Ilium (Ilium series Book 1)

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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. While you are singing, O Muse, sing also of the rage of those thoughtful, sentient, serious but not-so-close-to-human beingsout there dreaming under the ice of Europa, dying in the sulfer-ash of Io, and being born in the cold folds of Ganymede. Orphu of Io: a heavily armored, 1,200-year-old hard-vac moravec that is shaped not unlike a crab. Weighing eight tons and measuring six meters in length, Orphu works in the sulfur-torus of Io, and is a Proust enthusiast. Seguiamo i personaggi passo passo per giorni mentre affrontano intemperie senza cambiare troppo e poi l'autore fa passare un mese e tutto cambia? Bastava farci assistere al momento culminante cosicché poi si poteva anche dare per scontato la fine del processo di"maturazione" di Damian. I'm just getting started with the laundry list of things that frustrate me to no end about Olympos, but by now I'm getting tired of typing and you may well be tired of reading, so I'll keep the rest brief. Major conflicts peter out to nothing. Setebos, who seems to be the ultimate evil of this story, flees and vanishes without a fight. In the final showdown between Caliban and Daemen, nothing more climactic happens than Caliban uttering a few more of his inscrutable verses. Even Zeus' demise felt meaningless and disappointing. Childishly gross as well, honestly. And finally, most of the major mysteries put forth by Ilium never get solved. I still don't know how or why the Posts of Earth became the Gods of Olympos. I still don't know how Odysseus ended up on Earth. An explanation is put forth as to where the alternate ancient Greek Earth came from, but I found it extremely weak and unsatisfying. An afterthought. Dan Simmons throwing up his hands and admitting that he doesn't know. You'd think with robots and Greek gods and dinosaurs and at least three different planets, I wouldn't have been so...bored the whole time. I don't care about any of the characters. I mean, it didn't help that one of them was so gross and and the tone of the book wasn't condemning him. And the other main human guy- who is supposed to be the "normal" not gross one- sleeps with a woman while in the guise of her husband and doesn't have any kind of moral hesitation. It's pretty obvious that Simmons also doesn't think anything is wrong with it and couldn't possibly conceive that there would ever be anything wrong with it. He's so unaware of how a woman would react after being raped that after she finds out, they have more sex! What?

With all this being said, I found Achilles' plotline to be fantastic and enjoyed all of the literary references (for example: Homer, Shakespeare, Proust, etc.) scattered throughout the book. Why did Zeus all of a sudden want to become the One God? There's no mention of this desire anywhere in the book.

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Dan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Dan received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art. Admittedly, I gave five stars to Dan Simmons’ other epic work, Hyperion, despite the fact that it doesn’t stand on its own. Hyperion, however, is different, and someday when I review Hyperion properly I’ll explain why.) Quantum theory and Quantum Gravity are also used to account for a number of other things, from Achilles' immortality (his mother, Thetis, set the quantum probability for his death to zero for all means of death other than by Paris' bow) to teleportation and shapeshifting powers.

As much of the action derives from fiction involving gods and wizards, Simmons rationalises most of this through his use of far-future technology and science, including: I also want to repeat here an observation made by another reviewer whose name I cannot remember: almost all the female characters in the book are described primarily through the size, shape, and consistency of their breasts. Simmons has written books with excellent, strong female characters. But he's rather gotten into the spirit of the Heroic Age of Achilles , though there are a couple of female characters in the story that are three-dimensional, including, in my opinion, Helen of Troy. I was excited to read Orphans of the Helix as it is set after the final novel of the Hyperion Cantos, The Rise of Endymion. And it was just as good as the novels. A superb story! Ok, anyways. Old Odysseus is injured by a voynix early in the book and removed from the story until the 11th hour. Meanwhile the moravecs kidnap Younger Odysseus from Ilium, promising him news from his wife to lure him aboard their spaceship. They then fly off to Future Earth on their mission to figure out what's going on. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Summary

While I admire the scope of this duology and how many different ideas found their way into these two books, I ultimately feel the vast majority of the storylines fail to capitalize on any of them. When I was reading Ilium, I found myself engaged in each individual character's storyline and was very excited to see how everything was going to be tied up in the sequel. However, most of what I was looking forward to in Olympos is either completely glossed over, avoided, or substituted for new plot threads that come out of nowhere and are unnecessary. Quantum theory and quantum gravity: used to account for a number of other things, including Achilles' immortality (in that Thetis set the quantum probability for his death to zero for all other means of death other than by Paris' bow), teleportation, and shapeshifting powers. Simmons definitely captures the barbaric nobility of the Greeks (and sheer assholishness of the Greek gods). And while at times I really had no idea where the story was going, it was never boring. In the end, I think it got a bit bloated and meandering and it seemed that Simmons was willing to throw any weird idea that came to him into the mix, which is why this was a huge doorstopper of a novel following a previous huge doorstopper of a novel.

An entire year passes, and their situation simply keeps getting worse. The weather is getting harder to cope with, food is running extremely low, and there appears to be no escape. But things can, and will, actually get worse in one of Simmons’s best novels out there. Terror ArrivesPriča je u nekim trenucima imala pomalo alienski vibe i Simmons je puno koristio Deux ex machina foru. I opet je priču bazirao na Shakespeareu, Homeru, Proustu i drugim književnicima. Knjiga je bila prepuna njihovih citata i referenci na njihova djela i likove. Mnoge od njihovih likova je i sam preuzeo i ukomponirao u svoju priču. In the sequel to Summer of Night, A Winter Haunting (2002), Dale Stewart (one of the first book's protagonists and now an adult), revisits his boyhood home to come to grips with mysteries that have disrupted his adult life. A word on mechanics. Simmons's prose is by and large effective, and deserves no special praise or blame. Where the story falls is in the construction of the plot, which in addition to its overall incoherence proceeds in fits and starts, with long stretches of inaction punctuated by world-changing events treated in brief. Both gods and machines regularly serve as dei ex machinae, with characters brought together on the thinnest of pretexts to haul one another out of intractable jams. The novel's conclusion is full of these convenient escapes, plot holes and simple omissions, and several major threads are left unresolved. The Terror (2007) crosses the bridge between horror and historical fiction. It is a fictionalized account of Sir John Franklin and his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, become icebound the first winter, and the captains and crew struggle to survive while being stalked across an Arctic landscape by a monster.