Dan Simmons' Ilium

Plot Summary

The story starts on Mars in the 40th century, where the events of Homer’s Iliad are being lived out as they occurred in the epic. All of Homer’s heroes and villains are there, including the gods, demigods, and muses, but the magic of the story is attributed to a number of advanced technologies. They use a quantum teleporter to travel back and forth from Olympus Mons to the plains of Ilium, nanotechnology to enhance their senses and abilities, and are the benefactors of generations of hyper genetic manipulation; which gives them their Godlike stature. Achilles, Hector, Paris, Odysseus, and other heroes of The Iliad are super powered due nanotech enhancements and (to be sure that they stay true to the mythology that they are reenacting) because they are the result of actual interbreeding between gods and mortals.

Luckily we have a 21st century classics professor, Thomas Hockenberry, who was revived by the technologically powered Olympian gods to monitor the 40th century Trojan War. It’s through his perspective that this section of the story unfolds. Hockenberry and his fellow scholics (Sholars who have been revived to witness and record the Trojan War as it unfolds) are controlled by the muses, who in turn are controlled by the gods. Since they were all former scholars of the classics, they know how the Iliad ends, but they have been forbidden by Zeus to tell any of the mortals or the other gods. The gods know that the scholics know how Homer’s story ends, but they've been forbidden by Zeus to ask about it. Rather than die at the hands of almighty Zeus, they push their pawns around the battlefield like they do in the original epic. That’s all until Hockenberry is recruited by one of the gods to assassinate another god in the Greek pantheon. He is given a bunch of god level technology with which to accomplish the task, including the “Hades Helmet;” a device that makes him invisible to even the gods’ advanced scanners. To say more here would lead to spoiling the plot, but I will say that the original story of the Iliad, which Simmons has done such a beautiful and in-depth job describing, begins to go off the rails.

While this plot alone could have been the entire book, Hockenberry’s Trojan War is only one of three simultaneous stories.

The second plot follows a group of "Moravecs" (a race of sentient robots built by post-humans who live on the moons of Jupiter). Not having paid much attention to Earth and Mars for generations, they were alerted when they discovered a lot of dangerous quantum manipulation and advanced terraforming on Mars. When they go to investigate, their ship is shot down in orbit, by a bearded, lightning bolt throwing god in a orbiting chariot Mahnmut and Orphu, the only survivors of the Moravec investigators, try to make it across Mars, aided by mysterious "Little Green Men.” The two robots further display Simmons literary knowledge while navigating the Martian landscape with conversations about the ancient Earth literature of Shakespeare and Proust. Their conversations are entertaining and enlightening, but I was most glad to see that their fates eventually completely converge with story of the second coming of the Trojan War. Lastly, there are the few surviving humans on Earth. They are a small population of humans whose lives are slightly enhanced by genetic manipulation and other technology, and who have little to do but go to parties and have sex with each other. I suspect that these people might be connected to the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey, though their role in Simmons story is much grander than that. The Earth that they live on, somewhere on the other side of the world from the 40th century Trojan War, was set up by the long-gone post-humans. They designed quantum teleportation networks around the world, and a system in which all remaining humans are carefully population-controlled. They are granted perfect health until their "fifth twenty," when they report for “ascension.” If this is ringing your Logan’s Run bell then you’re not alone.

However lazy and carefree these future humans are, some of them still have a faint spark of adventure and curiosity. A few set off on an unplanned adventure where they meet Odysseus, and where they discover truths that further expand the stories of the Moravecs and Thomas Hockenberry, though they do not intertwine like the other stories do.

On Originality

Some people might decry the story because on the surface it doesn’t seem original, and because the science behind it is extremely theoretical and largely unexplained. I have seen science fiction that makes popular fiction a reality and even has the characters manipulate the plot in an entertaining way; revisionist fiction, if there isn’t a better term. I remember the holodeck on Star Trek being used in similar ways numerous times.

Simmons is not shooting for originality the entire time, and even when he does recycle an idea he gives credit to the original authors. For example, he pokes fun at the meek future Earthlings when they encounter an old style human who refers to them as "Eloi,” a la H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. This is also a bit of foreshadowing since there are morlock-esque antagonists later on in that plot.

I once had the pleasure of sitting down with a group at UTD to have lunch with science fiction author Greg Bear. He said a lot of things that I won’t forget, but one thing that pertains to this current topic is his professional opinion that it’s okay for science fiction authors to use ideas from previous works, as long as they do it better. They must expand upon the concept, and make something new out of the old idea. While it’s true that, taken into constituent parts, a lot of the ideas and plot devices that go into Ilium aren’t wholly original, the way that Dan Simmons’ weaves them together, and the depth at which he explores classical literature while he does it is something that no one besides Simmons can do.

The difference between previous works and Ilium is that Simmons brings an amount of research and knowledge of classic literature to bear on Ilium that is dizzying. All the while he is also playing with some serious science fiction concepts and themes, and creating a rich, entertaining story. While I would imagine that Ilium would probably be classified as Soft Science Fiction because of its’ small level of scientific detail, I also think that fans of Hard Science Fiction would be impressed with Ilium due to the extent of the aforementioned research and how well it is applied in the novel. At least I think that’s why Hard SF fans like those books.

Why It’s Hard to Get Into

For me, Dan Simmons’ Ilium began at a crawl and ended at lightspeed. I had a similar experience with his earlier novel, Hyperion, which has much more in common with Ilium than my reception.

Both books rely heavily on intertextuality (the relationship between texts, especially literary ones). Hyperion ran along The Canterbury Tales, while Ilium leans on Simmons’ impossibly intimate understanding of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. He also manages to inject his knowledge of Shakespeare and Proust into the conversations or his characters as well as the plot. Lastly, Hyperion and Ilium follow the perspectives of multiple characters who seem unconnected, but who converge later in the novel.

It’s this manner of telling the story that makes it start slow for me. Just when I feel like I’m starting to understand and appreciate a character and the events swirling around them, the story resets to another character. To make matters worse I find myself in love with only one or two of the characters and disjointed stories. I impatiently read certain chapters just so I can get back to the characters and story line that I like the most. I think that’s why I like the end of Simmons’ stories better, because all of the characters, interesting and not, are finally together somehow.

Non-Ending

The last way that Hyperion and Ilium are similar is that the both end with unanswered questions. Both books begin a series, so the first books leave something to be desired by the end. While I was left puzzled by both books, I can say that I felt more satisfied by Ilium in the end.

I wasn’t unhappy with the ending, even before I knew that there was a sequel. I think that sometimes questions are better left unanswered. Sometimes the mystery is more interesting than the answer. In this case, I loved the mystery, I loved the attention to detail, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It takes a lot to distract me from the ever growing cloud of distractions that swirl around me on a daily basis. I’m happy to say that Ilium did just that. It trapped my interest like Zues trapped his enemies in Tartarus, and it inspired me to write this post.

One Final Note on Dan Simmons

While I thoroughly enjoyed Ilium and somewhat enjoyed Hyperion, I do think it's important to note Dan Simmons' polarizing political views, particular his radical views on Islam. After being impressed by the author I spent some time doing research and discovered that in recent years he has become more and more obsessed with perpetuating negative stereotypes about Islam. With his recent novel Flashback he took a step away from well researched intertextualization, and toward far right leaning dystopian United States. One article I read about this book summed it up by saying, "The U.S. is tottering, weighing in at only 44½ states, its mass eaten away by Mexico, its interior rotted out by floods of immigrants, by loss of faith in a free-market economy, by national health care and a myriad of other entitlement programs, by the global-warming hoax and green-energy boondoggles, and by drugs, the most pervasive being "flashback," which allows its users to visit their pasts in a dream state. It's a bad, bad time, and its fatal origins lie, we are instructed, with the Obama presidency, its spendthrift domestic programs and pusillanimous foreign policy."

While some readers might agree with those politics, it's sad to me to see that such a creative, thoughtful writer has turned his talents towards writing censorious dystopian fiction with little literary merit.

#Ilium #Troy #TrojanWar #DanSimmons #intertextuality #Hyperion #Homer #Iliad #TheOdyssey #Islamaphobia