Olympos, Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....

' novel published in 2005, is the sequel to Ilium

Ilium (novel)

Ilium is a science fiction novel by Dan Simmons, the first part of the Ilium/Olympos cycle, concerning the re-creation of the events in the Iliad on an alternate earth and Mars. These events are set in motion by beings who have taken on the roles of the Greek gods...

and final part of Ilium/Olympos

Ilium/Olympos

Ilium/Olympos is a science fiction duology by Dan Simmons. These events are set in motion by beings who have taken on the roles of the Greek gods...

duology. Like its predecessor it is a work of science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

, and contains many literary references: it blends together Homer

Homer

In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...

's epics the Iliad

Iliad

The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...

and the Odyssey

Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

, Shakespeare's The Tempest

The Tempest

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place,...

, and has frequent smaller references to other works, including Proust, James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

, Caliban upon Setebos

Caliban upon Setebos

Caliban upon Setebos is an 1864 poem written by the British poet Robert Browning. It deals with Caliban, a character from Shakespeare's The Tempest, and his reflections on Setebos, the brutal god he believes in. Some scholars see Browning as being of the belief that God is in the eye of the...

, Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Unbound

Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820, concerned with the torments of the Greek mythological figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus. It is inspired by Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and concerns Prometheus' release from captivity...

, Shakespearean poetry and even William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

 and Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

's Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

.

Plot introduction

The novel centers on three main character groups; that of the scholic Hockenberry, Helen and Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

 and Trojan warriors from the Iliad; Daeman, Harman, Ada and the other humans of Earth; and the moravecs, specifically Mahnmut the Europan and Orphu of Io. The novel is written in present-tense

Present tense

The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...

 when centered on Hockenberry's character, but features third-person, past-tense

Past tense

The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...

 narrative in all other instances. Much like Simmons' Hyperion where the actual events serve as a frame

Frame story

A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...

, the three groups of characters' stories are told over the course of the novel and their stories do not begin to converge until the end.

External links

• Olympos on Worlds Without End