Book(s) Review: Ilium and Olympos by Dan Simmons

Where to begin?

Okay, imagine it's the Trojan War (which, if you know me, is why I picked this series up in the first place). Same Trojan War as described in The Iliad - gods and everything...mostly, as there are a few minor discrepancies this time around. And those minor discrepancies are noted by Professor Dan Hockenberry, a Classics professor from Indiana University who lived in our time, died at 50, and was brought back to life IN THE PAST to record the Trojan War for the benefit of the Muses.

BUT ALSO! It's thousands of years in the future, and a clutch of cyborgs who live in the asteroid belt and beyond launch an expedition to Mars to see what is causing crazy seismic activity. Among the cyborgs is a submarine driver of child-like height who absolutely loves Shakespeare's sonnets (his submarine is called The Dark Lady), and a giant horseshoe-crab looking guy who argues that Proust was better.

MEANWHILE, also in the far future, there are only a few "normal" humans left, and those normal humans live lives of leisure, are able to "fax" themselves anywhere in the world (and no, this book wasn't written in the 80s - I checked!), and are served by robot-like servants called the voynix, although nobody is sure who the voynix are or how they got here. More importantly, those remaining humans regenerate their bodies every 20 years by faxing to the medical facilities in the three giant rings circling the Earth (!) and die after exactly 100 years.

Oh, and although the titles of these books are Ilium and Olympos, a thorough understanding of the characters from Shakespeare's The Tempest is absolutely necessary.

AND THAT'S JUST THE SETUP! I haven't even talked about any plot elements yet!

Look, we love Dan Simmons around here - a pre-VP Teddy Roosevelt jumping into a DC streetfight in The Fifth Heart is one of the best things I've ever read - but this was too much. In all the other Dan Simmons books that I've read so far, while he's added complexity that may or may not be necessary, he's tethered to historical events that serve to reign him in. For this series, he's free to do what he pleases, and that's...A LOT.

Let me put it this way: In the second book, the Earth is invaded by another species...and it's only like the fourth-most important thing going on! Too many things happen only for the sake of the story here, and sometimes those things are very disappointing - there's a very problematic "modernization" of Sleeping Beauty in the second book that had no business to exist in the first place.

This was way more complicated than it needed to be, and left a TON of loose threads at the end - and no, that's not a call for another book to tie them up. I'll have to continue my wish for a Trojan-War-in-space series. Four out of 10 hot dogs.