Ilium by Dan Simmons

Ilium by Dan Simmons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rollicking and hilarious yarn, after the relatively staid Hyperion. There are three parallel narratives that intersect – and how they intersect – ripping apart the very fabric of space-time! After a surfeit of John Keats in the The Hyperion Omnibus Cantos, here there are other literary references – Homer and William Shakespeare, even a Marcel Proust spouting sentient robot, Samuel Beckett and H G Wells’ Time Machine

Here is the favourite swear-word of Zeus

“ENOUGH!!” bellows Zeus and not only stops Ares’ diatribe, but freezes every god and robot in the place. “I’ll hear no more whining prattle from you, Ares, you lying, two-faced, treacherous sparrowfart, you miserable excuse for a man, much less for a god.”
“Hah! Diomedes – made you run! You coward! You girly girl! You glittering little puppet! You quavering sparrowfart]!”

The humour never flags, even if it is scatological

Agamemnon had been angry at the Calchas’ interpretation. “He shit square goat turds,” whispered the captain with a wine-scented laugh…
“At that point Lord Agamemnon, Atreus’ son, began shitting whole goats,” laughs Orus, speaking loudly enough that several captains turn to frown at us.

“You idiot,” thunders Apollo in ultrasonic frequencies audible only to the gods and scholics and the dogs in Troy, who set up a fearsome howling in response.

I loved the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo – the bread and butter, the essence, so to say, of ‘hard’ SF

If you’ve never seen a god or goddess, all I can tell do is tell you that they are larger than life – literally, since Athena must be seven feet tall – and more beautiful and striking than any mortal. I presume their nanotechnology and recombinant DNA labs made them that way. Athena combines qualities of feminine beauty, divine command, and sheer power that I didn’t even know could exist before I found myself returned to existence in the shadow of Olympos.

Ada stepped out of the water, dried herself, slipped into a thin robe, and told the servitors to leave her. They exited via one of their osmotic wall membranes.

“It’s some sort of squirt communicator,” said Mahnmut. “It’s all folded in on itself, but I can see that if I activate it, it’ll unfurl onto its own tripod, aim a large dish toward the sky, and fire a serious burst of … something. Encoded energy in tightband k-maser or perhaps even modulated gravity.”

“That’s Chevkovian felschenmass, artificial anti matter of the kind the Consortium used to fuel the first interstellar probe. There’s enough energy there to keep us alive and kicking foe another several earth centuries if there were a way for us to tap into it.”

…they discovered that the human mind – not the brain, but the mind – wasn’t like a computer, it wasn’t like a chemical memory machine, but was exactly like …” “A quantum-state standing wave-front,” said Orphu. “Human consciousness exists primarily as a quantum state waveform, just like the rest of the universe.”

“Exceptional types of consciousness that are like naked singularities in that they can bend space-time, affect the organization of space-time, and collapse probability waves into discrete alternatives. I’m talking Shakespeare here. Proust. Homer

Juxtapositioning absurd anachronisms and malapropisms e.g., a philosopher with a canine Disney character

“Plato,” mused Harman. “I’ve come across references to him in books I’ve read. And an odd drawing I saw once. A dog.”
Savi nodded. “A lot of the meaning of the Lost Age iconography has been lost forever.”
“What’s a dog?”

Waiting for Achilles to get dressed for war reminds me of the times I waited for my wife, Susan, to get dressed when we were late for a dinner party somewhere. There’s nothing to do to hurry up the process – all one can do is wait.

Swinging his heavy sword in a two-handed backhand that reminds me of Andre Agassi in his prime, Hector slices off Apollo’s right arm in a spray of golden ichor.

According to Homer, sent Orphu, “Attendants” are sort of androids created in Hephaestus’ forge from human parts and used like robots by the gods and some mortals.
Are you telling me that the Iliad has androids and moravecs in it? demanded Mahnmut.
The Iliad, has everything in it, said Orphu.

The mayhem never stops

I don’t believe in God with a capital G, despite their obvious solidity, I don’t believe in the gods with their small g’s. Not as real forces in the universe. But I believe in the bitch-goddess Irony. She crosses all time. She rules men and gods and God alike.
And She has a wicked sense of humor.

“PULL, GODDAM YOU!” howls Zeus. “PULL OR BE DRAGGED INTO STINKING TRARTARUS UNTIL TIME ITSELF ROTS AWAY FROM THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE!”

Riotous! The New Year sees me starting the sequel

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