Olympos

By: Dan Simmons

Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau

Length: 36 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Beneath the gaze of the gods, the mighty armies of Greece and Troy met in fierce and glorious combat, scrupulously following the text set forth in Homer's timeless narrative. But that was before 21st-century scholar Thomas Hockenberry stirred the bloody brew, causing an enraged Achilles to join forces with his archenemy, Hector, and turn his murderous wrath on Zeus and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators; before the swift and terrible mechanical creatures that catered for centuries to the pitiful idle remnants of Earth's human race began massing in the millions, to exterminate rather than serve.

And now all bets are off.

©2005 Dan Simmons (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Just throwing everything on the page…

…and hoping some will stick. So many subplots, a rape-ish scene for no good reason, characters made solely for the purpose of allowing the author to write bad poetry…

An epic story

This sequel follows the same formula as the first book. It is long and Simmons loves to say the names of Greeks, but he is following Homer’s lead. This series was not as good as the Hyperion books, but I happily finished it. If you like Simmons, you will like this book.

Wait what happened

Great story that seems like it was murdered by a deadline in the last act. Could have been 20 chapters longer.

Very original, but too artsy fartsy for me

There is no doubt that this is one of a kind. Very original and creative, but also too artsy and boring in many parts.

Better than most Action stories

One of Dan Simmons worst books but better than most action stories I've read. this is a waste of time for Dan Simmons fans, unless you want to see him try and salvage a terrible story. it's the best action book money can buy, and I hate it bc Dan Simmons wrote it.

Da. Simmons left no breast unnamed

Neither right nor left. 2 foot purple sceptor. Great narration with abwide variety of character voices

Second volume is good but not quite as great

This sequel to Ilium follows a pattern I've noticed with Dan Simmons, now that I've read his entire Hyperion Cantos - his first books in a series are really, really good, while the follow-ups are still good, but seem to lose a bit of the brilliance of the original and wind up going in strange places.

Olympos, the second book of this fat duology, continues the saga of a classics professor from 21st century Earth resurrected 3000 years later to witness a recreation of the Trojan War on a terraformed Mars. Although it's not really accurate to call this Hockenberry's saga; he is just the unifying character flitting between the subplots and separate groups of characters, but being a middle-aged temporally displaced academic with a few technological artifacts and his modest wits, he's hardly as epic a figure as vainglorious, undefeatable Achilles, tricky, crafty Odysseus, beautiful and scheming Helen, or the entire Greek pantheon, the two "gods" who created the gods, and the ever-escalating series of gods above them that these various figures meet in what turns out to be a multipart, often disconnected quest not only to unravel the mystery of this futuristic Trojan War, but save the world.

Hockenberry is the only first-person narrator, and he remains a rather milquetoast protagonist, though it's hardly his fault that he got yanked from a Midwestern university 3000 years into the future where suddenly the gods themselves want him dead.

The more interesting chapters are those describing the continuing adventures of the Greek and Trojan heroes, now that recreated plot of the Iliad has gone completely off the rails and Achilles and Hector have teamed up to go to war with the gods. The gods are really masters of magic-like nanotechnology, though their true nature and where they came from is finally revealed in this book. As Olympos opens, the sentient robots from the moons of Jupiter who'd come to investigate a big mess of quantum shenanigans taking place in the inner systems, where Mars was thought to be uninhabited and humans on Earth thought to be long extinct, are helping defend Troy from siege by the gods. Meanwhile, the remaining humans on Earth, whose miraculous ancient technology has fallen, forcing an Eloi-like civilization to learn how to actually survive the hard way, even as long-dormant mechanical beings have awoken and begun seeking to exterminate them, are also forced to contend with Caliban, the cannibalistic genetically engineered monstrosity who was one of the chief villains in the previous volume.

There are a lot of characters and subplots here, and Simmons as usual loads this science-fantasy space opera with references from Proust, Homer, Shakespeare, Blake, and numerous others. He layers subplot over subplot, multiple layers of villainous schemes, each villain being the pawn of a greater one, and then starts shoving all sorts of reality-bending weirdness into the story, involving actual divine beings, quantum reality, the last remnants of an apocalyptic war, all still while having Shakespearean and Homeric figures running around doing battle.

Simmons definitely captures the barbaric nobility of the Greeks (and sheer orneriness of the Greek gods). And while at times I really had no idea where the story was going, it was never boring. In the end, I think it got a bit bloated and meandering and it seemed that Simmons was willing to throw any weird idea that came to him into the mix, which is why this was a huge doorstopper of a novel following a previous huge doorstopper of a novel.

An epic SF saga, which I recommend, but in my opinion slightly inferior to the first book.

time to read Homer

After reading the Hyperion series I found myself interested in John Keats poetry. Now I guess it's time to read Homer's Iliad. Great

Excellent but flawed

A great story, masterfully told. The ending was a little unsatisfying, and Simmons' extreme right-wing views were very obvious in some parts of the book, which was annoying. Still, a great book.

Everything you’d hoped for

A great feat of imagination to combine all of these elements and never once feel like he’s reaching or lost. Kevin brings this to life as few narrators can.