Olympos by Dan Simmons

I've got a bit of a backlog on my posts, so over the next couple of weeks I'll be doing some catching up. I'm going to start with this one:

Olympos is the sequel to Ilium which I reviewed here prior to one of our book group meetings. Ilium was fast paced, full of concepts and a compelling read. I felt Olympos was about the same with some caveats. To summarize simply:

We pick up with all of our favorite (and not so favorite) characters - Harmon, Ada, Hannah, Daemon, and Noman ( formerly named Odysseus) from Earth. The people on Earth are suddenly being attacked by the voinyx, who once served humanity in all tasks, with a ferocity that is downright scary. Daemon finds that Paris Crater where his mother lived, is now under a blue dome of ice and in the center Setebos has taken up residence and is laying eggs. Meanwhile, the voinyx attack Ardis Hall and the humans there and Noman is mortally wounded. Harmon, Hannah, and Petyr make a desperate gamble and take Noman back to the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Pichu to Noman's regenerating coffin.


Here Harmon is kidnapped by Ariel and meets up with Prospero who tells him he has a mission to save earth. Harmon is frantic to get back to Ada, now his pregnant wife, but in order to do so he must complete this task.


And we meet up with my favorite little dues, the morvacs. Orhpu of Io and Mahnmut leave the battle of Troy on Mars and are heading toward Earth. From the sensors the morvacs have, there is a large probability the Brane holes and all the quantum stuff happening over Earth is going to destroy the near universe.



And lastly we still have the much altered battle of Troy in progress. The Ageans are getting their butts kicked, and Prof. Hockenberry, Ph.D., is quite distressed that it was because of him. In addition, the Gods have begun to war amongst themselves, and once Zeus is found and brought back to Troy, all Hades breaks loose. Literally.



That is to summarize very briefly. Overall, I enjoyed the story. I did get bogged down about halfway through, but that could have been in part because I became distracted by three busy weekends in a row (Minicon and two yoga workshops) and a knitting project. Plus this really isn't a book to read if you're tired.



I also found that Simmons seemed to pontificate more in this one. More than several times a character would go on at great length about some activity they were participating in or observing or whatever. And 'at length' would constitute pages of description. Now I normally enjoy description, but not when it drags on so much. (I'm thinking here particularly of Harmon finding the sub with the black holes in it.)



And it seemed to me the ending was almost to...pat. I shan't describe the ending because I know some of by bookish friends are waiting to read this, but it was almost as if Simmons just didn't know how he wanted to wrap this up or he just wanted to be done with the book.



But even despite my dislikes and it taking me forever to finish it (again, I got busy for about 3 weeks), I don't regret reading Olympus.