Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Ilium: Science Fiction by Dan Simmons
Right now I'm reading Ilium by Dan Simmons. Remember Dan Simmons? He wrote Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion. He won and was nominated for the Hugo award for these. Excellent science fiction novels. Well Dan jumps around genres, but he entered back into the Science fiction realm in 2003 with Ilium.
I'm not quite half way through with Ilium, but I can say this much "what a trip". This is no cookie cutter sci fi novel. The imagination and sometimes, just plain weirdness, of this book is extraordinary.
I won't go too much into the plot, but there are three main story lines in the Ilium. One is about far future earth and the humans that currently live there. The far future humans are completely taken care of by someone, but I'm not exactly sure who, yet. They are pretty much kept in the dark and have no real skills other than living day to day and having fun. The "fax" from place to place, can't read, have all sorts of implants, and really are clueless. However, some of them start to get curious.
Another plot line is about these half machine/half organic beings from the outer planets. They go to Mars to find out what is going on with several quantum disturbances there.
The final plot line is about the Greek gods that are now living on Mars. Their main pastime is watching Homer's Iliad unfold in real life and the battle of Troy (called Illium). At the point in the story I'm at, there is still a big mystery as to how all this ties together and just what/who these "gods" really are.
All in all, a pretty cool sci fi book so far. Well written and utterly fascinating science fiction. There is a follow on sci fi novel called Olympos.
# posted by tsglisa @ 10:35 AM 
