Ilium by Dan Simmons: A short review


On my way to Gen Con I powered through the first book I'd brought with me, and realized I needed another fix. A walk through the Minneapolis airport (where I was making my connection to Indianapolis) ended when I saw Ilium, the newest book by Dan Simmons.

Thinking it was a modern day update to Homer's Iliad, I idly paged through it anyway. That's when I discovered that one of the main characters was a DNA-resurrected history professor from the twenty first century, alive again 10 or 20 thousand years after his death through the magic of quantum tunneling and DNA reconstruction. Whoa. He had been "brought back" by greek gods to observe what was apparently a re-enactment of the Iliad.

I read this not insignificantly-sized book in just a few days (before I returned home on the return flight, unfortunately, but that's another book). I thought Dan Simmons had peaked with the Crook Factory. But, a different genre, a different style.

Ilium isn't afraid to fling mind-bending hyper-advanced tech at the reader, but in small, easily digestible lumps. But beyond that, one of the best aspects of the book is that you are constantly asking, "But, what's going on; how is all this possible? What is the lost history of humanity that has brought us to this?" It gave me a feeling similar to that I had when I read Larry Niven's A World Out of Time so long ago, which like Ilium is a story about coming suddenly upon the civilization of humanity thousands or more years in the future, and sleuthing along with the main character to discover what the flip has happened to bring us to the present crazy circumstance. With Ilium, even your gueses about what has probably happened will eventually be proved wrong.



A great book!

Posted: Tue - July 29, 2003 at 03:38 PM          

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