This book by Dan Simmons is so confusing, way too long, and involves way too many characters.
There’s a group of characters on Earth who appear to just exist to party. The non-explanation is that aliens called “post-humans” showed up a millennium or two ago and took care of everything, so humans can just hang out and party, and apparently they do.
What we don’t find out until later is that the post-humans abandoned Earth a long time ago and basically left their technology on auto-pilot. It must be pretty good, reliable technology if the humans haven’t even noticed anything is amiss.
Then there’s a scholar who was a professor of ancient Greek literature and specialized in the Iliad back in the late 20th century, but is now on Mars watching The Iliad play out. How he was reincarnated is never explained. I get that the post-humans wouldn’t think he was worth explaining their technology to, but as a reader, I need some sort of explanation in order to suspend my disbelief. As it is, there is so much disbelief, in this book.
Apparently a bunch of post-humans managed to set up the circumstances of The Iliad, casting themselves in the role of the gods. Only Zeus has read The Iliad. No one else knows what happens or how it ends except for some scholars Zeus reincarnated to watch the events unfold and note when events deviate from the book.
I can almost get behind the idea of reincarnating people who lived millions of years ago, but The Iliad is fiction. None of those people existed. The fact that Simmons doesn’t bother to even try to explain how the gods have manufactured this whole situation just felt like lazy writing.
Meanwhile, there’s yet another character (I told you there were too many) named Mahnmut. He appears to be a type of cyborg whose mission is to explore the oceans of Europa, until he’s pulled from that mission and told he’ll be part of a team that’s traveling to Mars to figure out why that planet seems to be acting strangely these days.
It’s not until they get halfway to Mars that Mahnmut and his crew are told it’s most likely a suicide mission. Also they have a device on board they have to activate when they get to Mars, but they’re not told what the device is or what it does. They assume it’s most likely a bomb.
Sure enough, once he gets to Mars, Mahnmut finds himself in the middle of a war between ancient Greeks and he’s as confused as I am.
This book doesn’t even try to make sense, and I find that frustrating. When you throw me into a world so different from my own, I have to work to navigate that world alongside the characters and try to figure out how everything works and what the hell is going on. I have to trust that the author will make the payoff worth the effort to get there, but he didn’t. He just wasted my time.
I’ve heard arguments that Simmons was trying to explore the nature of humanity and creativity by having the “post-humans” try to recreate one of the surviving texts from ancient Greece, but since Zeus is the only one who’s actually read the book, none of the others show any interest in art or literature at all.
And the lazy humans on Earth have forgotten how to read, much less tell each other stories or create art. Of the people we meet on Earth, only one has taught himself to read and one other has taught herself how to make and mold brass. Everyone else just drinks and parties.
If that’s Simmons’s way of exploring human nature, I think he’s forgotten a key part of human nature: creativity. Yes, necessity is the mother of invention, but plenty of inventions (not to mention art and culture) have come about because rich people with time and resources started playing around until they made something either useful or beautiful. Unfortunately, this book is neither.