Customer Reviews

I am SO disappointed with Olympos!
Please don't get me wrong. I am a HUGE Dan Simmons fan. I am an avid fan of his Hyperion series and I am waiting with serious anticipation for a movie series to unfold. While reading Ilium, I fell in love with the slightly dorky Hockenberry and the glorious Orphu and Mahnmut, worrying and fretting about their outcomes in this finale...

I was SO disappointed. This is just not Mr. Simmons' best writing. At BEST this is a melange of notes, maddeningly short chapters that jump from one subplot to the next (you literally have 5 or 6 subplots with an added one or two thrown in in the last 100 pages just to tick you off). Then, when you are heading for that all critical showdown with the antagonists (of which there are a minimum of 4 major and a whole slew of minors including Helen of Troy), you get NOTHING. I mean, there IS no showdown. The horrific Setebos and his evil sidekick Caliban (who was supposed to be THE bad one in Ilium)...Well, let's just say that Nada, zip and "What the He**!!" were my thoughts and exclamations. It was just awful. You get some seriously disturbing scenes like semi-necrophilia/rape the stasis patient (a la Kill Bill Part 1) which frankly, leave a bad, stinky, taste in your mouth. There is a lot of mind numbing exposition/explanation of physics and brane holes and all the things that make you think that Mr. Simmons is just trying to prove he ran these things past physics/chaos/quantum theory prof friends of his. (My favorite quip from anyone like this was simply "Quantum Physicists have P-branes".)

The book starts out really well. The chapters are of good length. Then they get smaller, more frenetic and things spin in and out and back again until you KNOW the end is going to slam into you and you are not going to like it. It's the same thing I have found over the years with Anne Rice. She would start out with an amazing plot and lose it in the middle and muddle her way to the disappointing, often hard to understand end.

And MAN, if Odysseus were really alive today, there is NO way he'd have followed Sycorax through time just to get it on with her. He'd have tricked her to be with his beloved. Come ON! There had to have been SOME kind of heroic ending instead of him just turning into a horny old time traveler! Gads. Such a letdown!

And BY the way, what EVER happened to the STRONG WOMAN characters that he seemed to have in his previous novels? In this one, she leads her wounded and left for dead group of friends out of serious danger then has a baby and BAM, she is relegated to a minor character who defers to hubby by the end. (Must be all the BOOK LEARNING he could hold over her head. Maybe he didn't send her as many PACKETS????) She just turns from heroine to glowing barefoot momma with kids in the background...ick.

Mr. Simmons is an amazing writer. I would really like to see more of the Hyperion series with a fresh, new slant. I have said this before and I hope I don't see these things anymore. I do not ever want to see another literary translation of a major epic in any more of his sci fi books. The man is seriously intimidating in his love and knowledge of ancient literature but, I can't take another novel full of clips from Keats, Yeats, Proust, Shakespeare and the myriads of Iliads. Moreover, I don't want any more stories with brane holes, creches or resurrection couches. And for goodness sake, stop with the mini-chapters and zillions of characters and sub plots. Too many to keep up with.

All in all, I am seriously disappointed. I even popped for the signed leather limited edition. Oh well. I hope for many more. They can't all be divine. But no more stinkers please!!! I like you too much to see you steep yourself in more of this!

Fine author - competent book
Dan Simmons is amazingly skilled as a writer. He has obviously spent much time with great literature to his benefit and his readers'. The Hyperion tetralogy still contains more archetypal images in less space than any book or series of books I know.

Ilium, the predecessor to this book, was an interesting set-up and I enjoyed it. [What's not to like when an English professor gets to become the bedmate of Helen of Troy? Shades of "The Kugelmass Episode"!]

I was eager to find out how Simmons would get himself out of the many traps he had put himself into. Nobody is a better speculative fiction Houdini than he is.

And here we are with gazillions of pages that lead to one of those "Huh?" last-volume-of-the-Dune-series endings. Lots of loose ends here and no third volume in sight.

No spoilers here, but I have to note that the trajectories of the characters seems arbitrary sometimes - Achilles especially with a bizarre wind-up.

I also find some of the writing self-indulgent in a crass kind of way. A character of immense age and power spends much time talking like an oracle and some like a trailer trash Jerry Springer guest.

In the same way, some of the important plot events happen offstage and seem designed simply to move characters around and get them in and out of the narrative.

If you enjoyed Ilium, you ought to read this one, but bear in mind that it's middling Simmons. Middling Simmons is far better than the best of many other writers. And yet, Simmons's best writing and thinking promises a book - or a series of books - much better than this one. It's a promise that he's never lived up to, not even in the Hyperion books. I hope he someday writes the book that he's capable of.

Meanwhile, consider this a kind of placeholder for that book. It's Simmons on cruise control.

very disappointing
I'll start by saying I loved the first book of the series (Illium). Read it three times. The final scene with the combined Greek, Trojan, and robot armies ready to take on the gods on Mars just blew me away. I couldn't wait for Olympos, which I hoped would give me some resolution and some answers. Somehow all the plots would wrap together and we'd get a clue how this all came about.

What do we get here? Resolution yes - some good, some bad. But very little answers. Others below have said it much better than me. But I'm feeling deprived and ripped off, so here are my major plot line complaints...

Who/what/where/when is this Sycorax person? The only hint we get is the goofy little line about her "relationship" with Prospero. There's some sense that her whole role in the story is so she can have sex with Odysseus (ala Circe in the travels), but is that really it? Is she the person who really started all this?

What happened to Setebos? Someone calls down and says The Quiet is coming and he bails? A big war between Prospero and Setebos is hinted at in the beginning, but then we hear Setebos has just been hanging out on Mars sucking bad vibes from the Trojan war (which is not happening in Mars, anyway....)

Just who was the person or persons that came through from the alternate universe? Setebos? Sycorax? Zeus (as he claims to have existed before the other gods came into being)? Demogorgon? All of them? Your guess really is as good as mine.

This whole thing starts because of the needle on the quantum flux-o-meter is in the red zone and the solar system is about to implode, but there's no resolution to this. The rest of the "gods" are left to duke it out between Mars and Illium-Earth, so that quantum stuff is still on-going. Some of the others on Earth can QT all round. Is the fleeing of Setebos and Sycorax enough to calm things down?

This isn't really a plot line, but sort of a "what the heck?" thing. We're sort of led to believe that Harman finds out about the Sword of Allah so he can realize the dark side of human nature and just what might happen if "civilization" returns. He gets all depressed about it as he's dying, but then he gets all better and civilization returns anyway, and nobody seems to care anymore. Kind of reminded me of an atheist in a foxhole who makes it through, only to proudly proclaim his atheism again.

All in all, Simmons created an enterining world and gave us enough of its history to pique our curiousity, but that's about it. I'll admit to daydreaming trying to resolve it all in my head, but overall, Olympos is very, very disappointing after the thrill of Illium.