Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
what happened??, 5 Aug 2005
I own most books by Dan simmons and loved all of them - except this one.
the first part, Ilium conveys a wonderful adaptation to sci fi of troy with its heroes and gods.
in Olympos it seems the narrative escapes the author, with too many threads running amok, leaving too little time for each individual thread.. too many things are left unexplained or just glossed over, leaving a jumble that , to me, just got boring. Also, while in a novel full of gods you expect some deus-ex he overdoes it. gods, overgods, and
"evenmorepowerfulgodsyouneverseebutsolvetheplotline" ruin the story, as all the plotting and the plans of ALL characters in the book are ultimately made irrelevant.
Dont get me wrong, its not a bad book, but not up to the standards one has come to expect from Dan Simmons.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
So what was all that about?, 2 Dec 2005
By the time I'd finished reading Ilium (the first book of this pair) I was enthused with anticipation. How on earth, I wondered, can the author tie up all the plot threads, characters and storylines into a satisfying, coherent and meaningful conclusion. I couldn't wait to find out.
If you're wondering the same thing, I can answer you: he isn't going to.
Ilium was a fast moving, exciting Sci-fi blockbuster with a lot of good ideas. With Olympos, Simmons piles on even more plot threads and ideas until the whole thing just collapses into incoherence. With the Greek Gods, teleportation, nanotechnology, magic, alternate universes, Shakespeare, Proust, artificial intelligences, quantum effects of consciousness, shaceships, islamic fundamentalists, black-hole bombs, little green men, Mars and more, the author throws in everything you can think of - by the end I was expecting Hitler to wander into the narrative, possibly carrying the kitchen sink because they were the only things which hadn't thrown into the mix.
Long flagged plot threads are wrapped up in a couple of lines, the villain of the book just ups and leaves about a hundred pages from the end with no satisfying resolution, major characters appear and then disappear with no indication of where they have gone, and other characters have resolutions which - to put it politely - make no sense whatsoever.
Terry Pratchett can get away with using the excuse of "it's all Quantum, innit?" when excusing plot hoes in his books because he writes comedy. An author of Simmons' calibre cannot get away with it and having read Olympos from start to finish my over-riding feeling is that not only did I not understand how the book ends, I don't think the author does either. What is worse, is that there isn't much evidence of the author caring. The last hundred pages feel rushed, as if the author is as sick as you are of the whole thing and just wants to get it finished so he could go and watch Lost instead. Which is what I advise you do. It's more satisfying and it makes more sense.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
If you've read Ilium don't bother, 22 Oct 2005
Being a great fan of Dan Simmons I expected much of his new epos. Ilium was an intriguing book and although the storyline was confusing at times it had the makings of a great story. One year later Olympos comes along. I had forgotten most of the story from the first book, but that wasn't really a problem. It's just more of the same. Greeks, little green men, gods, moravecs, Caliban..... and the list goes on. The story moves along at a very slow pace. You even have to labour through page after page of dialouge between some of the surviving captains of Ilium. And then there are the poems. Why? Instead of giving a background story and shedding some light on the strange fenomenons of the story, new and seemingly pointless elements are added. There is a side story about a sunken sub which for some reason seems important in the book, but no explanation is given as to why this is. Olympus is a poor attempt to finish the story in one book. I think Mr. Simmons would have been better off doing it in 3 or 4 volumes like the Hyperion saga. If you've read Ilium, you'll only be dissapointed by this book. The story is better without the last installment.
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