January 12, 2006
MarkBernstein.org
 

Ilium

Ilium
Dan Simmons

(order)

(January 12, 2006)

This 700-page, Hugo-nominated adventure of the distant future is packed with incident and invention. We have old-style humans on earth, we have post-humans in the earth's rings, we have robotic cyborg intelligences called moravecs mining Jupiter and discussing Proust and Shakespeare among themselves. We have a vast reenactment of The Iliad unfolding on the plain of Ilium, with real blood and real gods and with everything witnessed by a team of reincarnated classics professors.

At the end, the characters agree that they're eager to discover what happens next -- presumably, in the second volume.