So, a little annoyed that Ilium ended so quickly, but curious about the characters’ fates, I picked up Olympos. I thought the plot was a little out of the box, but workable. I actually raced through Ilium, occasionally glossing over uber-tech passages, because I truly cared about what would happen to the characters. That way, the reader always has a handle on what’s going on. Also, he manages to ground the book by strongly developing a handful of characters in each situation.
It’s a good device for maintaining tension. Sound weird? Well, Simmons manages his stories pretty well, alternating between the three plots mainly by chapter. In the third one, these robots (with some living parts) from Jupiter are flying out to Mars (where The Iliad is happening) and talking about Western literature (Shakespeare and Proust, mainly). In the second one, people are on Earth, but their lives are pretty unrecognisable for a twenty-first century human.
In the first one, Simmons essentially decides to retell Homer’s The Iliad in a sci-fi setting.
The plot is complicated, involving three main threads. That being said, I was favourably impressed with Ilium. While I occasionally read fantasy (mainly David Eddings), I’ve never enjoyed a science-fiction book. It’s a two-book series, that should probably be published as one extra-large book, since the action continues seamlessly. So, I ended up reading Iluim and Olympos by Dan Simmons as two of my Chunkster Challenges (they come to 1,643 pages-more than War and Peace).
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