Ilium (Paperback) ~ Dan Simmons (Author) and Homer... Cover Art

Ilium (Paperback)

By: Dan Simmons (Author) and Homer (Author)

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Review

"...[P]erhaps the one modern reworking [of the ILIAD] to capture both the savage poetry of Homeric death-wounds and the power and terror of the Iliadic gods."

"Simmons folds..[the] disparate threads...[of the novel] into a coherent and engrossing saga."

First line

Rage.
Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles, of Peleus' son, murderous man-killer, fated to die, sing of the rage that cost the Achaeans so many good men and sent so many vital, hearty souls down to the dreary House of Death. And while you're at it, O Muse, sing of the rage of the gods themselves, so petulant and so powerful here on their new Olympos, and of the rage of the post-humans, dead and gone though they might be, and of the rage of those few true humans left, self-absorbed and useless though they may have become.

Publisher's note

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 twenty-first-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 fortieth-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 Twenty. 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 ...

The first book in a remarkable two-part epic to be concluded in the upcoming Olympos, Dan Simmons's Ilium is a breathtaking adventure, enormous in scope and imagination, sweeping across time and space to connect three seemingly disparate stories in fresh, thrilling, and totally unexpected ways. A truly masterful work of speculative fiction, it is quite possibly Simmons's finest achievement to date in an already storied literary career.

Annotation

Dan Simmons, author of the sweeping science fiction Hyperion saga, borrows liberally from the fertile mythology of Homer's ILIAD in this first installment of an epic SF duology, set in a far distant future. The plot consists of three discrete, but thematically related, storylines. On a terraformed Mars, the Trojan War rages, presided over by awesome beings resembling the Greek gods who derive their powers from technology so sophisticated it may as well be magic. On Earth, a group arises from the decadent, uneducated scraps of humanity and struggles to reclaim forgotten knowledge left behind by the more evolved, vanished post-humans. Meanwhile, a group of moravecs--semi-organic, intelligent machines from the inner moons of Jupiter--journey to Mars to investigate a series of odd images they've picked up via remote observation of the planet.

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