From the outer solar system, an advanced race of semiorganic Artificial Intelligences, called moravecs, observe Earth and Mars in consternation, trying to make sense of the situation, hoping to shift the balance of power before out-of-control quantum forces destroy everything. Superhuman entities with names like Prospero, Caliban and Ariel lay complex plots, using human beings as game pieces.

Meanwhile, the last remaining old-style human beings on a far-future Earth must struggle for survival against a variety of hostile forces.

Posthumans masquerading as the Greek gods and living on Mars travel back and forth through time and alternate universes to interfere in the real Trojan War, employing a resurrected late 20th-century classics professor, Thomas Hockenberry, as their tool. Drawing from Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare's Tempest and the work of several 19th-century poets, Simmons achieves another triumph in this majestic, if convoluted, sequel to his much-praised Ilium (2003). Olympos, a tale of Mars, the Greek gods, and survival in a post-human world.įrom Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Master of the Universes: An Exclusive Interview with Dan Simmons That and a more-than passing familiarity with _ might come in handy for the journey to Mars, Ilium's far-off shores, and the Earth that might be. Not only is Olympos excellent hard science fiction and grand space opera, it's a riveting and fast-paced book that is alternately shocking, thrilling, and often deftly hilarious as his hapless human creations wrestle the forces of literary history itself. Picking up where he left off in the high-wire act _, Simmons doesn't disappoint.

And amid it all, a group of confused mere mortals with their classically trained robot allies (from Jupiter no less) race across time and space to keep from getting squashed as the various Titans of the Western Canon square off.Ĭonfused? It's all part of Dan Simmons's Olympos, a novel one part fun-with-quantum-physics and two parts through-the-looking-glass survey of Western Literature. Back on a future Earth, assorted creatures from Shakespeare's _ get ready to rumble in a winner-takes-the-universe battle royale. Hector and Achilles have joined forces against the Olympic Gods. “ ReviewWelcome back to the Trojan War gone round the bend.

Olympos simmons