Book Review: Olympos by Dan Simmons
Aug. 17th, 2006 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
juushikaTitle: Olympos
Author: Dan Simmons
Published: New York: HarperCollins, 2005
Page Count: 690
Total Page Count: 27,470
Text Number: 79
Read For: my own enjoyment, checked out from the library
Short review: The sequel to Ilium, and unfortunately not as good. Olympos picks up where Ilium left off: On Mars, where the Trojan War has been lived again, the scholic Hockenberry has changed the course of events and started the Greeks and Trojans in a joint war against the gods—but the gods have plans to restart the war between the mortals. Meanwhile, on Earth life as they know it of the old-style humans has been completely changed, and rather than endless parties and good health they must now fight for themselves while being attacked on all sides by the very machines that used to serve them. Sentient robots called moravecs unite the two storylines when they leave Mars for Earth in order to stop the wild quantum fluxations that originate there. A sci-fi epic on a grand scale, Olympos unfortunately has too many concurrent plot lines to stay afloat and feels disjointed and incoherent. Nonetheless, the characters are interesting and the plot original. The book does bring to a satisfying close the story begun in Ilium, if you've read the prequel you'll care enough about the story and characters to make it through this volume, and the science-fiction aspects (while not particularly well explained) are innovative and make for a unique setting. I'm fairly ambivalent about this book: it was ok as a sequel, but I didn't enjoy it much in its own right.
This sequel is quite a change from the first book. While the first followed and played off of literary allusions to Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest, the sequence of events has separated this book from those sources. The characters from the Iliad are still around and new characters from the Tempest are introduced, but for the large part the book has become more independent than the original. As a result, there are fewer worrisome interpretations of both texts but it's also less enjoyable for those that picked up the book for these elements. The author tries to make up for it by introducing more Proust quotes and, at one point, a poem written by his wife, but these addictions seems cursory—slapped on late in the game in order to keep some symmetry with the original book. Furthermore, in the case of the poem, they don't nearly rival the importance or depth of the original inspirations and allusions.
More bothersome than the literary allusions or lackthereof is the sheer number of characters and plot lines that Simmons tries to balance throughout this text. The Greek, human, and moravec stories are all split up into one or two subplots, and the text is still constructed with one chapter dedicated to a plotline, ending in a cliffhanger, and moving to another plotline in the next chapter. With so many plotlines and so many cliffhangers, the book quickly becomes fragmented, cliche, and even annoying to read. In his attempt to create an epic and remain faithful to Ilium, Simmons put himself in a bind: the combination of plots and writing style don't work well together, and are perhaps the biggest problem with this book. I still contend that readers of Ilium will make it through this text because of interest in characters and plot piqued in the original book, and ultimately Olymos brings the plotline to a satisfying, almost too-quick conclusion. However, on its own this is a shoddily-crafted, disjointed novel that tries to take off more than it can handle in a style that doesn't compliment the content.
All in all, I recommend Olympos only as a sequel. Ilium leaves off at such a cliff-hanger that it's almost necessary to read this book simply in order to resolve the story. At 700 pages, it is time consuming, but luckily the writing style isn't very complex—rather, Simmons seems to delight in profanity, sex, and violence to an extreme that almost seems comical—and so it's not a huge investment of time and energy. It does provide a conclusion to the original story, one that ties up all the plotlines and saves everyone we care about. The science that runs throughout both novels is interesting—a little too explained at points, a little unrealistic at others, but overall a unique idea and sci-fi geeks should enjoy. Nonetheless, independently this is a pretty middle of the road, poorly constructed sci-fi epic, and on that basis I have a hard time being passionate about it and am hesitant to recommend it.
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
Author: Dan Simmons
Published: New York: HarperCollins, 2005
Page Count: 690
Total Page Count: 27,470
Text Number: 79
Read For: my own enjoyment, checked out from the library
Short review: The sequel to Ilium, and unfortunately not as good. Olympos picks up where Ilium left off: On Mars, where the Trojan War has been lived again, the scholic Hockenberry has changed the course of events and started the Greeks and Trojans in a joint war against the gods—but the gods have plans to restart the war between the mortals. Meanwhile, on Earth life as they know it of the old-style humans has been completely changed, and rather than endless parties and good health they must now fight for themselves while being attacked on all sides by the very machines that used to serve them. Sentient robots called moravecs unite the two storylines when they leave Mars for Earth in order to stop the wild quantum fluxations that originate there. A sci-fi epic on a grand scale, Olympos unfortunately has too many concurrent plot lines to stay afloat and feels disjointed and incoherent. Nonetheless, the characters are interesting and the plot original. The book does bring to a satisfying close the story begun in Ilium, if you've read the prequel you'll care enough about the story and characters to make it through this volume, and the science-fiction aspects (while not particularly well explained) are innovative and make for a unique setting. I'm fairly ambivalent about this book: it was ok as a sequel, but I didn't enjoy it much in its own right.
This sequel is quite a change from the first book. While the first followed and played off of literary allusions to Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest, the sequence of events has separated this book from those sources. The characters from the Iliad are still around and new characters from the Tempest are introduced, but for the large part the book has become more independent than the original. As a result, there are fewer worrisome interpretations of both texts but it's also less enjoyable for those that picked up the book for these elements. The author tries to make up for it by introducing more Proust quotes and, at one point, a poem written by his wife, but these addictions seems cursory—slapped on late in the game in order to keep some symmetry with the original book. Furthermore, in the case of the poem, they don't nearly rival the importance or depth of the original inspirations and allusions.
More bothersome than the literary allusions or lackthereof is the sheer number of characters and plot lines that Simmons tries to balance throughout this text. The Greek, human, and moravec stories are all split up into one or two subplots, and the text is still constructed with one chapter dedicated to a plotline, ending in a cliffhanger, and moving to another plotline in the next chapter. With so many plotlines and so many cliffhangers, the book quickly becomes fragmented, cliche, and even annoying to read. In his attempt to create an epic and remain faithful to Ilium, Simmons put himself in a bind: the combination of plots and writing style don't work well together, and are perhaps the biggest problem with this book. I still contend that readers of Ilium will make it through this text because of interest in characters and plot piqued in the original book, and ultimately Olymos brings the plotline to a satisfying, almost too-quick conclusion. However, on its own this is a shoddily-crafted, disjointed novel that tries to take off more than it can handle in a style that doesn't compliment the content.
All in all, I recommend Olympos only as a sequel. Ilium leaves off at such a cliff-hanger that it's almost necessary to read this book simply in order to resolve the story. At 700 pages, it is time consuming, but luckily the writing style isn't very complex—rather, Simmons seems to delight in profanity, sex, and violence to an extreme that almost seems comical—and so it's not a huge investment of time and energy. It does provide a conclusion to the original story, one that ties up all the plotlines and saves everyone we care about. The science that runs throughout both novels is interesting—a little too explained at points, a little unrealistic at others, but overall a unique idea and sci-fi geeks should enjoy. Nonetheless, independently this is a pretty middle of the road, poorly constructed sci-fi epic, and on that basis I have a hard time being passionate about it and am hesitant to recommend it.
Review posted here at Amazon.com.
