Since it isn't possible to dislike a book where this happens I'm all in favour of Ilium, but its thriller-based scaffolding is so stuffed with exuberant, Banksian charm, visceral detail, breathtaking audacity and vividly realistic action scenes that it would be difficult not to warm to it.Īs with Simmons's first SF book, Hyperion, this volume manages to quote from, steal from, criticise and do homage to a number of favourite writers from the past, using them to shore up a sophisticated theory of literature which is also the basic plot. Further loans, this time from the library of SF's Greatest Hits, include the Eloi (The Time Machine), the quantum teleport that destroys the original and remakes it with every usage (Star Trek) and a very jolly scene where an insufferable young man is eaten by an allosaurus (Jurassic Park). On the top of the tide comes Dan Simmons's Ilium, with its triple-layered narrative, which drags Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's The Tempest as its sea anchors and tows the Sonnets and a dollop of Proust in its wine-dark wake. There's a big morphic resonance from the classics breaking out all over science fiction at the moment.
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