Dan Simmons' "Ilium"

I just finished reading this late last night.  It's definitely an enjoyable read, likely to appeal to both hard SF lovers and, thanks to its sword-and-sandal element, also to fans of epic fantasy.  I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to Simmons--for that, read the more-or-less incomparable Hyperion & sequels.  Nonetheless, a fine novel, and I plan on picking up the sequel soon.

The novel is composed of lengthy chapters angled from three different viewpoints; two of the storylines converge towards the end of the book, with the third left kind of running in parallel.  Viewpoint 1 follows Thomas Hockenberry, arguably the protagonist.  Hockenberry delivers a first-person narration of...the Trojan war, as depicted by Homer.  This is not, however, the "real" war, but a recreation of the events of the Iliad, including the full Greek pantheon.  It's not entirely clear if the gods created this whole set-up, or are themselves sub-creations.  Simmons never leaves the supernaturality of the gods in question; Hockenberry (or some other aspect of the narrator, more on that in a bit) is passably acquainted with the nanotech etc. involved in all "godly" powers.  Hockenberry himself is a "scholic",  an Iliad scholar, resurrected by the gods to chronicle the events of the Trojan war "on the ground", as it were.  He eventually acts to change the course of events away from the poem.

The second viewpoint is that of Mahnmut of Europa, essentially a robot, and member of a "race" of such creatures inhabiting the Galilean moons (and points beyond).  He is made a member of an expedition to Mars to investigate strange quantum signals there; in Martian space he is dragged into the affairs of the gods, eventually winding up on the plains of Ilium.  Mahnmut's passion is analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets; his conversations with fellow "moravec" Orphus of Io (obsessed with Proust) provide the novel with both its only comic relief and its only "meta-literature" commentary.  The meaning-of-life-type-discussion that Simmons bandied about so successfully in the Hyperion novels is here (mostly) restricted to this robotic duo.

The final viewpoint is that of a small group of "old-style" humans on earth; actually a sort of nature preserve of mildly-altered humans, uneducated, kept in pampered seclusion by automata, "faxing" from place to place by some sort of quantum teleportation network.  This "herd" of humans are kept at a supposedly stable population: each person lives exactly 100 years (victims of accidents are resurrected or repaired), births are only allowed to replace true deaths, and the centenarians (again, supposedly) "ascend" to join the "post-humans", who are discussed but never seen.  One aged human's desire to live longer, and to learn more about the world, lead a small group into meeting the oldest truly old-style human, and following her on a trip to an orbital city.  Along the way, they meet Odysseus, Caliban, and Prospero.  Yes, from the Tempest.  Ariel is kicking around somewhere, too.

My main complaint with this novel is lack of follow-through, and lack of explanation (and to be fair, I haven't yet read the sequel.  Complaint stands.)  As readers, we are never given enough information, but the novels constantly raises narrative-troubling questions.  It is explicit that the recreation of the Trojan war has a technological basis--it's not magic, nor is it (merely) time-travel.  But, we never even glimpse the real orchestrators, the post-humans or AI responsible, except in so far as the gods should be included in that number (and only Zeus seems to display any self-consciousness beyond the mythical persona); furthermore, the extent of this recreation is totally unclear (how long have the characters/culture of the Iliad been around, how far does the recreation extend geographically, etc).  

The old-style humans are purposeful satires of technology-enabled ignorance, incapable of interpreting the clues that would explain their world to the reader.  (My only writing-style complaint here, but a very strong one: the third-person narration following this group often explains or labels something in the action or setting, only to remind us that "they"--the characters--"didn't know that, of course."  The only human character who is in the know makes infuriatingly uninformative comments to her companions in a style (deliberately?) parodying the authorial tone.  It comes across as incredibly annoying, reminding us unnecessarily of the characters' ignorance, and rendering the fantastic far-future environment inaccessible in terms of enjoyable description.  Highly advanced cultures/architectures/technologies, even the ruins thereof, can be explored by relative savages to good effect, but not when it's done like this.)

The moravecs, the robots from the Jovian moons, are fascinating, but our viewpoint character, Mahnmut, has lived a very isolated life, so we get essentially no insight into this culture.  Further, the entire civilization has apparently been isolated from human and post-human development for centuries, so they bring little explanatory power to the narrative--just one more kind of outsider.  Mahnmut and Orphu's literary discussions and introspections are highly enjoyable, and, as I mentioned above, are the vehicle for most of the novel's "deeper questions".  Unfortunately, they're not examined at length, and the action overtakes the two before they can come to much in the way of answers.

Finally, Hockenberry, who's the closest the novel has to a central protagonist, is strangely empty: his memory fragmented, relatively unemotional except for flashes of mortal fear and a brief fling with Helen, absent clear motive except survival and, eventually, a thwarting of the Homeric story-line, primarily (?) to spite the gods. Who, granted, are jerks. Hockenberry could deliver the goods, explanatorily, as he seems to know a lot about the science of his predicament (how?), but he never does.

The literary cross-textural nature of the novel is probably one of its strongest drawing points, but it comes out a bit weak in the end.  A lot of page-space is given over to the sonnets, with little resolution, and it assumes a fair amount of familiarity with Shakespeare's poetry.  Proust does not receive nearly enough examination; if you're not familiar with In Search of Lost Time, you will likely get little to nothing from this discussion.  (People in this category include...me.)  The Tempest sub-text emerges late in the novel, Caliban is the only character with much screen-time, and the whole thing just comes across as rather nonsensical to me.  And I love the Tempest, I am primed to start looking for post-colonial otherizing what-have-you...there's just too little to work with here, and that half-filtered by utterly ignorant viewpoint characters. Finally, the Homeric action of well over a third of the book is clearly at the center of the text, but doesn't lend itself well to re-interpretation or analysis: it's just a re-telling of the poem, the supernatural bits explained technologically, with the addition of an outside observer who eventually changes the course action (and then everything changes).

This is a large, ambitious novel, a far-future, post-singularity story. It is very enjoyable, I want to emphasize that despite my criticism. The three threads work on totally different levels—bloody sword-and-sandal action, far-future adventure vaguely reminiscent of post-apocalyptic “rural” SF, and a heavily allusion-laden adventure/journey of robotic academics. But where Hyperion was able to handle its ambiguities and larger-universe questions (what I've elsewhere called the paraperipheral or occulted text) elegantly, even re-shuffling its internal explanations several times without feeling like it's cheating, the foundations of the Ilium universe are never established satisfactorily, which, for me, drastically limits the effectiveness of the action. The big background questions don't remain in the background—the question of what's really going on, what the post-singularity history leading to this point really was—but are instead continually brought to the reader's attention, while the three storylines/characters pursue much more limited objectives. Olympos, the second half of this duology, might answer most of my questions, but anything that goes over the 600 page mark without answering questions inspired in the first chapter leaves me a bit dissatisfied. It seems clear that the action of the three threads—the recreation of the battle for Troy, the voyage to Mars, and the humans' search for longer life—are not in themselves critical, except as they tie in to a larger, mostly hidden narrative of post-singularity development. And that tie-in just doesn't happen, though we see glimpses in the last few chapters. An excellent read, but lacking a certain focus.