Episode 1 of the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas podcast featured Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, and that lively discussion prompted me to track down another Simmons book that had been recommended to me multiple times: Ilium, which recently became available in paperback and now has a sequel on the stands, Olympos.
This is an odd book. Simmons envisions a solar system several thousand years in the future. Earth is practically uninhabited—a few hundred thousand “old-style” humans are all that is left of us. So-called “post-humans” left the planet long ago for cities built on asteroids in orbit. The “old-style” humans are each allotted one hundred years of life, at which point they are faxed (quantum teleported) to the rings to live forever with the post-humans. Or so the ordinary humans believe. Living in complete ignorance on the battle-scarred surface—you might say the environment is post-post-post-apocalyptic—the humans are no longer able to use advanced technology or even read, and they spend the majority of their time faxing among the few remaining cities to attend parties. Their every needs are met by autonomous robots and odd creatures known as voynix. They’ve gone soft, in other words, and when a human from closer to our own time calls them eloi, we know exactly what she’s talking about.
Meanwhile, self-evolved robots known as moravecs inhabit Jupiter’s moons, exploring, discussing Proust and Shakespeare, philosophizing about the meaning of it all. Of all the various creatures and races and characters that populate this very dense book, these robots—which come in all shapes and sizes, from giant hard-vacuum crabs to tiny bipedal androids—are the most recognizably human.
The central action of the book takes place on Mars, however, where the Trojan War is being re-enacted on the slopes of Olympos, the tallest volcano in the solar system. Hector and Achilles and the rest do battle under the watchful eyes of the gods themselves: Zeus, Athena, etc. Meanwhile, “scholics”—classics scholars from our own time—wander the battlefield, comparing and constrasting the battle with the Iliad as recorded by Homer.
Now, Simmons is an author that likes to keep a lot of balls up in the air. He throws a lot at you and raises a lot of questions, which makes the book a real page-turner, very compelling. Are the gods just the post-humans, play-acting? Maybe, but none of the gods but Zeus have any idea what will happen next, and the humble scholics are forbidden by Zeus from sharing the events of the Iliad with any of them. Are the Achaean and Trojan warriors androids? clones? quantum waveforms? Who is behind all this, and why are they doing it?
All the quantum activity on Mars draws the attention of the moravecs in Jupiter space, who send a contigent to investigate and, if necessary, stop whatever the post-humans are up to. Back on Earth, in a fairly unrelated thread, some of the “old-style” humans struggle to make their way up to the rings, where the posts supposedly live. Their illusions about the afterlife are, needless to say, shattered.
It’s a great read, with a lot of terrific ideas, but the book begins to wear on you when you realize that, if Simmons does have answers to the questions he’s raising—who are the post-humans, and what makes them “post”? what are the gods up to? why are little green men erecting thousands of stone heads on Mars? who terraformed the red planet in less than a century and how?—the author doesn’t plan to share those answers with the reader. And as far as narrative structure, the final third of the book feels slapdash, as if somebody told Simmons around page 350 that he’d better start wrapping all his threads, and fast.
It’s possible that Olympos answers the questions that Ilium raises, but even so I expect more closure and a more satisfying conclusion from any book, even one that’s part of a series. Still, Ilium is terrific fun while reading, a satisfying fantasy. After all, who wouldn’t want to live through and participate in the Trojan War, invulnerable, knowing exactly what would happen next, and being able to change events when desired. Hockenberry, the scholic through whose eyes we witness the events on Mars, is even given a morphing bracelet that lets him assume anyone’s identity—from Odysseus to Paris—and a Harry Potter-esque invisibility device. Given techno-goodies like that, I think any red-blooded classics scholar would pop into Helen’s tent to see what she was up to, maybe launch a few ships…
Ilium by Dan Simmons
Publisher : Eos / Harper Voyager; First Edition (July 22, 2003)
Hardcover : 592 pages
ISBN: 0380978938
ISBN-13 : 978-0380978939
Genre: far future post-apocalyptic SF
Although I loved the Hyperion-Endymion series, I had the same empty feeling as David had near the end of Ilium. Either too much or too little is explained at the end. I find I’m not curious to find out how things develop in Olympos. It is apparent there is going to be a war which will probably intertwine all the threads of Ilium but there doesn’t seem to be any place left for novelty like new characters or new situations.
However Dan Simmons has a way of surprising even the most blase of critics.
I was in B&N the other day and I decided to peek at the flap for OLYMPOS. Just didn’t grab me. It felt like reading the synopsis of a soap opera, not a scifi novel. I kind of hope that I’m wrong, that Dan’s got something surprising lined up in there that somehow validates ILIUM, but judging from the buzz I’ve heard about it, I just don’t think that’s happened.
I suspose it depends on whether you get annoyed if you don’t get all the answers. Olympos provides some answers but not all. Personally I enjoyed both books.