Complex layers of literary allusion. The only characters I came to care about were the robots Mahnmut and Orphu, and I wanted a better ending for them. ( )

After the tedious Quicksilver, Ilium was a welcome change. It's a wonderful blend of science fiction and Greek myth.

As Simmons' Hyperion was infused with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, so Ilium works from Homer's Iliad. One of the central events of the book is the siege of Troy. In Ilium, however, the gods are more science fiction than fantasy--they accomplish their majestic feats via nanotechnology and quantum manipulation. And the events in the Iliad are only a rough third of the events in Ilium.

The book opens with the words of a twentieth-century Homeric scholar, in a very deliberate reference to the opening of the Iliad. That scholar has been resurrected by the gods and sent to observe the unfolding of events that shaped the Iliad. The following chapter introduces humans living on Earth several thousand years past the 20th century, in a world largely abandoned--the "post-humans" meddled with the planet, cleaned up some of their mess, and left it to the old-style humans, whose lives they continue to regulate. The third chapter sets the stage for the third storyline, involving sentient organic/inorganic machines that live and work among the moons of Jupiter.

Into all three storylines, the reader is dropped without much backstory; the shape of the world in which the characters live must be gleaned from details in the story's telling. And the threads don't tie themselves together until a distance into the book.

The single best thing about the book, however, is the writing. Simmons does a very good job of taking these disparate threads, blending them together while painting the backdrop for the story, and weaving a thoroughly engaging tale.

Ilium certainly deserves its Hugo nomination. I can't speak to whether it should win, since I haven't read most of its competitors, but if it does, I'll not be disappointed. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/3f74j3

How very unfortunate that Simmons' duologies fail with the second book as much as they succeed in the first book. I was really looking forward to reading Olympos, the second book of this duology, until I read the abysmal reviews.

But apparently, Simmons plays even more havoc with his created world-- that of a re-imagined Trojan War, set on Mars no less, and the Earth that can no longer house true humans except those who live exactly 100 years and have no culture to speak of. Is it actually possible to include more, and more complex, characters than Zeus, LGM (little green men), Caliban, and a 1400-year-old wandering Jew? So I hear.

Consequently, I won't be reading Olympos. But I recommend Ilium with the caveat that it doesn't end tied with a neat red bow. If you don't mind that, these particular flights of fancy are engaging, for the most part well-drawn, and illuminating (as a mirror to our own lives). ( )

Just finished reading Ilium on my iLiad book reader...that alone is funny. ( )

An imaginative melding of the legend of Troy and hard sci-fi. Dan Simmons at his best. ( )