HECK. That was intense.

~ 15/02/17I've only read one chapter but I can already tell the writing is so unbelievably brilliant. Insta-love for me.~ 18/03/17•I'm a little past page 100 and the writing is still brilliant, but all the rest isn't doing it for me -sure enough I've only been able to read 100 pages in 30 days. I've no doubt the world-building is complex and thought-out, but nothing is explicitly explained and the reader is supposed to glean all the information from the story itself as it unfolds; normally I wou...

OK, mad props to Dan Simmons!! Bravo!! This man is brilliant and cheeky. Bold and irreverent. And humor in the oddest of places. I swear if I didn't know better I'd say this book was written on a dare. I mean honestly "What the heck did I just read" (er…listen to)!! This was everything in the kitchen sink of scifi!! The world building was amazing and genre blending? Yes please!! Did you want to read a book about Greek mythology? How about a story about the retelling of The Iliad? Complete with G...

Update: After thinking about the book for three weeks and comparing it with the other books read and ratings given this month AND despite my misgivings about the beginning and not really liking the parts about the Greeks all that much, I decided to upgrade the rating to a full five stars. The scope of the book was just so great, it really deserves the highest rating.*~*~*~*I did not enjoy the first 50 pages or so. I was confused and wondering what was going on. I though I would DNF this, before

Most excellent. I like SF, and I like much of what gets lumped under the rather stuffy title 'classic literature'. Clearly, so does Dan Simmons. Set in a very distant future, long after both AI and posthumans have merged, this novel contains three main storylines, all of which ventually intersect. First, there's a group of languid, pleasure-seeking old-style humans living on old earth, all their needs taken care of by mechanical servitors left for them, presumably, by the posthumans. Upon comple...

Time to pimp ones´ mythological session with some sci-fi elements. Some people don´t see this one as the same ingenious work as Hyperion and Endymion and I don´t get why. It´s not that über, true, but it´s still some of the best a science fantasy hybrid reader can wish for. There is, for instance, and as far as I know, nothing of the same quality and perfection that combines mythology with sci-fi, fantasy with space opera style fractions, and in general dares to dance at many genre weddings.Rete...

After reading Hyperion, you can't but help thinking that as far as sci-fi goes Simmons is in a class of his own, and this offering Ilium does not let the reader down. Once again a book deeply entrenched with classical history and literature as it's centred around Homer's The Iliad of Homer and William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and when I say centred I mean a 20th century historian is revived to oversee the Iliad and see how match it matches Homer's poem, for hie employers, the classical Greek g...

I love the idea of a throwback, an author who takes cues from classics and puts a new spin on them. Mieville took rollicking pulp and updated it, Susanna Clarke made fairy tales and the Gothic novel sing for a modern audience--but if you're going to adopt a bygone style, take only the best, and leave the dross. By all means, copy Howard's verve and brooding, but skip the sexist titillation. Copy Lovecraft's cosmic horror, but skip the racist epithets. Dan Simmon's Ilium feels like 50's sci fi fo...

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and beca

Hey, I have a booktube channel (youtube for book reviews, etc.), and I include Ilium in my top 10 fantasy books list here. Please subscribe if I've earned it!If someone were to describe this book to me (if they even could), I don't know if I would believe how much I absolutely enjoyed it. Dan Simmons is a mad genius.Shakespeare-quoting humanoid robots, Greek Gods, post-humans, and old-style humans somehow make the craziest awesome story imaginable.Ilium is a story told through essentially three

"Literary science fiction". One of the words in this phrase struggles and strains against the other two like an 18-month old who doesn't want to be picked up. It doesn't want to be associated with a genre that often is long on ideas and short on quality prose and sharp and distinct style. It often succeeds in escaping the pull of science fiction's weak gravity. Occassionaly, an author creates a story that is so dense that the word is held in place in an unstable orbit. Ultimately many of those f...

Masterly far-future sci-fi epicness from Dan Simmons. Thousands of years into Earth's future the human population has stagnated into a contented form of indulgent immortality; no-one dies and no-one goes hungry, but also no-one really does anything more interesting than take part in the occasional sex party or get eaten by a cloned Allosaur. Meanwhile a present-day historian has been resurrected on Mars, apparently at the whim of the ancient Greek gods in order to act as observer to the siege of...

Readers, Assemble! and go get this book and read it. Seriously, this is a book lovers paradise. It is a science fiction/fantasy mash-up of the Iliad and Odyssey but also with two other totally awesome and original story lines that at first seem like they have fuck all to do with one another until all the tiny pieces start to click and you see how vast Simmons' imagination is and how well he plots. A book this length usually would take me about four or five days, I'm a severe insomniac and pretty...

My review of Ilium in a nutshell: “I liked it?”AMBISHUN: DAN SIMMONS HAZ IT. I’m not sure if it is possible to be too ambitious when creating a plot for a novel, but Dan Simmons seems to be on a mission to find out. There are concepts, there are high concepts, and there are Dan Simmons concepts. When it’s time for Simmons to begin a new novel, I picture something like this:Dan Simmons is smoking a pipe (made from the bones of an aurochs), deep in the bowels of Stately Simmons Manor. Inspiration

Dan Simmon's imagination and his ability to craft stories are impressive. In "Ilium" he tells a very interesting sci-fi story. While never being specific about the timeframe, the story seems to start in an approximation to what I find in Warhammer 40K fiction. A period so far in the future that the past is a nearly unknown legend. What makes this unique is the juxtaposition of that far-flung future with the Trjoan War. I know, right? Welcome to Ilium. Post-humanity has evolved into something ver...

This was a fun read! Combine the Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, aliens, space travel, dinosaurs, war, and AI then you've got Ilium! This was such a new and great twist to the story we all know and love!

A fantastic sci-fi epic in the tradition of Simmons's Hyperion Cantos. In Ilium, as in the Hyperion books, Simmons really shows off his knowledge of classical literature. He obviously knows the Iliad and the Odyssey inside and out, but the author (through his characters) also fills this book with literary and historical references to Shakespeare, Proust, and a dozen other sources. It's ingenious and it made me to resolve to finally get around to reading the Iliad myself once I've finished this s...

Prepare to have mind blown.I like dense reads, and I like immersing myself in complex worlds created by brilliant minds... but never, NEVER have I read a more astonishingly complex novel. 1/2 the way through this gigantic mind bender I was still completely without a clue about what was going on in the book. The fact that I and so many others rate this book so highly tells you a little something about our Mr. Simmons and the quality of his writing. Who get's away with this?? Nobody does... excpet...

According to the cover for Ilium, it was nominated for the Hugo Novel of the Year in 2004. It absolutely deserved it. It also didn't win, and it deserved that as well. Don't get me wrong. It's a great book and I loved reading it (indeed, this was the second time I read it and I think I enjoyed it more the second time). It's really three stories all happening in different places in the solar system at the same time, inevitably approaching one another. It's rare to find a book tries this and does

Hands down the best scifi that I’ve read in the last ten years. This was the first time that I’d read Dan Simmons and I was floored by the depth of his characters, the complexity of his plot, and the intricate and fascinating world(s) he created. I personally liked the feeling over never really knowing more than any of the characters. I enjoyed the mystery of being on level with the characters, unsure of what would come next. Nothing about this is a light read. The book treats you like an adult