Olympos

The direct follow-on from Ilium. Ilium finished at convenient point rather than a satisfactory point. Neither book really stands on its own. And both are long, with a combined page count of about 1,500 pages.

Olympos exposes more of the underlying thought of the Ilium universe. The three threads of the story start to bounce off each other. The literary scholar monitoring the Trojan war for the gods of Olympus inserts himself into the events, thus causing Homer's history to come unstuck. The far future humans are under attack from the biomachines that have been their servants for centuries. And this ancient Greek guy named Odysseus has turned up to teach them hand to hand battle skills. The Shakespeare and Proust quoting robots have been co-opted by an advanced alien race to find out why there is such a dangerous level of quantum emissions from a mountain on Mars.

The literary sparing between the robots continues to form the scaffolding of much of the story. And their interactions slowly suggest what is behind the time/location shifts of the overall work. Simmons suggests that when a genius, like Shakepeare or Homer, writes a genius work, like The Tempest or The Iliad, then those worlds are brought into being as alternate universes. And Simmons' story jumps between them without barriers.

Olympos does the time/place jumps effortlessly, so effortlessly that the reader follows on accepting what is happening without necessarily seeing this underlying schema.

The book has countless side plots that can get a bit heavy-handed but as the story speeds up in the final 25% of the book these tangents are shown to have some bearing on the final outcome. Simmons manages to keep a lot of balls in the air in this process. There is also a lot of little comments in the book that might be seen as easter eggs that Simmons has left lying around. While there is no deliberate humor in the overall work, these little pop-ups give a bit of light relief if we notice them.

And while I said there is no deliberate humor, as the book progresses there is a growing sense in which Simmons is saying, "How can I totally mess up the historical narrative of Homer and keep people engaged?" Imagine that Banksy has just painted over some famous work and people say, 'Yep, that works for me'.