Ilium (Ilium series Book 1)

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Simmons definitely captures the barbaric nobility of the Greeks (and sheer assholishness of the Greek gods). And while at times I really had no idea where the story was going, it was never boring. In the end, I think it got a bit bloated and meandering and it seemed that Simmons was willing to throw any weird idea that came to him into the mix, which is why this was a huge doorstopper of a novel following a previous huge doorstopper of a novel.

The Abominable (2013) recounts a mid-1920s attempt on Mount Everest by five climbers—two British, one French, one Sherpa, and one American (the narrator)—to recover the body of a cousin of one the British characters. [6] Literary references [ edit ] A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. Now I'm going to complain about the actual plot. My biggest gripe by far is with Odysseus's arc(?) There are two Odysseuses in the novel; the one from the battle of Troy who is kidnapped by the moravecs and brought to future Earth, and an older Odysseus that the Old Style Humans discovered during the first book. So many people and characters interacting in blurry loops of potential meaning that go nowhere. For example about 5/8 the way through you are introduced to a "historical" character named Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep! (Say that three times fast) I'm sorry but as a reader I'm so tired of being brutalized by authors with names like this. Crap like this even makes skimming irritating. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

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On second thought, O Muse, sing of nothing to me. I know you. i have been bound and servant to you , O Muse, you incomparable bitch. and I do not trust you, O Muse. not one little bit. Summer Sketches (1992), Simmons reveals how his travel experiences have allowed him to instill a feeling of place in readers of his fiction Oh, and then of course, there’s all the sex stuff. What is it with cis white male science-fiction authors and an obsession with sexytimes? Asimov was conservative enough at least to merely be sexist in his descriptions of women. Simmons is closer to Larry Niven, whose obsession with “rishathra” torpedoed any enjoyment I could get from the Ringworld series. Everyone in this book is so horny. Add to that the descriptions of things, not even people, but things in terms of “the shape of a woman’s thighs,” and I was so close to noping out. Bobby Luczak is an American poet who has just been hired to travel to Calcutta and collect a recently discovered manuscript by a famous Bengali poet known as M. Das. Bobby decides to take his wife, Amrita, and their baby girl, Victoria, along on the trip, which might turn out to be the biggest mistake he has ever made. The Cult of Kali

Turin cloth: a cloth used by the people of Earth that, when draped over the eyes, allows them to view the events of the Trojan War, which they believe is just a drama being created for their entertainment. Named after the Shroud of Turin In the sequel to Summer of Night, A Winter Haunting (2002), Dale Stewart (one of the first book's protagonists and now an adult), revisits his boyhood home to come to grips with mysteries that have disrupted his adult life.Achaeans and Trojans: the heroes and minor characters are drawn from Homer's epics, as well as the works of Virgil, Proclus, Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, and classical Greek mythology. E-ring/ P-ring: short for "equatorial ring" or "polar ring" respectively. The rings described are not solid, but rather similar to the rings around Jupiter or Saturn: hundreds of thousands of large individual solid elements, built and occupied by the post-humans before Caliban and Prospero were stranded there and Caliban began murdering the post-humans. The rings are visible from the Earth's surface, but the old-style humans do not know exactly what they are.

In the end, much like the Hyperion Cantos, the science plays a part, but it is mostly handwaving at a philosophical level. I do “handwaving” a disservice as he is far more consistent with the limitations and behavior of the invented technology and lampshades it far better than the typical “Star Trek” episode. Yes. I'm a big fan of Simmon's stories, and this is another great time warping, world building, epic installment. It’s time to put the science fiction aside for a bit and see how one of the best Simmons horror novels looks like. Seasons of Horror is the perfect choice to start with as the four books inside this series are about to bring chills up your spine. Summer of Night All this to say, the narrative structure is a bit of a mess. Not in any way that makes the story hard to follow, but in a way that makes the storytelling feel very clumsy at times.The author's alter-ego professor character is forced to chase a young student through a parallel Colorado where all the people have vanished. Cute set-up, but it's missing that extra something to make it really good. But I can certainly forgive Simmons with that minor issue considering how many things he did right and how he tied all those intersecting plot threads together. He really did a stunning job. ARNists: short for "recombinant RNA artists". ARNists use recombinant DNA techniques to resurrect long-dead and prehistoric animals. Simmons borrows this term from his Hyperion Cantos. Quantum theory and Quantum Gravity are also used to account for a number of other things, from Achilles' immortality (his mother, Thetis, set the quantum probability for his death to zero for all means of death other than by Paris' bow) to teleportation and shapeshifting powers. Savi: the Wandering Jew. The only old-style human not gathered up in the final fax 1,400 years earlier. She has survived the years by spending most of them sleeping in cryo crèches and spending only a few months awake at a time every few decades.