Olympos by Dan Simmons

Life is sweet after getting the guillotine off my neck.

Can indulge myself, like spending 2.5hrs at Borders, reading Dilbert comics, or stuff on mountain biking and triathlon-ing etc... I'm certainly under no delusions whatsoever about my level of fitness, but one should still seek improvement, and also to shame meself into seeing how far short my level of discipline is compared to real athletes.

Love Borders. All those unwrapped books. It's good for me. I'm a bookworm.

Been so for a long while. Maybe it started because I am socially autistic. Or perhaps I just enjoy listening to smart people 'talk', (I vocalise every word I read in my head). Both will also explain why I'm frequently quiet amongst company; stupid things pop out of my mouth with alarming frequency, so I'll much rather not hear myself talk.

But if someone's recounting his knee surgery in great detail for the fifth time, or giving a running commentary on what Bree Van De Kamp is wearing, my brain may compell my mouth to speak and gush forth the garbage verbiage.

I'm digressing...

Back to books...

I used to read a lot. But these days, what with all the many little things that's taking up slices of my leisure, I'm having to cut down on quantity and focus on quality.

But with some exceptions... I still read Harry Potter so that I can tell people that Snape killed Dumbledore. Also Da Vinci Code, to experience the depth of disappointment to see how the whole world is taken in by such gimmicky drivel. It's like... watching Revenge of the Sith...


But I'm not here to review bad books. Not now...

Let's talk about good books.

I'm pretty much all about fantasy and sci-fi these days. If I were to name my favourite sci-fi, I'll go with Dan Simmon's Hyperion. That's where the creature on the right came from. It's the Shrike. An enigmatic & undefeatable killing machine guarding the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. This is the Balrog of Dan Simmon's world. An immediately identifiable icon of death.

The story of Hyperion continues in Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and Rise of Endymion. And I'm still not entirely sure how the Shrike came to be...


Anyways.... I can't seem to be able to hold onto a thought here, and it's taken me almost 400 words to get to the point of the book review.


Dan's latest book is Olympos, the sequel to Ilium.

Unfortunately, I can't talk about Olympos without talking about the book that came before it.

In Ilium, there are three discrete 'worlds' all happening together.

First there are the moravecs, a race of artificial beings created by humans millenia ago, and seeded in Jupiter, its moons, and the asteroid belt. They are a fusion of the organic and the cybernetic. They have autonomy, but also programmed to have a great curiosity in the human consciousness. They spend their lives conducting scientific explorations on Jupiter's moons and discuss literature like Shakespeare or Proust.

Being a being of scientist and engineers, they're picking up readings of critical quantum disruption on Mars, and have built a ship to investigate.


Second, there are the 'old-style' humans on earth. Living like terrapins in a terrarium. Everyone lives to be a hundred, exactly, in eternal youth. Every 20years, they are 'beamed' up onto one of the many artificial satellites to be rejuvenated. These satellites also facilitate childbirth, and heal fatal injuries. After a century, the human is retired from field service, and a birth is then allowed to take place.

Humans spend their lives teleporting all over a care-free Utopian earth. Everybody is illiterate. Robots handle all labour. Nobody works. Their only diversion is entomology, recreational copulation in a freely loving society, and a soap drama showing the Trojan war round the clock.

And the human females have evolved a something to keep and catalogue sperm sacs. So when their biological imperative drive them, they can sort thru the genetic material of any of their many one night stands over the course of decades, to fertilise the new life. Thus, creating an impossible society where a father could be copulating with his own daughter and no one would even know.


And in the third world, Priam's walls are under siege. His worthless son Paris has carried off the bride of Menelaus. Agamemnon has launched his ships and those of his allies to help his cry-baby brother get his wife back.

The whole cast from the Iliad is here. Achilles. Odysseus. Small Ajax. Big Ajax. Hector. Helon. Nestor. Cassandra. Andromarche. Patroclus. Briseis. Scamandrius. Apollo. Athena. Ares. Aphrodite. Hephasteus. Zeus. And many others. The Archaens. The Trojans. The Greek pantheon. The Muses. The Furies.

The cast that didn't fit though, was Dr. Hockenberry PhD University of Indiana.

For some inscrutible reason, some beings of unimaginable quantum powers have styled themselves as the Greek gods, and recreated all the heroes from Homer's Iliad to have them enact the siege of Troy.

The doctor has a PhD in literature with deep knowledge of the Iliad. He lived in the 20th century, but somehow, his body and memories had been reconstituted intact in this bizarre world, and tasked to give the gods a running sports commentary on the events around Ilium. Only Zeus and the commentators (and Cassandra to some extent) know the Iliad, but somehow, the entire cast, including the pantheon, are all following the script.

And if "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", here the powers of the gods are explained by pheromones, nanocytes, quantum fields or tunneling etc...

But what is most exciting, is to read the stories of the Iliad, finally in a readable form! Because seriously, I do not have the mental constitution to work through an epic volume of ancient Greek poetry.

I read this book before watching Troy. Which gave me an excellent perspective to enjoy all the bits that Hollywood did right, and the many many places where they shafted history in a fairly uncomfortable place. (And I don't mean the back of a Volkswagen.)

For example:
-The siege lasted 9 years or more.
-Achilles' gay-love for Patroclus, and upon their deaths their bones were mingled for sweet eternity.
-Menelaus did not die.
-Helen didn't escape with Legolas Paris. She was cornered by Menelaus in a temple. And just as he was about to plunge his sword (not a double entendre) into Helen, she bared her boobs and Menelaus changed his mind.


I'm digressing again...

Anyway, at the end of Ilium, all three worlds began to come together.

Olympos is the exciting climax. Of the fates of the 'old-style' human, after they found out the terrible truth about the orbiting satellites. Of the war between the pantheon and the Greeks, orchestrated by Hockenberry, who is enviably sharing Helen's bed. The conclusion of the Trojan war, which ended differently when Odysseus and Achilles are taken out of the equation.

The twist in Olympos, is the nature of Prospero, Caliban, Setebos, Sycorax, Ariel,and Miranda.

Yes, the cast from Shakespeare's last play: The Tempest.

And an enjoyable bonus ending, with Achilles and Penthesilea (an Amazon warrior of great beauty who was defeated by Achilles in the Iliad). Aphrodite gave Penthesilea an intoxicating pheromone, keyed to Achilles' senses only, to aid her in her ill-fated duel. But the big bosomed dumb blonde went and challenged Achilles standing downwind. HaHaHaHaHaHaHa. Resulting in the poor hero becoming helplessly in love with a corpse.


Better stop before I give away too much of the story.

Verdict: Good book. Read it.