Olympos by Dan Simmons

Olympos by Dan Simmons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A rambunctious, bawdy, hilarious humdinger of a yarn peopled by characters from The Tempest, Homer’s The Iliad, sentient autonomous robots (some of whom are painfully literary - spouting Marcel Proust, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Shakespeare, Lord Byron and others), nebulous post-humans, recombinant humans – all interacting with each other on multiple worlds – some of those worlds being in an alternate reality. It all ends with an epic deɪəs ɛks ˈmækɪnə - the ultimate deux ex machina.
After ‘sparrow-fart’ from Ilium, with some further novel abuses, the author attains new levels of scatological creativity

Priam’s son, that shit-eating pig-dog, Paris.

An ignoble giant like that ant-pizzle Achilles

Kingdom of the dead where your brother Paris now floats like a forgotten fart.

Deiphobus has been waiting his turn in line to boink the posy doxy since the week Paris dragged her bumpy ass here – gods curse the day – so he’s probably well into the rites of Dionysos, if not of marriage, even as we speak, sister.

“Well, Theano is worm meat. Dead as Prince Paris’s pizzle,” said Helen.

That popinjay. That pair of spangled leotards with a dick.

You will magus. You are but a shadow of a rumour of a hint of a noosphere – a personification of a centreless, soulless pulse of useless information, senseless mumbles from a race long fallen into dotage and decay, a cyber-sewn fart in the wind. You will fall and so shall your useless bio-whore, Ariel.

You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking sonofabitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mouthed goddammned fucking…

“You’re a friend of that dog-fucker Achilles, “snarls Menelaus, “You’re a lackey of my enemy, Hector, whose doom is sealed this day.”

“I’ll kill you now if you don’t, you pig’s arse. And draw your bowels out slow in the killing.”

“Penthesilea?” says the black-garbed goddess, still chuckling. “That brainless, blond, big-boobed lesbian tart? Why on a million Earths would you want to bring that musclebound bimbo back to life, son of Peleus?”

Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? God of Faeces.

…that dickless worm Peleus.

“Fight,” said Achilles. “You old pigfucker.”

This Demogorgon is as crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat.

Harman’s people must be the dullest subspecies of homo sapiens ever to receive a patent

There is a lot of explicit and kinky sex - after the staid The Hyperion Omnibus. The breathless action (the dyspnoea resulting from the actions on both the battlefield as well on the bed!) is interspersed with some stylish writing: alliteration

“And rather beautiful in a bumpy, bulgy, black, bulbous, sinister sort of way.”
… “That’s an awful lot of alliteration from an anxious astronaut.”

Much to murky metaphor for a mere measly man.

I’ll never believe that the bumbling buggering bad-breathed cripple could do something like this.

Abstruse and poetic bits

Books were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

With characters from diverse timelines and manifold universes interacting in myriad ways, there is bound to be anachronistic confusion

“Who’s Homer?” asks Odysseus, pausing in midair at the irised door to the astrogation bubble.
“No one you’d know,” says Hockenberry, drinking more wine.

“No, this is a hardline. That Demogorgon is a lot of things, but not J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Who?”
“Never mind, son of Peleus…”

“Fine. But we still have to talk. We only have a minute or two before this kangaroo court commences.”
“What is a kangaroo?” Achilles is growing tired of this mini-god’s double-talk.

…just as in the old TV broadcast series from the lost era - Star Truck.”
“Trek,” corrected General Beh bin Adee.

“It’s a case of ‘Beam me up Scooty.’”
“Scotty,” corrected Retrograde Sinopessen.

…it has a bigger diameter than Pluto.”
“Pluto?” says Achilles.
“It’s a fucking planet, you stupid hick preliterate,” growls Hephaestus

The essence of SF is pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and mystical gobbledegook

The Strominger-Vafa-Susskind-Sen sensors are giving us BPS rates showing increasing disparity between the Brane’s minimum mass and its charge, sent Orphu
BPS? Sent Mahnmut. He knew the mass-charge disparity had to be bad, but wasn’t sure why.
Bogomol’nyi, Prasard, Sommerfield sent Orphu in his oh-what-a moron-but-I-like-you-anyway voice. The Calabi-Yau space near you there is undergoing a space-tearing conifold transition.

Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus… That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.

The gods have begun using physical bombs to penetrate the force shield in recent week, the single-molecule bomb casings quantum-phasing through the moravecs’ shield.

…old style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometres in diameter. They used these Z-DNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX-DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibres, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of naonelectric organic memory storage clusters.

Yabba Dabba Doo! Metaphysical abracadabra and verbose legerdemain can either send the reader into side-splitting hilarity or turn him/her/it (if the reader is an AI) into a blubbering imbecile. The chicanery goes on

“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau intermemBrane tourist Brain here?”

…when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum data on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.

“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability staters?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of a interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”

The confrontation of Achilles with Nyx is droll and farcical

Night – Nyx – is fifteen tall, wrapped in a roiling, vaporous cloud, dressed in what seems like multiple layers of diaphanous black cloth, strips hanging down in scores of lengths, with either a black headdress that includes a veil over a face or perhaps a face that looks like a moulded black veil. Impossibly, her black eyes are perfectly visible through the black veil and vaporous clouds. Before averting his face, Achilles saw that she was incredibly large-breasted, as if she could suckle all the world to darkness.

Achilles decides it is time he spoke. “I need to see Zeus, Goddess.”
The dark wraith turns more in his direction. It is as if she is floating, not standing, and the large and huge-breasted form swivels without friction…
“You need to see the Lord of Thunder, the God of All Gods, the Pelasgian Zeus, Lord of Ten Thousand Temples and Dodona’s Shrine, Father of All Gods and Men, Zeus the Ultimate King Who Marshals the Storm Clouds and Who Gives All Commands?”
“Yeah,” says Achilles.
“What about?” asks Nyx.

It’s Aphrodite’s pheromone perfume,” says Hephaestus, still on his knees.
Night quits laughing. “Which type?”
“Number nine,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Puck’s potion. The type with the self-duplicating naonmachines in the bloodstream constantly reproducing more dependency molecules and depriving the brain of endorphins and serotonin if the victim doesn’t act on his infatuation. There is no antidote.”

“Crippled God of Fire, busy artificer to the more noble gods, what do you see when you look upon this mortal man?”
“A fucking fool,” grunts Hephaestus.
“I see a quantum singularity,” says the goddess Nyx. “A black hole of probability. A myriad of equations all with the same single three-point solution. Why is that, Artificer?”
The god of fire grunts again. “His mother, Thetis of the seaweed-tangled breasts, held this arrogant mortal in the celestial quantum fire when he was a pup, little more than a larva. The probability of his death day, hour, minute, and method is one hundred percent, and because it cannot be changed, it seems to give Achilles a sort of invulnerability to all other attacks and injury.”

I couldn’t figure out the conundrum behind the names of the post-literate humans with the suffix ‘man’ – viz.,

Laman, Siman, Reman, Raman, Dorman, Kaman, Caman, Stoman, Boman, Beman, Noman (Odysseus) and Harman and Daeman (the main pratagonists)

I sincerely wish there is a sequel… and that eventually turns into the Ilium Cantos…

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