Ilium

From the multiple award-winning author of the Hyperion Cantos — one of the most acclaimed and popular series in contemporary science fiction — comes a huge and powerful epic of high-tech gods, human heroes, total war, and the extraordinary transcendence of ordinary beings.

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 ot the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new assignment for the ware 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 alotted time expires, in search of a lost past, a devastating truth, an an escape from his own inevitable "final fax."

Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian space, for sentient machines race to investigate—and perhaps, terminate—the potentially catastrophic emission of unexplained quantum-flux emanating from a mountain-top miles above the terraformed surface of Mars…

The first book in a remarkable two-part epic to be concluded in the upcoming Olympos, Dan Simmons's Ilium is a breathtaking adventure, enormous in scope and imagination, sweeping across time and space to connect three seemingly disparate stories in fresh, thrilling, and totally unexpected ways. A truly masterful work of speculative fiction, it is quite possibly Simmons's finest achievement to date in an already storied literary career.