Ilium
by Dan Simmons
Rating: 4.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2015-04-20
It’s fairly long, but a page-turner. There are three main story-lines, and I found the story of Hockenberry watching the Trojan war to be the most interesting. I’m a fan of Greek mythology, so it was a lot of fun seeing gods and godesses portrayed in a modern action-adventure writing style. I’ve never read the Iliad, but I primed myself by reading the Wikipedia summary first. Plus, the book does a good job of introducing characters and events on its own.
I’ve never read The Tempest, so the later events involving characters from that play were confusing and uninteresting to me. But the story-line involving Mahnmut traveling to Marse was my least-favorite part of the book. There was very little action, and a lot of talk about literature I’ve never read. So maybe this whole genre of “literary science fiction” doesn’t work unless you have some background knowledge of the literature.