Olympos by Dan Simmons Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Olympos
Book Review: Nice sequel, not as good as the first
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is true to the Simmons style. Gripping, hard-core action, grand scale, full of far-out ideas and notions. In fact it is so far out and complicated that it almost becomes tiring. The ending leaves you with a sense of incompleteness, like an unfinished story though. Not as good as Ilium, but worthy of your time, money and bookself space.Book Review: Not Hyperion, but worthy of this fine author
Summary: 4 Stars
All good authors must face the challenge of "the next book" after they produce a master work. In the wake of the superb Hyperion Cantos, the thoughtful and talented Dan Simmons now, by producing his Illium /Olympos series, confronts that old problem. While readers may find that these books fail to measure up to the Cantos, any author would be proud to produce these excellent novels.
Rare among science fiction authors, Dan Simmons holds a keen interest in literature and philosophy over technology and hackneyed plot twists. Cantos readers will recognize some of the terrain of these works, such as how technology shapes culture, the roots of religion, and the direction of history. Even more than the Cantos, Simmons here delves deep into some of the West's finest literature, ranging from Shakespeare to Proust to Homer, but Cantos fans need not fear, Keats does make an appearance.
Far from retreating after the magisterial Hyperion, with Illium/Olympos Simmons if anything reaches to embrace a story of an even more epic scope. Building a world 500 years in the future would challenge any author. Here the author ranges over thousands of year, from the battle for Troy to the very far future. Indeed the plots many strings can be daunting to follow for even the most dedicated reader. Several of the reviews demonstrate the challenge, as they claim as unanswered questions that the novel clearly answers, albeit buried within the novel's almost 700 pages. After reading I found only one such dangling thread, and considered a minor annoyance at best. My complaint in contrast is that he often glosses over subjects that would surely fascinate any reader, but every writer must make choices. That Simmons resists the temptation to stop the action for greater detail is probably to his credit, as it would surely detract from his efforts to keep the complex plot moving apace.
Fans of Hyperion should not be scared off by some of those who complain about this series. Simmons continues to offer more food for thought and discussion then almost any fiction writer working today. If here he failed to reach the very peak of Olympos, the summit was surely well within his sight.
Book Review: Not quite as good as the first book.
Summary: 3 Stars
Pretty much everything I said in my review for Ilium stands for this book as well... not much has changed in the writing style (versus Fall of Hyperion vs Hyperion where the perspective was completely different.) This book is pretty much just an extension of the first.
Which, there would be nothing wrong with, as the first book was brilliant.
This book has its own problems, though, that the first did not. It is much slower read.
The fact that there are really no likable characters becomes more important, as the mystery behind the technological magic and mythological characters is old new in this book. The moravecs are cool, but their chapters are written in a very dry, scientific language; appropriate, but not emotionally charged. (Although at the end, Orphu of Io was my favorite character.)
With only few (maybe one...) exeptions, every character in Troy/Ilium is a lying, backstabbing, foul mouthed and vulgar character. Again, appropriate, but no one to like here, either (again, though, Achillies ultimate fate is brilliant.)
The old style humans are left as the characters you should identify with, but I never really cared about their lives, either (and since, by this time, everyone is dying after the Fall... that's probably a good thing.)
A poorly included sex sceane involving a major character in an odd situtation also turned me off towards a major plot thread, and altered my opinion of a few characters. This was my biggest complaint with the novel, because it was such a disturbing event, and I couldn't see that it had ANY point in the overall storyline...
There were a few brilliant events in the novel, but mainly, there was nothing new to see here since Ilium. Events already laid out in the first book continue to unfold, but with no real new developments the pages dragged compared to the first novel.
Epic battles aren't as enjoyable when you don't care who wins or loses, either.
All in all, nothing was added to this book that wasn't really in the first... and that made for a less enjoyable read.
There were some very cool events and ideas presented at the very end, but unfortunately they weren't developed at all! Almost makes me wish for a third book dealing with the meshing of certain societies...
Book Review: Not really my dish
Summary: 2 Stars
Now, this book is like a pizza with everything on. And I mean everything on. Even if you like both steak and vanilla sause it doesn't go too well together.
That's the problem with Olympos too, it tries to be space opera, robot-mutant SF, post disaster dystopia, horror novella, fantasy and a flirt with the fans of classic litterature. And that's just too much. Too much of everything.
There's for instance a handful of plots running on parallell tracks and which fail to be really merged in the end. There's about two dosen main characters and out of all those only four seem to engage: Achilles, Hockenberry, Helen and Hera. And their stories take up about ¼ of the book. The oldstyle-humans on Earth are rather sketchy drawn and their faith is like a generic "robots gone bad" story with some Jules Werne thrown in. And the moravecs talks too much and don't really aquire anything.
And in the end the writer needs about 100 pages to knit it all up, and he tries and tries without succeeding.
I had expected little Mahmoud to solve the problems of Earth by some Shakespeare knowledge, but since it doesn't happen all this Shakespeare-lore seems totally unnessecary!
There are too many questions unanswered, too many characters left in the blue. What happened to Athena's grand plot for instance? She just dissapears out of the story. Why did the voynix suddenly start attack the humans? And who was this Ariel creature really and what was it's purpose? And Circe and Sycorax, where did they fit in with the rest of the story? And what happened when Hector found out that his son was still alive?
Then the submarin plot was totally out of the blue and so was the reason for the weird Titanic-esque spaceship.
But the main problem is - there's no "BANG" in the end. No grand conclusion. It just fizzles away.
Book Review: Not said above...
Summary: 2 Stars
Count me in the "very, very disappointed" camp. I agree with nearly everything said above about the plot falling apart. I'd give "Ilium" 3.5/5 - quite high for me - but "Olympos" drops to 2/5. (Why the random variation between Latin and transliterated Greek spellings, here and elsewhere?)
Despite some (incomprehensible? random?) praises from other reviewers above, Dan Simmonds' prose varies from humdrum and ugly to so horrible that it induces gum disease in laboratory animals. He puts an unusual (for him) amount of work into making his Greek and Trojan heroes talk with a sense of their own dignity, but abandons the struggle every time when they are in the grip of strong feeling. How he can invoke Homer without blushing I don't know. When not trying so hard (or at all), he describes a spaceship as being kicked in the butt, allegedly "literally".
The book seems not to have been proof-read at all, by anyone, though it may just possibly have been run through a spelling checker. Some hapless grunt at a keyboard may be responsible for "gobbets" being printed as "gibbets", and "Automedon" consistently as "Automedan", and so on, and so on, but how did "SOCRATEM" become "SCORATUM"? Surely Simmonds himself is responsible for repeated confusions of singular and plural ("an oxen", even). His use of thou/thee/ye/you is so elaborately and inconsistently wrong ("thee shall help me", apparently addressing several people, and so on, and so on) that it's almost safe to assume that when he gets it right (according to any identifiable model whatever) he's quoting. It doesn't keep him from getting it wrong in the next sentence.
His quotations contain random and pointless-looking modifications, as well as those required by his own purposes. Why is Caliban "never honoured with a human shape" rather than "not honoured"? Simmonds seems here to be drowning in Shakespeare's syntax. In the original, it is the island which is "not honoured with a human shape", but Caliban is stated to be an exception - meaning that Caliban does have a human shape, though so called only under an appearance of protest. All this and queer-reading nonsense about Shakespeare's Sonnets; why not accept the sestet of Sonnet XX at face value?
There's a lot of sheer fakery. For instance, Simmonds seems to think that a geodesic dome is a dome made out of geodesics. I couldn't understand his explanation of "simplex", despite knowing what a simplex is. I'm not convinced by his efforts to persuade me that he knows ancient Greek either. I can't make head nor tail of his attempt to distinguish "kaos" from "chaos". Why render "hekatonkheires" as "hundred-armed", when what he wants (and what the word means) is "hundred-handed"? Does Simmonds think that as a vessel keeps on going faster it keeps on going through sound barriers? The whole parallel-universe thing is grossly too big and complicated for the effects he tries to pull out of it, and perhaps for human understanding.
The single most irritating thing, for me, was the pseudo-moral invocation of the Quiet (which Prospero serves, or maybe doesn't). Apparently the only things which the Quiet does are (a) "eat Seteboses for snacks" - just a plot device - and (b) feel very peeved if anyone else claims to be God supreme and almighty. At least, Demogorgon (the visible hands of the Quiet in the world, unless one counts Prospero, and maybe even if one does) seems to want to do nothing else on the Quiet's behalf. Moreover, no amount of Setebosian nastiness provokes Demogorgon into action - just the usurpation by Zeus. So the only thing that "MERCIFUL GOD" actually cares about is invasion of Godly privilege? A "deus absconditus" is one thing, a god (or God, or GOD) who only intervenes (through his servants) to reserve his pet epithets to himself isn't a very convincing moral backstop to the universe. Are we to invent a moral deus ex machina out of whole cloth, to rescue the moral deus ex machina Simmonds has dragged in to save his cosmos from falling apart?