Watch in awe while the last, currently, written science fantasy epos of one of the most fascinating authors of our time comes to an end.In the second part of the series, the world is more and more escalating, fractions getting mad, gods being sad, Mars getting hot, poor protagonists stumbling around between mighty entities, and the big aha moment towards the end gives a satisfying conclusion.In contrast to the Hyperion series, the a bit stronger focus on mythology and magic makes if more fantasy...

I was disappointed in this book. It's sad, because Ilium was so promising. But I found this a real let-down conclusion to a probably over-ambitious beginning. Perhaps I had too high of hopes, because if anybody could have pulled off a conclusion to such an ambitious start, it would have been Simmons.This novel seemed like a jumble of cool ideas thrown in together and stirred. They were all individually fascinating, but they didn't come together into anything... Well, "story shaped" (to steal Nei...

It's like Simmons wanted to write a sequel to Ilium but told himself he was going to make it the exact opposite in almost every way imaginable. This book was much darker in tone and much more violent then the first book but it still totally worked for me. None of what's in these pages should make any sense being an amalgamation of many different styles and influences as well as many characters, real and imagined, from history and literature but holy hell it is entertaining. Almost all the charac...

I enjoyed the beginning of this book as it picks up where Ilium left off. Leading up to about the middle of the book the story line is interesting and exciting. And then wham! Stinky turds from there on out. The rest of the story is a classic example of everything I can't stand about bad science fiction.No or very little insight into the science... The author just assumes you know what the *+!? he is talking about.So many people and characters interacting in blurry loops of potential meaning tha...

(Contains spoilers towards the end)This is my least favorite book.It's not the worst book I've ever read. "Manos: The Hands of Fate" is perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's not my least favorite. It takes more than simple technical ineptness to rise (or sink) to the rank of my least favorite. A least favorite work needs to commit some special crime. Olympos' crime is that it took the plot threads of Ilium, one of the top two or three most creative and ambitious science fiction books

Mind-blowing, adrenaline-pumping, world-expanding science fiction at its very best. Dan Simmons has big ideas and grand schemes, and he is never content to simply tell a story; no, he must weave it into our own reality in a seamless fashion, reaching backward and forward in time and literature. In this story (I’m grouping the previous book, Ilium, into the “story”), he brings together Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, quantum teleportation, terraforming, robots, and so much more. Each new bit that unf...

"Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens."Hour 1 of the 37 hour-long audiobook:Not impressed with the narrator. Another 36 hours, sigh. The Greeks are a silly lot. Glad to have made it past the first few chapters and to Hockenberry.Hour 2... mostly bored. The gods are not much of an improvement over the Greeks.Hour 5. Oh my goodness, another 32 hours of this... Greek gods in a SF setting really do feel silly. Especially when this inept. And Simmons‘ description of w...

Oh, frack it. I’ve started and deleted and restarted this review too many times already. Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos have left me speechless. (If you ask my wife, you’ll discover that’s a rare occurrence indeed.) I don’t think I can put together an entirely coherent review, much less something with any significant insight on the author’s ideas. So I’ll just share what I’m able to get out in a little solitary brainstorming session.First of all, you have to realize that Olympos isn’t me...

didn't answer anything.the quite one didn't show up.setebos just left.islamophobia left a bad taste in my mind.

Welllll... I just can't get excited about this book now that it's over. After wading through 900 dense pages of literary influenced sci-fi, I feel a little cheated by where we ended up. Harman's journey into what was supposed to be the Earth's past (our future, I guess) was pretty dull considering the tantalizing hints Simmons drops. I love the idea, for example, that a Global Caliphate arose sometime in the 22nd Century, developed time travel and quantum spacetime science, and destroyed the bul...

What a complete disappointment!! Ilium was amazing, beautiful, epic story-telling, but Olympos was just a complete boring mess. I kept thinking it would get back on track, but it didn't. NOTHING was explained. Don't read this if you are looking for answers from the questions in Ilium, you won't get them. There are even two characters in the story that actually do know what's going on and can answer questions, but they refuse to and just wink at each other knowingly. Kind of insulting to your rea...

and then there were none... no one writes like Simmons, and even when he has split open your skull, taken out your brains, juiced them with some Reyka vodka, chocolate sauce, coffee beans, and butter pecan ice cream (it's known in Hugo and Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke winning circles as a Medulla Mudslide, which is why you'll never have one, non-award-winner types hahahahahaha- OK, that's just me being silly) and then sluiced them back in and stuck a bendystraw in your mouth so you can sample the...

Dan Simmons' Olympos consists mainly in two threads. In the one, most of our various characters (Harman and Daeman, the moravecs, Odysseus, Achilles, et al) undertake long journeys in time and space, bringing them at an unbearably slow pace towards the future Earth. On these journeys, they endure various ordeals of little consequence, and a great deal of nothing occurs and is described at great length and in extraordinary detail by Simmons. In the other thread, we are treated to pages and pages

I almost couldn't believe this book was written by the same author as Hyperion and Ilium. The various plots meandered while none of the big mysteries were answered. And where did all the misogynism come from? Simmons has always written such strong female characters. Suddenly Helen of Troy is calling herself a cunt and the formerly powerful/strong modern-day human female characters are suddenly crying and moody all of the time, while the men take front-seat on the adventures. And the Goddesses al...

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEADI have tremendous problems with this book, not the least of which is that I wanted to enjoy it so badly. Simmons has a talent for writing good scenes and decent characters, but the overall structure of this book is so sloppy and disappointing that I can't help but feel cheated. I felt this way at the end of Rise of Endymion as well, and I'm starting to think that it's systemic to all of his epic sci-fi narratives. He comes up with a neat idea, creates hint that he's going to

If you ever plan to read the Ilium duo-logy then i recommend doing it back-to-back. I picked up Olympos 18 months after Ilium and experienced a great deal of confusion. My usual go-to Wikipedia let me down so i resorted to finding spoiler reviews, which gave me snippets of names, events and what went down. I would still need to re-read Ilium to fully appreciate Olympos.It continues in the same vein as Ilium with the three story lines still separate but slowly making their way to the inevitable c...

A very ambitious science fiction duology (Olympos being the direct sequel to Ilium). (MILD SPOILERS AHEAD:) This is a multi-universe far-future epic involving Greek gods and Homeric heroes, Artificial Intelligences obsessed with Proust, nanotech-enhanced posthumans, a resurrected Professor of Classics from the 20th century that attempts to seduce Helen of Troy, anti-semitic killer robots, characters from Shakespeare that have come to life due to Quantum-wave parallel universe framistatwhatsits (...

This was too long, but so worth the long hours.

Sometimes, Kara, you need to listen to yourself more. I really should have read my review of Ilium before diving into Olympos. Not only would it have refreshed me on the plot, but I actually mentioned the uncomfortable, rapey, male-gazeyness of Simmons’ writing in that review. This is what clinched my dislike of Olympos. As with Ilium, I almost gave up on it—but I soldiered on, and honestly? Not worth it.Picking up where Ilium left off, Olympos has a lot of plot threads/characters to summari...