The Trojan War has been going on for nine years, prolonged and complicated
by the meddling gods, who from their seat on the terra-formed Olympos Mons on Mars
use Greeks and Trojans to play out their private feuds. In the midst of all this
is Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first-century literature professor, who has been
transported there to confirm if everything plays out according to Homer's epic.
But then Aphrodite orders him to kill Athena.
Meanwhile on Earth, the last few hundred thousand humans spend their lives of
exactly one hundred years each in blissful ignorance (which includes watching
the Trojan War for entertainment). Who needs to know how to read
when everything is taken care of by helpful machines? Only Savi, the Wandering Jew,
who has been around for more than a millenium, remembers the (not so good) old days.
And then there is Odysseus, the Wandering Greek, who quite enjoys hunting dinosaurs.
Mahnmut is a sentient submarine robot, who spends his
days exploring Jupiter's moon Europa and discussing Shakespeare's sonnets with
his friend Orphus, who has a similar job on Io, but is actually more fond of Proust.
Both of them are sent to Mars on a mission to investigate the recent, strange and
quite possibly dangerous activities on the red planet.
As with most other of Simmons' books, the story is split into two volumes,
and after Ilium
comes Olympos
, which I already placed on the night-stand.
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