Ilium Book Review - Cave To The Cross Apologetics

Ilium By Dan Simmons

Synopsis:

21st-century professor Thomas Hockenberry has been brought back from the dead by the Greek gods to witness and write down the evens of the Illiad and make sure everything turns out the way Homer described it. Things don’t go as planned. There’s a couple of robots in the far future who must travel to Mars where chariots of fire threaten post-human Earth. Things don’t go as planned. There are a group of perfected, resurrected humans who live for a while and can do pretty much anything they want. A group has gotten bored and wants to explore the old Earth planet below them and find a woman who is said to have lived for hundreds of years. Things don’t go as planned. There’s another book after this one. Things don’t go as planned.

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Review

This is my second attempt at reading a book by Dan Simmons. I read and hated Hyperion and after a recommendation from Nick Rekieta of this book, it is clear that I do not care for anything by Simmons and will stop trying.

I would not say that Simmons is without talent and it seems that a number of people enjoy his books. Simmon’s pacing here is a slog. The story meanders and most of it feels like it’s a high school teaching telling a bad story to get people interested in reading the Iliad. There is no character that is worth caring about. The main character barely seems like he would survive a fistfight let alone carry out the feats required of him in the story. For over three-quarters of the book, three different storylines crawl and switch enough times without any real revelations or reasons why one would care to continue that it is now three stories that crawl. It’s not until the last quarter of the book that anything of actual value occurs and even then its a mixture of confusing reveals and plot points that I didn’t know what really was going on or to what extent things mattered. Echoes of Hyperion loomed greatly here.

Simmons knows his history and his Iliad. However, what is two books could have been one and it’s one that I will not be continuing as I fear it would lead to my own Odyssey. *Note here* – Like Hyperion, there are a number of sexual descriptions, descriptions of extreme violence, and language use. The reader should be cautioned – but the book wasn’t good so that helps.

Final Grade