Book Review: Ilium by Dan Simmons

Title: Ilium
Author: Dan Simmons
Published: New York: Harper Torch (Harper Collins Publishers), 2003
Pages: 731
Total pages: 12,633
Text number: 35
Read for: for my personal enjoyment, recommended and lent by benwards.
In brief: Some time far in the future, science has taken a number of strange turns. Sentient robots study Shakespeare and Proust, the Iliad is reenacted at the foot of Olympus Mons on Mars observed by scholics revived from twenty-first-century Earth, and back on Earth humans live with no memory of their own history. These three storylines are united as human history is investigated and revealed. Literary illusions run rampant for Shakespeare (the sonnets and The Tempest) and the Iliad with a bit of the Greek tragedy, Odyssey, Aeneid, and Proust. It's a sci-fi book for geeks, but not, I would say, for the avid critical Shakespeare geeks—because what he has to say about characters in The Tempest is less than fulfilling.

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Review posted here at Amazon.com