Name: OLYMPOS
Rating: 3.714285714285714 (14 reviews)
ISBN: 9783453521230

Dan Simmons

ROMAN. DEUTSCHE ERSTAUSGABE

OLYMPOS

Beneath the gaze of the gods, the mighty armies of Greece and Troy met in fierce and glorious combat, scrupulously following the text set forth in Homer's timeless narrative. But that was before twenty-first-century scholar Thomas Hockenberry stirred the bloody brew, causing an enraged Achilles to join forces with his archenemy Hector and turn his murderous wrath on Zeus and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators; before the swift and terrible mechanical creatures that catered for centuries to the pitiful idle remnants of Earth's human race began massing in the millions, to exterminate rather than serve. And now all bets are off.

Olympos

Christian

This is the second half of the story begun in Ilium. My favorite characters were still the robots (which is good, as I was reading this as part of my robot-fiction research). The author continued to be extremely imaginative: I loved the concept of the Eiffelbahn - an intercontinental steampunk cablecar network supported by a series of Eiffel Towers. However, so much remained unexplained at the end that I was left with the sense that many of the elements over both books were included more for the sake of novelty than to advance the story. We never really found out about who the post-humans were, how they got that way ("they engineered themselves out of the gene pool"); who the avatars Prospero, Ariel, and Sycorax were and where they came from (beyond a vague explanation in Ilium about connecting the Internet to the web of living things); how and why the posts became the Greek gods (beyond some references to it being Prospero doing); and especially what the various parallel universes and their denizens represent. Orpho of Io reasoned that these alternate universes were created by acts of creative geniuses like authors (a well deserved nod to the author's own creativity here), though I found this unsatisfying. With a thousand pages of build-up I was expecting a more interesting solution to the central mystery of the story. I was disappointed with the Setebos creature (and offspring) and Caliban - with no explanation for their grotesque forms, they come off as being included solely for shock and revulsion. Caliban in particular seemed like a knock-off of Tolkien's Gollum. I was also disappointed to find out that the voynix were genocidal killing machines unleashed by one group of humans against another, and that they had simply been re-programmed into servitude by the posts. One of the central tensions in the last part of the story was between the voynix and the Setebos hatchling, but the author never explained why thousands of voynix would be held at bay by a Setebos egg. A major quibble I have is with the editing, I'm hoping this will be corrected in subsequent editions of the book. More in Olympos than in Ilium, there were some odd mistakes, like writing "Achilles" when then author meant "Paris", mixing up the groups of major gods supporting the Trojans and the Achaeans, or giving knowledge of events to characters who had no first- or second-hand knowledge of them. In Ilium there is a statue in Paris Crater called the "Putain Enormé" [sic], the meaning of which had been forgotten, while in Olympos characters referred to it with an English version of the name. Latin quotes were botched in a way that made me think they were transferred from hand-written notes, which is odd as the quotes are readily accessible via the Internet. Most distracting was the inconsistent and incorrect use of archaic English forms to lend an grave air to certain characters' speech: using "thee" as a subject pronoun (Common among Quakers, though presumably not among post-humans); using "thou" as a plural subject; using "ye" as a singular subject; and mixing up the verb endings for second and third person indicative as well as the imperative. This stuff is easy to fix, and widely enough understood that the mistakes come off looking lazy. Overall it was a fun read and a true page-turner, rapidly shifting perspective across a half-dozen story lines. I loved the central concept of advanced humans recreating the Trojan War, and I found the moravecs fascinating - easily the most interesting characters in the book. I'd like to read the earlier Hyperion books next and see how they compare (plus, I think they also feature robots).

Bhaskar 

A great way to get a skim through on shakespeare and greek mythology , though still not as good as the hyperion series or even the first part of this sage: ilium

Adam

Oh boy. As much as I like the idea behind the Illium/Olympos series, this one required some suffering to make it through. I loved Hyperion, and the wealth of characters, and how well their stories intertwined in time, but for this one, most characters I could not connect with. Perhaps it has to do with basing the story around a first person point a view, which made it more difficult for me to think the story was more than the main character. The Illium storyline and the Gods were easily the most interesting, but when it came down to an explanation I wasn't satisfied with it.

Klaus Eck

Jessica Gerrard 

Phileas Fogg

Olympos (Gollancz)

Emmett

Benjamin

Cindy Lieberman

Christopher McCaffery

Achilles and Hector lay seige to the home of the gods, inadvertently triggering a massive conflict between humanity and such powerful beings as Setebos, Prospero, and Caliban.

Alex Jones

Stephen Gill 

Alberto Cabas Vidani

Jeff Byrnes

Kyle Barron-Cohen

Helen of Troy is in mourning for her dead husband, Paris. Killed in single combat with the merciless Apollo, his body is nothing but a scorched and blasted thing. Hockenberry, her lover, still sneaks from her bed after their nights of lovemaking. And the gods still strike out from the besieged Olympos, their single-molecule bomb casings quantum phase-shifting through the moravecs' force shield and laying waste to Ilium. Or so Hockenberry and the amusing little metal creature, Mahnmut, have tried to explain to her. Helen of Troy does not give a fig about machines. She must dress for the funeral. And man and the gods and the unknown players in this tragedy must prepare for the final act. And a battle that will decide the future of the universe itself.

OLYMPOS ROMAN. DEUTSCHE ERSTAUSGABE

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