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Ilium

By: Dan Simmons
Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
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Publisher's Summary

From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing - and often influencing - the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy.

Thomas Hockenberry, former twenty-first-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new assignment for the wary scholic, one dictated by Aphrodite herself.

With the help of fortieth-century technology, Hockenberry is to infiltrate Olympos, spy on its divine inhabitants ... and ultimately destroy Aphrodite's sister and rival, the goddess Pallas Athena. On an Earth profoundly changed since the departure of the Post-Humans centuries earlier, the great events on the bloody plains of Ilium serve as mere entertainment.

Its scenes of unrivaled heroics and unequaled carnage add excitement to human lives devoid of courage, strife, labor, and purpose. But this eloi-like existence is not enough for Harman, a man in the last year of his last Twenty. That rarest of post-postmodern men - an "adventurer" - he intends to explore far beyond the boundaries of his world before his allotted time expires, in search of a lost past, a devastating truth, and an escape from his own inevitable "final fax." Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian space, four sentient machines race to investigate - and, perhaps, terminate - the potentially catastrophic emissions of unexplained quantum-flux emanating from a mountaintop miles above the terraformed surface of Mars.

©2003 Dan Simmons (P)2014 Audible Inc.

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Mediocre at best

I listened to this tale on the strength of Hyperion and its sequels but it didn't come close to what I was hoping for. I thought it started out well even if it took a long while to understand anything that was happening. However, I was enjoying it.

Then it just got stupid. I didn't mind the initial concepts but when it tuned into the Greek Gods using nuclear weapons and Achilles and his fellows fighting a war against Olympus alongside a bunch of robots... For me it just became stupid and I only listened to the end because I paid for it and I wanted to get my money's worth. I won't continue listening to any sequels.

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