![]() Now, beings claiming to be the Greek gods inhabit a terraformed Mars and have recreated the Iliad in the flesh. Humanity experienced a posthumanist singularity, including an event vaguely alluded to as “the rubicon,” and mastered nanotechnology and quantum tunnelling/quantum teleportation. It’s a couple of thousand years into the future. Summarizing Ilium is not an easy task, but I’ll do my best. Yet I have no doubt he is actually a great SF author, one of the greats of our age, even if he isn’t one of my favourites. I doubt I’ll ever refer to Simmons as one of my favourite authors, or even as one of my favourite SF authors. In my review for the final book of that cycle, The Rise of Endymion, I commented, “Even if you don’t like the series, it is hard to dispute the scope and style of it.” Simmons lives up to this judgment with Ilium, which does for the Iliad what Hyperion did for Keats and Romantic poetry (although I’d argue it goes further than that). I didn’t like The Terror or Drood, but I warmed up to Simmons through his epic Hyperion Cantos. Longtime readers of my reviews will recall I have a tumultuous relationship with Dan Simmons’ books. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |