Dan Simmons: Olympos (2005)

Published: Gollancz 2005

Like The House of Storms just reviewed, Olympos is the sequel to a favourite science fiction/fantasy novel of mine from the last few years; in this case, to Ilium. Unlike The House of Storms, Olympos is a continuation of the earlier novel: very much a traditional sequel. From the start it is clearly going to wrap up the many loose ends of the earlier novel. (This wrapping up extends to the last paragraph of Olympos, which is virtually identical to the last paragraph of Ilium; both are translations of the opening of Homer's Iliad, though from slightly different points of view.)

Since Olympos follow on directly from Ilium, the plot is hard to describe without revealing details which might spoil Ilium for those who have not yet read it. (Though like much science fiction and fantasy, there are many other pleasures in the novel other than the plot.) War continues in the recreated Troy, where post-humans take the place of the gods of Greek mythology and run a simulation of the events described in the Iliad.

This is the main point of both novels. The theory that post-humans will get the most fun out of running simulations so perfect that to the participants it will be like resurrection in heaven is not very convincing and has struck me ever since I first heard it as wishful thinking, a desire by somewhat sentimental atheists to replace Christian ideas of heaven. There should be so many more interesting things to do than pandering to an obsession with the history of far more limited individuals. Personal interactions with other post-humans, investigation of the universe, simulations which are entirely new and alien: these seem to me to be three obvious possibilities. Simmons paints a more believable post-human, a race that has retained many of the less pleasant facets of humanity, with the desire to play cruel and capricious deities the reason for running a simulation. (Imagine what it would be like to be a simulated character in many of today's computer games.) All the post-humans in these two novels are unpleasant, mad or alien; it is only the resurrected humans and the descendants of human beings genetically engineered to live in the outer solar system that are anything approaching sympathetic. Like the idea of entirely benevolent beings, this is surely an over-simplification. If post-humans ever come to exist, they may be in some part incomprehensible to us, but they will surely be at least as varied as personalities. There may be some backing for Simmons' scenario in the idea that power corrupts, but the lack of nice, stable post-humans is for me a weakness in his vision.

Ilium made an impact - being hailed as "a landmark in modern SF" on the cover of this edition of Olympos - by being different and innovative. Since its sequel cannot match these qualities of the original by definition, it is hard to feel that Olympos is as good. It is well written and, of course, fans of Ilium will be keen to see how things turn out.

Dan Simmons: Ilium (2003)

Edition: Gollancz, 2003
Review number: 1258

To science fiction fans, Dan Simmons is best known for his award winning novel Hyperion, which uses the poetry of John Keats as its inspiration. In Ilium, his most recent novel and a return to the genre (in which he writes occasionally), the literary references are there again. Here, though, they are made more central (being far more frequently referred to directly), and are more varied. Homer is naturally the most obvious, but there are also direct references to Shakespeare (the Sonnets and the Tempest), H.G. Wells The Time Machine, and Proust as well as indirect ones to other sources.

In The Rolling Stones, Robert Heinlein satirises the flagrant plagiarism of some pulp science fiction authors, a character who is a writer blatantly reuses plots from the Odyssey, Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors. Here, Dan Simmons has done something which is even more clearly reuse, but he does this in a much more interesting way; his retelling of Greek myth is a springboard for a fascinating piece of science fiction.

There are three storylines in Ilium: one a retelling of Homer's Iliad, in which the Greek gods influencing the action are beings from the future; a story from the other end of history, where pampered humans have lost a great deal of knowledge but live in a world run for them by robot "servitors"; and a mission by a group of artificial beings engineered to live on the satellites of Jupiter to discover what is behind some strange quantum effects observed on Mars.

One thing that is interesting to me about Ilium is how Simmons places each story in a different part of the science fiction genre. The Iliad bits are part fantasy, part something like Lord of Light; the last humans on a depleted Earth are like a number of far future scenarios originally derived from the Eloi in The Time Machine; the outer solar system artificial beings hard science fiction rather like Kim Stanley Robinson. Even with all this complexity, Ilium does not come across as having a split personality; Simmons holds it together magnificently for over six hundred pages - which means that each strand is long enough to form a novel in its own right.

The reader of Ilium will get a lot more out of it if they have read the various literary sources it alludes to, and an acquaintance with the Iliad is even more useful. Neither is absolutely essential, as the important points are explained as the story develops. (The device of having the point of view character in the Iliad sections a Greek scholar re-animated at the scene to provide the "gods" with a commentary on how well what happens matches Homer's poem is useful in this respect.) Even without the clever folding of the literary themes, the little references to delight the knowledgeable, Ilium is an extremely well written, if slightly over long, novel. Entertaining and intelligent, definitely one of the best books I have read this year.