An interesting book but I am afraid it kind of fell down in some places for me. I've been spoiled by the splendour of Hyperion. Although Ilium does have some unique and compelling elements it is both too epic to not have a completed and ending and too complicated to be completely enraptured with.

Simmons does use his wealth of literary knowledge throughout this work however it is often disjointed and incongruos. To me this was like reading three books at the same time. We have the Trojan War played out and witnessed by a contempary human. We have Shakespeares sonnets and The Tempest driving a different set of characters and events completely and also a smattering do Proust.

Although the story does attempt to tie the three different threads together it is left unfinished. However, the attempt to read this took so much effort in places and much of the literary discussion and conversations about quantum physics felt like filler or info dumps that I'm not particularly inclined to read the sequal.

There was just so much going on and so many characters to follow. I did find some of the action and characters interesting and did read the whole thing hoping to get somewhere conclusive with them but felt left down at the end that I would be expected to work my way through 600+ more pages toward any resolution. I might try to read Olympos but not for a while as it seems like too mammoth a task. ( )

This is my new favourite by Dan Simmons, having previously read his Hyperion duology and The Terror. The pace is fantastic and nearly every chapter contains another fascinating twist or revelation. It is definitely not the kind of book that leaves you sitting around waiting for something to happen. The book jacket is one of the best I've ever read: extremely obtuse and tells you very little, but within seventy-five pages it makes perfect sense while giving nothing away.

Since events of Homer's Illiad come strongly into play, you might get more enjoyment if you're at least familiar with the major events of that epic, though I wouldn't call it a requirement. I've never read Homer but I had enough familiarity with it to appreciate the parallels in this novel. If you were truly setting out to do all the background reading then you'd also have to cover Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Something like "A Brief History of Time" wouldn't hurt either to understand some of the science better, but that's even less necessary.

I don't know if Mr. Simmons would appreciate it, but I kept picturing Pixar's Wall-E during the Mahnmut chapters... ( )

Complex layers of literary allusion. The only characters I came to care about were the robots Mahnmut and Orphu, and I wanted a better ending for them. ( )

Increíble libro, que mezcla portentosamente la ciencia-ficción con la literatura (muy propio de Simmons) y nos sumerge en una aventura maravillosa. Solo se le pueden añadir pequeños defectos en determinados pasajes, pero sin que ello perjudique a un conjunto que hace disfrutar. Recomendable sin excepción. ( )

After the tedious Quicksilver, Ilium was a welcome change. It's a wonderful blend of science fiction and Greek myth.

As Simmons' Hyperion was infused with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, so Ilium works from Homer's Iliad. One of the central events of the book is the siege of Troy. In Ilium, however, the gods are more science fiction than fantasy--they accomplish their majestic feats via nanotechnology and quantum manipulation. And the events in the Iliad are only a rough third of the events in Ilium.

The book opens with the words of a twentieth-century Homeric scholar, in a very deliberate reference to the opening of the Iliad. That scholar has been resurrected by the gods and sent to observe the unfolding of events that shaped the Iliad. The following chapter introduces humans living on Earth several thousand years past the 20th century, in a world largely abandoned--the "post-humans" meddled with the planet, cleaned up some of their mess, and left it to the old-style humans, whose lives they continue to regulate. The third chapter sets the stage for the third storyline, involving sentient organic/inorganic machines that live and work among the moons of Jupiter.

Into all three storylines, the reader is dropped without much backstory; the shape of the world in which the characters live must be gleaned from details in the story's telling. And the threads don't tie themselves together until a distance into the book.

The single best thing about the book, however, is the writing. Simmons does a very good job of taking these disparate threads, blending them together while painting the backdrop for the story, and weaving a thoroughly engaging tale.

Ilium certainly deserves its Hugo nomination. I can't speak to whether it should win, since I haven't read most of its competitors, but if it does, I'll not be disappointed. ( )