This item is currently not available. If you have this item,
Join and post it to share with others.
Welcome back to the Trojan War gone round the bend. Hector and Achilles have joined forces against the Olympic Gods. Back on a future Earth, assorted creatures from Shakespeare'sThe Tempestget ready to rumble in a winner-takes-the-universe battle royale. And amid it all, a group of confused mere mortals with their classically trained robot allies (from Jupiter no less) race across time and space to keep from getting squashed as the various Titans of the Western Canon square off.
Confused? It's all part of Dan Simmons'sOlympos, a novel one part fun-with-quantum-physics and two parts through-the-looking-glass survey of Western Literature. Picking up where he left off in the high-wire actIlium, Simmons doesn't disappoint. Not only isOlymposexcellent hard science fiction and grand space opera, it's a riveting and fast-paced book that is alternately shocking, thrilling, and often deftly hilarious as his hapless human creations wrestle the forces of literary history itself. Be sure to readIliumfirst though. That and a more-than passing familiarity withThe Illiadmight come in handy for the journey to Mars, Ilium's far-off shores, and the Earth that might be. --Jeremy Pugh
Amazon.com Exclusive Content
Master of the Universes: An Exclusive Interview with Dan Simmons
Changing genres as easily as others change clothes, bestselling author Dan Simmons has written horror, mystery, historical fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. In thisAmazon.com exclusive interview, he talks about his latest SF triumph,Olympos, a tale of Mars, the Greek gods, and survival in a post-human world.
incredibly disappointing 3/4ths of the book is a re-telling of the Ilium followed up by a lukewarm, ending that isn't an ending at all. For shame Dan Simmons! You can do so much better, Olympos is a waste of your fans time and money while you obviously didn't spend enough time on it.
Dissapointing sequal to a stronger book To start off with, I want to say that I really loved Ilium, and had very high hopes for Olympos. But I was ultimately dissapointed. There are a number of flaws I found in the book, most of which I'll mention here.
Like another reviewer, I was hoping the focus of Olympos would be the war between the united Greeks and Trojans against the gods. To avoid spoilers I won't say much other than there is very little time given to this conflict, which I found very dissapointing.
As many other reviewers have mentioned, the book seems to build for a long time, to what the reader hopes will be some sort of epic intense conclusion, but ultimately there is barely a climax at all. Also, not all mysteries set up by the book are explained (though overall a great deal will become more clear, there are a number of unexplained bits that annoy me). Along with unexplained mysteries, there are a few points in which the motivations of characters do not make much sense.
Also, one specific conflict we are essentially promised at the end of Ilium, and is foreshadowed a number of times in Olympos, never actually occurs. The reader is supposed to accept that this sort of showdown will probably happen at some point after the events of the book.
Olympos also lacks the intensity and action of Ilium. I remember reading the last 300 pages of Ilium in one sitting because I was so enthralled. Olympos never reaches this level. In fact, by the end I was already dissapointed enough that I practically had to force myself to finish it.
One final thing that bothered me were a number of anti-Islam and homophobic bits that really add nothing to the story. They were essentially purposeless, yet they were there. At one point near the end homosexuality is described as if it was just some psychological disease existing only in the 21st century. This passage comes from nowhere, and like I said, serves no purpose.
While I still think Ilium was an amazing book, this sequal did not come close to meeting its promise.Outstanding work Dan Simmons really delivers in this one! Greek gods, Shakespeare, robots, Proust, and posthumanism all in one place. Sounds like a mess, but it's executed flawlessy.
Changing genres as easily as others change clothes, bestselling author Dan Simmons has written horror, mystery, historical fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction. In this