Reading this book has taken over my life during the past two weeks. Oh my my my! I haven't devoured a book with this much voracity since reading Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas five or six years ago. NOM NOM NOM NOM.
Ilium takes place in an epic (yes, epic) overlap of ancient history and the far, far future. It's a multi-pronged story about Greek gods and goddesses (at least, beings who assume this classical role), the individuals the gods resurrect to have observe their divine influence in progression of The Battle of Troy, Post-Humans and MORAVECS* (*autonomous, sentient, biomechanical organisms seeded throughout the outer solar system by humans during the Lost Age) in the far future who grow weary and concerned with the harmful quantum footprints that these same gods are leaving on space and time from their lavish home on the summit of Mount Olympos - the highest point on a terraformed planet Mars...
Flaring tempers. Honor. Defiance. Luck. Robots obsessed with human literature. Hard Science. Graphic battle narration. Yeah, I'm in it to win it, folks.
Well-written, too - Props to Dan Simmons. You'd think that a story which ping-pongs between 1200 B.C. and some unspecified date in the far future would be a disorienting nightmare of a read. NAY! Simmons has crafted a smooth, textured and fun story to read. I've also gained some awesome insight into how a tale can be told. This is my first exposure to Dan Simmons, but most certainly will not be the last novel of his that I dive into - other than Olympos, the concluding half of this story, that much is a given.
Here's an excerpt from one of my favorite parts of Ilium:
“Open your eyes,” said Savi.
He did so, wildly grabbing the sonie for support with both hands a second later. Everything within his sight had been transformed. The nearby trees he had been ignoring except to borrow their shade were now towering complexities – transparent, layer upon layer of pulsing, living tissue, dead bark, vesicles, veins, dead inner material showing structural vectors and rings with columns of flowing data, the moving green and red of life – needles, xylem, phloem, water, sugar, energy sunlight. He knew that if he could read the flowing data, he would understand exactly the hydrology of the living miracle that was that tree, know exactly how many foot-pounds of pressure it was taking to osmotically raise all that water from the roots – Daeman could look down and see the roots under the soil, see the energy exchange of water from soil into those roots and the long voyage, hundreds of feet, from roots to the vertical tubules raising that water – hundreds of feet vertically! Like a giant sucking from a straw! – and then the lateral motion of the water, molecules of water in pipelines only molecules wide, out along branches fifty, sixty, seventy feet wide, narrowing, narrowing, life and nutrients in that water, energy from the sun…
Daeman looked up and saw sunlight for the discrete rain of energy it was – sunlight striking pine needles and being absorbed, sunlight striking the humus beneath his feet and warming the bacteria there. The world around him was a torrent of information, a tidal wave of data, a million micro-ecologies interacting all at once, energy to energy…
Gasping, almost gagging, Daeman whirled away, trying to shut off this vision, but everywhere was the complexity – the tagged and streaming ebb and flow of energy being passed, nutrients being absorbed, cells being fed, molecules dancing in the transparent trees, and breathing soul and sky ablaze with its rain and surge of sunlight and radio messages from the stars.
Daeman clasped his hands over his eyes, but too late; he’d looked at Savi – the old woman, but also a galaxy of life. Life nested in the flashing neurons of her brain behind that grinning skull and firing like lightning on the string of shocks along her retinal nerve and in the millions upon billions of living forms in her gut, busy and indifferent all, and – trying to look away, Daeman made the mistake of looking down at himself, into himself, past himself at his connection to the air and ground and sky…
“Off!” said Savi; Daeman’s mind echoed the command.
The brilliant midday sunlight bouncing off the trees and needle strewn soil suddenly seemed as dark as midnight to Daeman. His legs ceased to work. Gasping, Daeman slid along the edge of the somie and collapsed to the ground, rolling onto his stomach, arms extended, palms pushed flat, face pressed against pine needles.
Savi crouched next to him and patted his shoulder. “It’ll go away in a minute,” she said softly.
Quoted from Ilium by Dan Simmons
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