Ilium
by Dan Simmons


  
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Book Description

Dan Simmons, one of the best novelists in the field of speculative fiction, deserves all the accolades that have been heaped upon him. Simmons' novels are engaging and thought-provoking, playing with the events of the past and speculating, in interesting ways, about possible futures. In Ilium, a complicated cliffhanger of a novel set hundreds of years in the future, a group of highly evolved beings - humans, but at the same time more than human - use Mars as their staging area to recreate Homer's Iliad, with themselves cast as the gods and goddesses of the epic poem. (They've even imported their own Homers, a group of humans from the past, who report on the events both on and off the battlefield.) Meanwhile, a team of robots from Jupiter (one a lover of Proust, the other more a fan of Shakespeare: their dialogue is priceless) is sent to Mars to investigate the resultant worrying increase in quantum fluctuations felt throughout space. At the same time, members of a small group of humans living on a now minimally populated Earth begin to question their own way of life. These three groups converge on Mars, and the novel concludes with an ending that's worthy of those Saturday afternoon serials staring Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, where you don’t see how the good guys can get out of this alive….