After a couple of years and several recommendations, I finally read Dan Simmon’s Ilium. I’ve been a Homer aficionado for most of my life (thanks, Mrs. Farmer!), and an “expert” ever since I took my first class in graduate school on epic poetry. I’ve written quite a bit on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – not to mention other epics – but Simmons’ knowledge of Homerica makes me feel like a novice.
I think what I like most about Ilium is that Simmons imaginatively connects the Greek age of heroes with the future history of our solar system, about 2000 hence. His Greek gods connect the two. They are either posthumans that left earth for Mars, or they are literary beings that have somehow been transported to the reality of Simmons’ novel by some quantum physical singularity. By the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered — one being: who are the gods? In fact, Simmons’ chief protagonist Hockenberry has a discussion with Zeus near the end of the novel, but few questions are answered before Zeus is distracted. Whatever the “gods” are, they seem convinced they are actual gods, but they use technology out of science fiction, like rejuvenation chambers, quantum teleportation devices, super bodies, and other technology that makes them god-like. To the Achaeans and Trojans, this technology is inseparable from magic.
Simmons’ interplay of science and literature is intriguing, though somewhat vague. I’m beginning to see how the Greek gods fit into the story, but Ilium uses characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, too: Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel. An epilogue explains that Prospero is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth logosphere”; Ariel is an “avatar of the evolved and self-aware Earth biosphere”; and Caliban is “Prospero’s pet monster.” These show up at various times in the novel, and Caliban is the chief antagonist in the latter part of the “old style” human narrative thread. Simmons seems to be using these characters as allegorical projections of a future Earth. Perhaps they will be fleshed-out in the next novel.
As I mentioned, Ilium contains three distinct plot lines: the first-person narrative of Hockenberry — a Homer scholar in a previous life, he is now “scholic” who is literally observing the events of the Trojan war as they unfold. His job seems to be to compare the actual events with those that Homer narrated in his epic. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the scholics were there for. They worked for the “gods” observing the humans, but I’m not sure why. These gods are not omniscient, so the scholics might have been their necessary extensions. Still, it’s unclear why. I connected with Hockenberry’s character, as he is a scholar and a bit awkward. He works for the gods until he gets a bit of power. Yeah, I could see that happening to me, too.
This narrative was probably my favorite, for obvious reasons. As I said: Simmons did his homework. Not only has he done his research on Homer and his epics, but he uses epic conventions within his narrative. One that sticks out is the penultimate chapter where armies are lining up for battle. It’s a hoot to read about these heroes in an altered context. Simmons does a fine job here using Hockenberry as a twentieth-century interlocutor.
There’s the old-style human narrative with Daemon, Ada, Harmon, and Savi. This one’s set in a future where the posthumans have left earth, but seem to have supplied for the remaining old-styles. They have a long life of comfort and convenience, but — as Savi will quip later in the novel — they are much like the Eloi from Wells’ The Time Machine: naive to what they’ve lost — just children, bred for something more sinister. Essentially, this narrative is about Daemon’s growing up as a human, and the rest of humanity’s end of innocence. Oddly enough, the character Odysseus joins this narrative with the former. Again, it’s not quite clear how. (Yet.)
The third narrative centers around the friendship between two Jovian moravecs. Simmons playfully names these sentient robots after Hans Moravec, a roboticist and futurist. Mahnmut is a small humanoid moravec who is fascinated with Shakespeare’s sonnets, and his friend is a “hard-vac” moravec who has a penchant for Proust. The dialogue between these two is entertaining and colorful. Oddly, they are the most human characters in the novel; they provide comic relief and significant moments of pathos. Early in the novel, they are sent to Mars to investigate unusual and dangerous quantum signatures. This is how they become entangled in the first plot. They even meet Little Green Men who call themselves “zeks” — a word used by Solzhenitsyn in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the camp’s prisoners. I’m unsure what they’re doing in the book.
OK, these were pretty random thoughts. It seems like Simmons wrote Ilium and its sequel Olympos as a single book. There are many unanswered questions by the end of Ilium, some of which I’ve mentioned here. Maybe this is just good marketing; I think I’m going to have to read Olympos. Too bad Ilium took me two months to get through. Maybe if I start now, I can finish before the fall semester.
