Poor Excuse For A Critic

I have re-read my last post and boy am I a poor critic. It is so hard to write something positive that doesn't sound like you are a dimwit. Amazingly I do love science fiction over any other literary format. I enjoy historical fiction but I like alternative historical fiction even better. There are several authors that do a great job of playing the "what if" card. Harry Turtledove has a great two book series (Days of Infamy) of what would have happened if Japan had launched an invasion of Hawaii at the same time they attacked Pearl Harbor. I must say by the end of the books, I had developed a severe dislike for the Japanese. That is not to say that there is not already some prejudice towards their culture due to my years of employment in the automobile industry.

I just finished a book called Ilium by Dan Simmons. It is staged in the distant future of Earth. We have let our technology run wild by creating computer intelligences that become gods and allowing genetic engineering to repopulate extinct species that run rampant. Disease and manipulation has reduced the human population of less than one million. They are ignorant of their past and dependant on a technology they neither understand or can control. Their life span is limited to 100 years and they are allowed to have only one child. At the same time, the Greek gods are re staging the Trojan War and using 20th century scholars to compare the reenactment with Homer's account. The activity of the gods has caught the attention of a race of robots inhabiting the moons of Saturn that send a team to investigate Mars, where the gods have terraformed the planet and built their Olympus.

Needless to say, the Trojan war goes off the rails and the humans, robots, the Greeks and the Trojans go to war with the Zeus and company by storming Olympus. You have Hector of the Trojans and Achilles of the Greeks forging a partnership to defeat the very gods they worship.

The book was a little confusing at first. The three completely different parties shared no relationship to each other. But Dan Simmons managed to sew the three plots into a very interesting taste of what is to come. The story finishes up in the follow up called Olympus. It will have to wait however. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have come out with a sequel to their novel Inferno. Escape From Hell was recently published and it has moved up to the top of my reading priority list. I will let you know if Dan Simmons pulls off a great ending to an interesting beginning at a later date. In the mean time, bone up on you Dante.

Icool

Cobb