Olympos by Dan Simmons Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Olympos
Book Review: A Great Story Unravels
Summary: 3 Stars
A big disappointment here: Olympos takes the brilliant plot and characters of Ilium and gives the reader a rapidly unraveling story that falls apart before too long. While Simmons is still a great writer, the tale becomes a bit silly and ungainly, with many of the major characters coming off as stereotypes. The Setebos character especially seems like a malevolent cartoon. By story's end, there is nothing going on, as if the characters, like the author, has run out of steam. The final scene seems like something out of Mr. Rogers. Please, Mr. Simmons, no sequel to Olympos.Book Review: A grand magnificent disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
Dan Simmons, is in my opinion, the best writer that I have ever read. His Hyperion/Endymion Saga is the greatest science fiction story ever told. Therefore my expectations were extremely high for his latest science fiction adventure, the two book series Ilium and Olympos.
Ilium and Olympos are essentially one book, divided in 2 for publishing reasons, but the difference between the 2 books is startling. Ilium was a great read. Three major plotlines that converged into a stunning story, filled with mystery, sense of wonder and a fast paced plot. One seems poised for all sorts of exiting and interesting themes in Olympos. Can humans really fight against their gods? What happens if they win? Can a society destroy its gods and survive? What if the humans learn that their gods are imposters? These were some of the questions I pondered and thought would make for an interesting as well as exciting story.
Unfortunately, this major setup in Ilium of the showdown between humans and gods reaches a big dead end in Olympos leaving these questions unexplored. Instead, the major thrust of Olympos shifts to the battle for survival by the old style humans against the evil entity Sebetos, and the odyssey of Harmon as he learns the secrets of Earth's past and gains the knowledge that will help the old styles survive. The Harmon storyline is definitely the highlight of Olympos, but it is just not enough to overcome the book's weaknesses. The plotline regarding the Greek gods does not have a satisfying resolution. The plotline with Sebetos does not have a satisfying resolution. A pivotal plotline involving Odysseus and Circe seems to appear out of nowhere, so the reader is both confused by events and has no particular emotional involvement, either. Hockenberry, the scholic, seems to serve no purpose in Olympos except to QT to different locations so that he can be the viewpoint character that reports events to the reader.
One of the major strengths of Simmons first dozen books, culminating with The Rise of Endymion, was his ability to create stories with deep meaning and which were ultimately spiritually uplifting. The books of the last 6 years have been lacking these ingredients, and unfortunately, Ilium and Olympos stay true to this form. The potential is there for the story to take on a deeper meaning as we find out that Sebetos actually feeds on death, and has come to visit Earth's deadliest battlefields. But any hint of this meaningful sub plot is essentially erased by the fact that nearly everyone in the book (including the author?) all admire those heroes of battle as represented by the Greeks and Trojans. The book seems to waver between the horrors of war and the glories of war. The themes contradict. The result is apathy and confusion.
It is hard to give a book only 2 stars when it is filled with great ideas and some wonderful characters. It is also a real page turner and impossible to put down. But in the end, there are no truly clever plot twists and many of the plot resolutions seem to come out of nowhere. After the promise of Ilium, Olympus should have been a classic. Unfortunately, it is a grand, magnificent disappointment.
Book Review: A let down...
Summary: 2 Stars
I'm a huge Simmons fan and the Hyperion series is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi collections. I loved Ilium and devoured the book in one weekend. I couldn't wait for the follow-up. In fact, I pre-ordered Olympos and the new H. Potter book at about the same time, and decided that Olympos was my next must-read book.
Then, it literally took me 4 months to read Olympos. I essentially had to force myself to keep reading. Ilium was ablaze with suspense and all the characters, from the gods to the moravecs (organic machines), leapt off the page they were so alive.
Spoiler Alerts: There are numerous story threads that are left hanging, others that simply dissipate. The build-up created in Ilium, where meta-intelligences (Prospero, Sycorax, Ariel, post-humans in the guise of the Greek Pantheon) are battling for their respective interests, is not resolved in Olympos. Other characters arrive, and their motives are never fully explored or explained. Prospero floats around being cryptic. Sycorax gives up a battle she has been waging for centuries to have sex with Odysseus. Ariel appears once, acts mysterious, and disappears. The post-human Greek gods just eventually go away.
In the first book, the fabric of the entire universe is in danger because the post-humans have abused quantum reality. Additionally, the quantum distortions have allowed evil beings from other dimensions to slip into our universe. In Olympos, the evil departs, with no explanation. Apparently, the quantum instability is also resolved, also without much explanation. Primary characters from the first book are ignored in the second.
Most frustrating, the pace of the second book is lethargic through 3/4 of the novel, and then the pace picks up at frenetic speed. At the point where the pace increases, is precisely where things just stop being explained. The moravecs, which, throughout Ilium, carry the literary heart and soul of mankind because mankind has forgotten them, become, in book two, cute/fuzzy jokesters who babysit children. In book one, they had their own society!
I'm not sure how this got past the editors, but narratively speaking, this is an inferior effort from Simmons, and especially in light of the first book, which blew me away. This book left me cold and flat, and by the end, I just didn't care what happened to anyone in the book. I was just happy I could finally move on to Harry Potter.
Book Review: A monumental epic of struggle, defeat, and triumph
Summary: 4 Stars
Just where do you start with what surely deserves the title of this summer's biggest book for sci-fi and adventure fans? I thought my imagination was pretty supple until I entered, once again, the intensely symphonic prose of Dan Simmons in his latest epic, OLYMPOS. And I found myself returning more than once to that first thought after putting down his gargantuan prequel, ILIUM --- how could this saga about old humans, post humans, future humans, and all their various nemeses possibly get any bigger, more complex, more richly veined, more compelling?
It's not simply about literal size, temporal dimension, character multiplication games, word counts, body counts, special effects, plot variations, imagery, or other semantic virtuosities. I've read b-i-g books before in this genre and so many of them start with lofty concepts, only to implode into a mass of descriptive goo and plotlines that are positively Wagnerian in their refusal to harmoniously resolve.
In fact, to stretch the musical analogy a little further, Simmons orchestrates the movement and meaning in his immense multi-dimensioned future universe much more along the lines of a Mahler symphony. The result is huge, but never flabby; vast, yet tightly and purposefully integrated.
So, although I was often lost in a sea of imaginative and visceral depth, I was never abandoned there. Amid its core dependence on the fantastical creations of classical myth and literature, OLYMPOS never lets us forget about the precious fragility we all share as "old style humans." As limited as we are in both story and history, humans repeatedly invent ideas, objects and machines that seem stronger and more clever than their makers. Simmons's ancient and modern mythic sources are full of such potent irony and he has brilliantly mined that lode for all it's worth.
The creations and characters met in ILIUM --- a must-read prerequisite --- grow, develop, live, love, strive or die, along with the added rank, file and super-beings of the monumental OLYMPOS. It's no surprise then that every page teems with forces of good and love contending with a Pandora's box of bizarre and grotesque evils. But along the way (along myriad ways, in fact) Simmons immerses this epic of struggle, defeat and triumph in layers of authentic emotion that, without warning, can leave one deeply touched.
--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch [...]
Book Review: A real disappointment
Summary: 2 Stars
I really enjoyed the first book (Illium). This book, while structurally similar (several stories going on in parallel), doesn't manage to be nearly as interesting, entertaining, or compelling. In this book, I found that the constant shifting from storyline to storyline kept me from getting too involved in any of the stories. And many of the characters are total cliches -- all the "higher powers" talk in unnecessary riddles, the evil creature feeds on pain, etc.
Although a lot of other reviewers complained about the author not tying up loose ends, the book is even worse when he DOES explain things. Most of the actions which really drive the plot (the actions of the gods especially, but also the actions of the post-humans and Prospero) make little to no sense. The reasons we are given for them acting are patently ridiculous. I don't think that the setting or "techology" of a sci-fi story needs to be believable, but the characters do. The main characters in this book are, but they end up being almost completely irrelevant to what happens in the book.
About half way through I had to force myself to keep reading. I was extremely annoyed when I was finished.