They made me think of modern teenagers living in a planetwide mall, unaware of the history or even the geography of their own planet. Deaman and his fellow travelers come across as fully human characters, yet with strange deficiencies. The second strand entails “old style” humans who inhabit an underpopulated, Edenic planet Earth. This is but one of three narratives which seem to run parallel at first and then converge slowly as this sprawling novel progresses. His only function is to chronicle the war and the dreary posturing of men and gods. We know this is science fiction because the narrator is a scholar by the name of Thomas Hockenberry, resurrected against his will from scraps of ancient DNA. His love of literature and literary figures is by now well established, yet here he incorporates one of the grandest literary themes in the western cannon - the battle for Troy, complete with flesh and blood gods and all the Greek heroes, both major and minor. Now Dan Simmons has come through again, returning from his intellectual and corporeal wanderings to his science-fictional roots with the novel Ilium. His output is so prodigious one imagines him married to his word processor a la Asimov yet unlike Asimov he finds time to raise children and travel the world.

One of my all-time favorite short stories called “Eyes I Dare Not Meet In Dreams” which he later expanded into the novel The Hollow Man. In fact, Simmons' novel called The Crook Factory features Hemingway as a character. His salt and pepper beard and prophetic squint makes you think of Hemingway had that salty old dog stayed home from Africa and become a professor of English. And if that isn't intimidation enough, he's a handsome devil too.

Even after a career that spans 19 years, 23 novels and collections, and about a zillion short stories and articles, his gift for invention is unpredictable, seemingly superhuman and limitless. ( Jump down to see more reviews of this author's novels )ĭan Simmons is a writer who seems unable to limit himself to a particular niche or genre.

Dan simmons ilium review