes". I also liked the little in-jokes, such as a scene in which Hockenberry, annoyed with how his PC fellow academics kept reading gay tendencies into certain Iliad characters, discovers that the truth is a little... ambiguous.

Audiobook narrator Kevin Pariseau is competent enough, but I think he does better at humor than drama. His wry Hockenberry is amusing, but his gods and heroes are a little lacking in gravitas.