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Summary
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 one observer--Twenty-first Century scholar Thomas Hockenberry--stirred the bloody brew; before an enraged Achilles joined forces with his archenemy Hector; and before the fleet-footed mankiller turned his murderous wrath on Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo, and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators.
Now, all bets are off.
Dan Simmons, the multiple-award-winning author of The Hyperion Cantos, returns with the eagerly anticipated conclusion to his critically acclaimed, Hugo Award-nominated sf epic Ilium. A novel breathtaking in its scope and conception, Olympos ingeniously imagines a catastrophic future where immortal "post-humans" high atop the real Olympos Mons on Mars restage the Trojan War for their own amusement even while the sad remnants of mortal humankind are forced to confront their ultimate annihilation.
For untold centuries, those few old-style humans remaining on Earth have never known strife, toil, or responsibility, each content to live his or her allocated hundred years of life in unquestioning leisure. But virtually overnight and for reasons beyond their comprehension, the world around them has changed forever. The voynix--terrible and swift creatures that once catered to their every need--are now massing in the millions with but one terrifying purpose: the total extermination of the human race.
Having traveled farther and learned more of the wondrous and terrible truth of their world than any others of their kind, Ada and Daeman--with the aid of the crafty and mysterious warrior once called Odysseus, now called Noman--must marshal the pathetic defenses of Ardis Hall in anticipation of the onslaught of the murderous voynix. And they must do so without Harman, Ada's lover and the father of her unborn child, who wanders the Earth on a great odyssey of his own. Harman seeks nothing less than the limitless knowledge necessary to defeat Setebos, an unspeakable, otherworldly monster who feeds on horror, and whose arrival heralds the end of all things.
And meanwhile, back on Mars . . .
The vengeful rebellion of Achilles--and the intervention of sentient robots from Jovian space, determined to prevent a potentially universe-obliterating quantum catastrophe--has set immortal against immortal, igniting a civil war among Olympian gods that may send all things in Heaven and Earth and everywhere in between plummeting straight to Hell.
A monumental work that blurs the often arbitrary line between great sf and serious literature, Dan Simmons's Olympos--together with its extraordinary predecessor, Ilium--sets new standards for the genre, confirming his reputation as one of the most original authors currently working in the field of speculative fiction.
Author Notes
Science fiction writer Dan Simmons was born in East Peoria, Illinois in 1948. He graduated from Wabash College in 1970 and received an M. A. from Washington University the following year.
Simmons was an elementary school teacher and worked in the education field for a decade, including working to develop a gifted education program.
His first successful short story was won a contest and was published in 1982. His first novel, Song of Kali, won a World Fantasy Award, and Simmons has also won a Theodore Sturgeon Award for short fiction, four Bram Stoker Awards, and eight Locus Awards. He is also the author of the Hyperion series, and Simmons and his work have been compared to Herbert's Dune and Asimov's Foundation series.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawing from Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare's Tempest and the work of several 19th-century poets, Simmons achieves another triumph in this majestic, if convoluted, sequel to his much-praised Ilium (2003). Posthumans masquerading as the Greek gods and living on Mars travel back and forth through time and alternate universes to interfere in the real Trojan War, employing a resurrected late 20th-century classics professor, Thomas Hockenberry, as their tool. Meanwhile, the last remaining old-style human beings on a far-future Earth must struggle for survival against a variety of hostile forces. Superhuman entities with names like Prospero, Caliban and Ariel lay complex plots, using human beings as game pieces. From the outer solar system, an advanced race of semiorganic Artificial Intelligences, called moravecs, observe Earth and Mars in consternation, trying to make sense of the situation, hoping to shift the balance of power before out-of-control quantum forces destroy everything. This is powerful stuff, rich in both high-tech sense of wonder and literary allusions, but Simmons is in complete control of his material as half a dozen baroque plot lines smoothly converge on a rousing and highly satisfying conclusion. Agent, Richard Curtis. 7-city author tour. (June 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The final volume in Simmons' retelling of the Iliad begins with the Greeks and Trojans, led by Achilles and Hector, laying siege to the home of the gods when Agamemnon returns with the news that everyone outside of Troy has vanished. From that point, the novel becomes a huge maelstrom of characters from history, mythology, and literature and of beings of vast powers warring against one another and the humans in their various strongholds in a conflict that threatens to destroy the solar system, at the very least. Simmons tells each segment of this saga from a single viewpoint and thereby enables the reader to keep going without getting lost. Simmons fans and those who like whale-sized stories, not to mention those who want to see what happens after the action of Ilium (2003), will enjoy Olympos. --Frieda Murray Copyright 2005 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-In Ilium (Eos, 2003), readers were introduced to Hockenberry, a 20th-century historian on a Mars of the far future restructured to look and feel like ancient Greece. He works for quantum-technology-wielding beings that brought classical mythology to life for their own amusement. Olympos places Hockenberry in an alliance with the Moravecs, a race of sentient robots who fear that the self-styled gods' technology will destroy the solar system. Together, they fight for ways to stop the Olympians. A second story line occurs on Earth, with humankind facing extinction from multiple directions. Voynix, powerful robotic creatures that once served humans, seem bent on killing and destroying everything they can. A monster named Caliban and a giant, pulsating brain known as Setebos add spine-tingling, H. P. Lovecraft-inspired terrors. Full of plot twists, doses of humor, and technologically pumped action sequences, this complex tale is nevertheless readable and surprisingly easy to follow. While it is even more complex than its predecessor, Simmons does a much better job of connecting the threads here. The mixing of Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's The Tempest is likewise handled better, making more solid use of the personae. While it helps to have some familiarity with these classics, it isn't required. The spectacular ending leaves just enough open for a sequel. Fans of epic, action-driven science fiction will talk about this inventive and highly addictive thriller for years.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Science fiction is the most ambitious of contemporary literary genres. Like its predecessor Ilium , Dan Simmons's new novel combines the historical and literary Trojan war with biotechnology, nano-engineering, quantum physics, geology, astronomy, sex, politics, and religion. Sci-fi wants it all, and craves the sorts of complication that produce an opening sentence such as: "Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens." Like so many epics and space operas, Olympos measures individual lives against a cosmic scale. Teenage sex in the back seat of a car, fumbling with "the round snap-stud" of a garter, co-exists with a vision of the river Seine "dried up and paved with human skulls. No one knew why the skulls were there, only that they always had been." This sense of scale, temporal and spatial, contributes to the sense of wonder that, more than any other genre, epic generates. The wonder is also linguistic - a spaceship is a "matte-black fractal bat", the human mind "a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront" - but it doesn't always depend on polysyllables or scientific precision; it can sometimes spring from the contrast between the simplicity of the words and the size of their meaning: "On the cart is a cage. In the cage is a god." Since the sense of astronomic scale is measured against the yardstick of an individual human life, the epic effect does not work without the detailed foregrounded portraiture of individual lives, lifespans, and deaths. "Achilles doesn't like being dead" is, for a reader who has been living with Achilles for hundreds of pages, not just an abstract truism about death but a compressed expression of the particularity of one man's confrontation with his own mortality. The comparison of a sound to "a boy running a stick along the rib cage of a skeleton" makes the boy as real as the sudden skeleton, which pops up where we are expecting a picket fence. This downshifting from hyperbole to humbling everydayness is sometimes deliberately funny, wittily changing only a single word ("Friends don't let friends teleport drunk") or even part of a word ("Star Truck"). But although Olympos , like its Homeric source, continually reminds us of the particularity of human experience, the engine that drives epic across space and time is not satire but praise, not failure but some memory of extraordinary achievement. Epic is all about the memory of winning. "Sometimes it may be difficult to believe in one's friends," Odysseus says here, "but one must always believe in one's enemies." Believe in them, in order to beat them. I still remember the exhilaration I felt, reading for the first time Homer's account of Odysseus stringing his bow. The massacre which follows was more complicated, but the stringing of the bow was a moment of primal human triumph I have never forgotten. But maybe I should say "primal male triumph". I know women who could identify as much as I do with that bow moment, but Homer makes it very specifically male. So does Simmons. His Odysseus fucks his way through time and space; he saves our planet, and our species, by cold-bloodedly killing his defenceless sexual rival. The best chapter of Olympos is a drunken conversation that drifts around the question "What does it mean to be a man?" For Odysseus, manhood springs from "the agonistics of one man against another". "How could any of us alive know quality if competition and personal combat did not let all the world know who embodies excellence and who merely manages mediocrity?" Like other epics, Olympos tells stories of titanic male competition because it originates in male competition: Virgil against Homer; Dante against Virgil; Milton or Tolkien against them all. Simmons claims the right to enter the ring against Homer, as explicitly as Joyce did. "This is what Homer would be doing," Joyce and Simmons as good as say, "if he were alive now, if he were as good as I am." Having internalised this knock-down ethic at an early age, I enjoyed the aesthetic courage and intellectual ambition of this book. Unfortunately, Olympos is not sci-fi at its best - or even Dan Simmons at his best. He seems to think that he can demonstrate his literary credentials by plopping down undigested chunks of Shakespeare and Proust. After epigraphs by Lucian, Conrad, and Shelley, we get quotations from Virgil, Milton, Blake, Byron, Keats, Tennyson and Rupert Brooke. It's easy to understand why a science fiction writer might suffer from a literary inferiority complex; but Simmons would seem less naked if he spent less time nervously covering his ass - or if he acknowledged the real influences of HG Wells, Robert Heinlein and Kurt Vonnegut, instead of manufacturing so transparently bogus a literary lineage. Homer refrained from describing the penis of Zeus being jerked off by rosy-fingered Dawn. Simmons, alas, has no such inhibitions. Nor does he have Joyce's talent for sexual fantasy. Homer may have celebrated a relentlessly male world, but his Helen is more than a "treacherous cunt", and the men who desire her do not simply want to "boink the poxy doxy". Simmons joins a long list of writers who have vilified Helen, but his animus against the fatally heroic Amazon Queen Penthesilea, killed by Achilles, is more unusual and harder to explain. Simmons tries to insulate himself from such criticisms by dedicating this novel to Harold Bloom, specifically invoking Bloom's criticism of the present as an "Age of Resentment" (which becomes in the novel itself "the Lost Age"). Presumably, anyone who doesn't like Olympos is just a resentful little mediocrity. But nobody is going to claim that Simmons is a greater verbal artist than Homer or Joyce. He's closer to Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Heywood, who is remembered for A Woman Killed with Kindness , but whose retellings of the Troy story (in Troia Brittanica and various plays) got faxed straight to oblivion. If you decide to go mano-a-mano against the big boys, Dan, don't be surprised if you get your butt kicked. Gary Taylor is general editor, with Stanley Wells, of William Shakespeare: The Complete Work s (Oxford) and his books include Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (Routledge). To order Olympos for pounds 9.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-genrev.1 Maybe I should say "primal male triumph". I know women who could identify as much as I do with that bow moment, but [Homer] makes it very specifically male. So does [Dan Simmons]. His Odysseus fucks his way through time and space; he saves our planet, and our species, by cold-bloodedly killing his defenceless sexual rival. The best chapter of Olympos is a drunken conversation that drifts around the question "What does it mean to be a man?" For Odysseus, manhood springs from "the agonistics of one man against another". "How could any of us alive know quality if competition and personal combat did not let all the world know who embodies excellence and who merely manages mediocrity?" Like other epics, Olympos tells stories of titanic male competition because it originates in male competition: [Virgil, Milton, Blake] against Homer; Dante against Virgil; Milton or Tolkien against them all. Simmons claims the right to enter the ring against Homer, as explicitly as Joyce did. "This is what Homer would be doing," Joyce and Simmons as good as say, "if he were alive now, if he were as good as I am." Simmons tries to insulate himself from such criticisms by dedicating this novel to Harold Bloom, specifically invoking Bloom's criticism of the present as an "Age of Resentment" (which becomes in the novel itself "the Lost Age"). Presumably, anyone who doesn't like Olympos is just a resentful little mediocrity. But nobody is going to claim that Simmons is a greater verbal artist than Homer or Joyce. He's closer to Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Heywood, who is remembered for A Woman Killed with Kindness , but whose retellings of the Troy story (in Troia Brittanica and various plays) got faxed straight to oblivion. If you decide to go mano-a-mano against the big boys, Dan, don't be surprised if you get your butt kicked. - Gary Taylor.
Kirkus Review
A sequel to Simmons's Ilium (2003) offers up the Trojan War along with elements from The Tempest, The Time Machine, Victorian poets and pop SF. Ilium ended with the Greek and Trojan heroes allied against the Olympian gods, advanced space-going robots called moravecs aiding the human side. Meanwhile, in a different reality, a lovely but decadent human civilization is under attack from its feral former servants, the robotlike voynix. A third plot strand now updates the conflict between the sorcerer Prospero, Caliban and Caliban's monstrous god Setebos. And the revived 20th-century American scholar Hockenberry attempts to chronicle the events while making love to volatile Helen of Troy. Simmons brings each subplot to a boil and spins off sub-subplots about Achilles' love for a dead Amazon queen, Odysseus' voyage to the alternate Earth with the moravecs, the arrival of Setebos and his minions in what was once Paris, etc. Everything comes together into a solid adventure story, with all the mysteries explained in respectably up-to-date SF terms. At the same time, Simmons adopts the device of having his characters quote freely from Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Browning, Proust and a host of other sources that liberal arts majors can have fun spotting. The author often gives his borrowings an ironic twist--as when Odysseus quotes Tennyson's "Ulysses" to a classical scholar who half-recognizes the poem, or when Prospero objects to playing himself in a production of The Tempest, not wanting to memorize so many lines. Homeric tags alternate with tough-guy street talk, and several of the moravec scientists turn out to be Star Trek fans. Simmons's gift for vivid description is evident throughout, as well. He effectively combines a serious subject, ironic perspective, strong action and believable (if not always sympathetic) characters. Ambitious, witty, moving: Simmons at his best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A temporary alliance between Achilles and Hector brings Greeks and Trojans together to lay siege to the mountain home of the gods. Soon other powerful beings become involved in a cataclysmic battle between humans and powerful entities, with names such as Demogorgon and Night. Like its companion book Ilium, Simmons's latest mammoth novel takes place in the far-future where ancient Troy (Ilium) is re-created, along with its gods and heroes, on a terraformed Mars for the entertainment and edification of humanity's successors. Through the eyes of a resurrected and reconstituted 21st-century scholar named Hockenberry, the author of Hyperion Cantos explores the relationship of history and culture to the idea of humanity. An exceptional creation, this volume belongs in all libraries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Olympos Chapter One Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens. She feels along the cushions of her bed but her current lover, Hockenberry, is gone--slipped out into the night again before the servants wake, acting as he always does after their nights of lovemaking, acting as if he has done something shameful, no doubt stealing his way home this very minute through the alleys and back streets where the torches burn least bright. Helen thinks that Hockenberry is a strange and sad man. Then she remembers. My husband is dead. This fact, Paris killed in single combat with the merciless Apollo, has been reality for nine days--the great funeral involving both Trojans and Achaeans will begin in three hours if the god-chariot now over the city does not destroy Ilium completely in the next few minutes--but Helen still cannot believe that her Paris is gone. Paris, son of Priam, defeated on the field of battle? Paris dead? Paris thrown down into the shaded caverns of Hades without beauty of body or the elegance of action? Unthinkable. This is Paris, her beautiful boy-child who had stolen her away from Menelaus, past the guards and across the green lawns of Lacedaemon. This is Paris, her most attentive lover even after this long decade of tiring war, he whom she had often secretly referred to as her "plunging stallion full-fed at the manger." Helen slips out of bed and crosses to the outer balcony, parting the gauzy curtains as she emerges into the pre-dawn light of Ilium. It is midwinter and the marble is cold under her bare feet. The sky is still dark enough that she can see forty or fifty searchlights stabbing skyward, searching for the god or goddess and the flying chariot. Muffled plasma explosions ripple across the half dome of the moravecs' energy field that shields the city. Suddenly, multiple beams of coherent light-- shafts of solid blue, emerald green, blood red--lance upward from Ilium's perimeter defenses. As Helen watches, a single huge explosion shakes the northern quadrant of the city, sending its shockwave echoing across the topless towers of Ilium and stirring the curls of Helen's long, dark hair from her shoulders. The gods have begun using physical bombs to penetrate the force shield in recent weeks, the single-molecule bomb casings quantum phase-shifting through the moravecs' shield. Or so Hockenberry and the amusing little metal creature, Mahnmut, have tried to explain to her. Helen of Troy does not give a fig about machines. Paris is dead. The thought is simply unsupportable. Helen has been prepared to die with Paris on the day that the Achaeans, led by her former husband, Menelaus, and by his brother Agamemnon, ultimately breach the walls, as breach they must according to her prophetess friend Cassandra, putting every man and boy-child in the city to death, raping the women and hauling them off to slavery in the Greek Isles. Helen has been ready for that day--ready to die by her own hand or by the sword of Menelaus--but somehow she has never really believed that her dear, vain, godlike Paris, her plunging stallion, her beautiful warriorhusband, could die first. Through more than nine years of siege and glorious battle, Helen has trusted the gods to keep her beloved Paris alive and intact and in her bed. And they did. And now they have killed him. She calls back the last time she saw her Trojan husband, ten days earlier, heading out from the city to enter into single combat with the god Apollo. Paris had never looked more confident in his armor of elegant, gleaming bronze, his head flung back, his long hair flowing back over his shoulders like a stallion's mane, his white teeth flashing as Helen and thousands of others watched and cheered from the wall above the Scaean Gate. His fast feet had sped him on, "sure and sleek in his glory," as King Priam's favorite bard liked to sing. But this day they had sped him on to his own slaughter by the hands of furious Apollo. And now he's dead, thinks Helen, and, if the whispered reports I've overheard are accurate, his body is a scorched and blasted thing, his bones broken, his perfect, golden face burned into an obscenely grinning skull, his blue eyes melted to tallow, tatters of barbecued flesh stringing back from his scorched cheekbones like ... like ... firstlings--like those charred first bits of ceremonial meat tossed from the sacrificial fire because they have been deemed unworthy. Helen shivers in the cold wind coming up with the dawn and watches smoke rise above the rooftops of Troy. Three antiaircraft rockets from the Achaean encampment to the south roar skyward in search of the retreating god-chariot. Helen catches a glimpse of that retreating chariot--a brief gleaming as bright as the morning star, pursued now by the exhaust trails from the Greek rockets. Without warning, the shining speck quantum shifts out of sight, leaving the morning sky empty. Flee back to besieged Olympos, you cowards, thinks Helen of Troy. The all-clear sirens begin to whine. The street below Helen's apartments in Paris's estate so near Priam's battered palace are suddenly filled with running men, bucket brigades rushing to the northwest where smoke still rises into the winter air. Moravec flying machines hum over the rooftops, looking like nothing so much as chitinous black hornets with their barbed landing gear and swiveling projectors. Some, she knows from experience and from Hockenberry's late-night rants, will fly what he calls air cover, too late to help, while others will aid in putting out the fire. Then Trojans and moravecs both will pull mangled bodies from the rubble for hours. Since Helen knows almost everyone in the city, she wonders numbly who will be in the ranks of those sent down to sunless Hades so early this morning . . . Olympos . Copyright © by Dan Simmons. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Olympos by Dan Simmons All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
