2004 Locus SF – ILIUM by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons’ Ilium follows the misadventures of a group of war-re-enactors, as the egos of the organizers and the participants threaten to get in the way of historical accuracy.

Okay, the war is the Trojan War, the site is a terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future, and the organizers are godlike beings. But, it was reassuring for me to imagine the story on a smaller scale, since, as is the norm with Simmons’ space operas, the story has to go BIG: the nature of Earth and humanity are on the line, supertechnology and omnipotent beings abound, numerous references to great works of the western canon are thrown in to give the proceedings extra artificial weight, and one volume cannot contain the action. Honestly, if not for the fact that I’ve read or want to read every other Locus sf winner, I would have skipped this one, because it’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Simmons after three disappointing books in a row (Fall of Hyperion and the Endymion duology). My eyes glazed over for a lot of my reading, and I’m afraid I won’t remember a thing about this book if I don’t write this review right now.

As I said, it’s the far future, most of humanity is extinct, but there are a few survivors bouncing around Earth, some missing-in-action “post-humans,” Greek gods on Mars (who may be said post-humans), and some sentient robots bouncing around the rest of the solar system. The Greek gods live on Olympus Mons and are recreating the Trojan War. They’ve brought a few twentieth-century scholars of the Iliad in to consult, including sometimes-narrator Thomas Hockenberry (who may as well just be PJF from Riverworld). Hockenberry is given the power to morph into different characters and teleport, but he’s also often given impossible, history-sabotaging tasks by the gods (“kill Athena!”), not that these lead the plot anywhere interesting in particular. There’s also some action with the few remaining humans on Earth where they hang with Oddyseus and fight Prospero and Caliban for some reason. There’s a good amount of Roger Zelazny here – the futuristic Greek gods, whatever their origin, reminded me of the futuristic Hindu gods of Lord of the Light, and Oddyseus adventuring on a destroyed future Earth took me right back to This Immortal.

My favorite portions of the novel involve to “moravecs” or sentient robots from the Gallilean moons of Jupiter. Mahnmut is a Shakespeare scholar from Europa, and Orphu is a Proust expert from Io. The scholars are tasked with a mission to check out Mars. Their scholarship doesn’t do much other than allow Simmons to remind us that he knows some things about literature, as he so often does. The Canterbury Tales format of Hyperion was original and fun; since then, the Keats, Shakespeare, Homer, and Proust references just seem like Simmons doing his shtick. Is it in his contract or something? At least Mahnmut and Orphu have personalities though, unlike the human characters.

I think Simmons is just not for me. His world-building doesn’t have the depth that I look for as it leans to heavily on shallow intertextuality, and he always ramps the stakes up to the point that nothing seems to matter.

Grade: C-

1998 Locus SF – RISE OF ENDYMION by Dan Simmons

Hyperion is one of the best space opera novels of all time, but its resolution, The Fall of Hyperion, is a rushed-feeling mess of a book. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to continue with the final two books of the series after that, but I do have a solid streak going with the Locus awards, and since the final book won I felt obliged to continue.

This second pair of books does manage to recapture some of what made Hyperion so special, though they also manage to repeat some of the messy mistakes of Fall. In the third book, Endymion, we return to Simmons’ universe a quarter-of-a-millenium later and see that much has changed. The Catholic Church has taken over from the old Hegemony and created an empire called the Pax. A young man from the planet of Hyperion named Raul Endymion (enough with the Keats references already!) meets up with some survivors of the first series and becomes the escort for a twelve year old girl with a capital “D” Destiny named Aenea. The novel unfolds as a chase across several worlds as church officials pursue Raul and the girl (and their robot pal). Unlike Fall of Hyperion, the story is simple, the cast limited, and the sum total engaging and fun.

In this volume, Rise of Endymion, we return the epic and manic universe-bending mess of Fall of Hyperion. The fate of the whole universe is on the line, the rules can and will change at any moment, and the power of love will somehow save everyone. Raul continues to hop from planet to planet, and Aenea continues to slide toward her Destiny. Even though only the second novel won the Locus, the pair of novels make a single whole, and I wouldn’t recommend reading either separate from the other.

Actually, I’m not sure I’d recommend that either. On the one hand, Simmons’s prose, character work, world-building and action scenes are all pretty great. Much of the novel moves from world to world, and Simmons uses his extensive knowledge of history and literature and a respect for the genre’s history to build a series of really interesting places for the protagonists to visit. For instance, the planet of T’ien Shan, featured on the cover, features colonists from Buddhist monasteries, who built a new home high in the mountains of a planet with a noxious atmosphere near the surface. These sections come the closest to matching the greatness of Hyperion. But, there is quite a bit of chaff in that wheat. Far too much of the book is taken up with the machinations of the church antagonists, which don’t serve much purpose and really start to drag. And, the rules do go out the window late in Rise, just as they did in Fall. We get a series of infodumps about evolution and theology and Buddhism and love, which allow for Simmons to chat about what are surely some pet interests before employing a series of deus ex machinas to quickly wrap everything up. As I’ve said before, it’s great when a speculative fiction author uses the full scope of his or her imagination to push the boundaries of reality…but, when characters can come back from the dead, teleport across the universe, or collapse an interstellar civilization with a thought, the stakes of the conflict really aren’t clear.

Simmons is a fine writer, and a lot of this is interesting, but none of it reaches the quality of the first book. I’d say, read Hyperion, then go skim or read some synopses of the rest if you just have to know where it all goes.

Grade: C+

1991 Locus and BSFA – THE FALL OF HYPERION by Dan Simmons

I had heard from a few sources that the sequel to Hyperion did not live up to the promise of its forebear. Based on the first book, I imagined that this novel failed by skewing off onto some sort of metaphysical tangent. Considering that Hyperion had foreshadowed a war between different versions of God, it was easy to imagine the resolution going off the rails in this manner. There is some of that here, but it’s not really where the book goes wrong. I was surprised to discover that The Fall of Hyperion is just kind of boring.

The first novel used an interesting structure to unveil its fascinating world – a series of different tales from varying points of view and in diverse styles. The Fall of Hyperion also attempts a new narrative structure. It is narrated in first person by a new character (though one very closely related to a character in the previous novel) who can dream faraway events on the planet Hyperion. So, we see war planning at the highest levels of the Hegemony government from our narrator, while also picking up the stories of the first novel’s pilgrims while he sleeps. It’s an interesting idea, but Simmons quickly abandons these rules by the novel’s second half in a move that illustrates the book’s overall sloppiness. There are no real rules here; it really feels like Simmons is making things up as he goes along, and you can see the dei ex machina coming from miles away (note to authors: discussing deus ex machina does not excuse it). There are no rules, so there are no stakes. We spend most of the novel watching the Hegemony fall apart, but it’s never all that clear why we should care. Simmons calls the Hegemony’s leader “Lincolnesque” at least five times, but she seems reckless, cruel, self-involved, and ignorant. Characters disappear and reappear, die and get resurrected, get tortured, send their consciousnesses into cyberspace, switch temporal directions, and so on. The narrator moves aimlessly, at one point going all the way to Hyperion and tantalizing us with the possibility that the dual plots will synch up and go somewhere interesting, only to leave again shortly thereafter. Watching an interstellar civilization collapse while gods battle should be dramatic, but here it’s just a mess.

Hyperion was a great book, but I’m not convinced that a) Simmons had a clear resolution planned, or b) had enough material for another full-length novel anyway. As a result, this feels simultaneously rushed and padded, staid and chaotic. This novel has its moments, and it’s still a fascinating world. I might check out Endymion duology down the line, but this one really got away from him.

Grade: C-

1990 Hugo and Locus - HYPERION by Dan Simmons

Of all the wide range of sub-genres that you can fit under the broad rubric of speculative fiction, I have the softest spot for the space opera. I’m not really sure why – too much Star Wars and Star Trek, I guess – and in some ways it’s the most staid and trope-ridden of them all. In the ‘80s, Brin made some innovations with some really alien aliens and some really bizarre technologies, but otherwise, I’m not sure there’s that wide a gap from Lensman and Foundation to Vorkosigan and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In Hyperion, however, Dan Simmons manages to shake the genre up by melding it with literary history to create a unique space opera setting.

The novel takes place in the 28th century. Earth has been destroyed, but colonists have fanned out to other worlds. Farcasters provide almost instantaneous travel between them and have forged a Web of worlds, ruled by the Hegemony. There’s also a hostile group of earlier, breakaway human colonists called Ousters, and then there are a few other worlds that remain rough frontiers outside the Web. One of these planets is the mysterious Hyperion, home to strange alien artifacts like an ancient Labyrinth and the Time Tombs. It is also inhabited by the Shrike, a murderous and god-like being, covered in metal spikes.

The novel unfolds through the stories of a group of pilgrims who go to visit the Shrike and ask him for favors on the eve of a massive war. These stories span genres and styles – the soldier’s story is military sf (told in 3rd person); the priest’s tale begins exploring the challenges of faith in an alien encounter (a bit like Case of Conscience), is told through journal entries, and ends as Lovecraftian horror; the detective’s tale is pure noir cyberpunk, narrated in first person; the scholar’s tale is family melodrama with horror elements (not so far from Song of Kali’s best features, really). Some of the stories are stronger than others, though the only one I didn’t like was the final story, which is a reprint of an older Simmons’ short “Remembering Siri.” I’m not sure I would cast this novel as literary sf, as some do, but it’s certainly literate in ways that many sf books are not. The structure follows the middle English classic, The Canterbury Tales and the title comes from English Romantic poet John Keats, who we see more of throughout the novel.

Each of the stories is exciting and skillfully told, and they each reveal further details about the Web and more mysteries about Hyperion while providing rich character development for the pilgrims. Again, it’s the setting that most captivated me here, and I look forward to reading more novels in the quartet. In fact, my biggest complaint is that there’s not much forward motion in the plot in this entry, and it ends, more or less, on a cliffhanger.

Grade: A

1986 World Fantasy Award - SONG OF KALI by Dan Simmons

I get the feeling that Dan Simmons took a vacation to India in the late '70s/early '80s and did not enjoy himself. There's a school of thought in horror (I think I got this from a Stephen King essay) that you take a rather mundane fear and magnify it. In this case, Simmons considers a vacation to a foreign country and makes it go about as poorly as possible. He does this effectively, though I'm not entirely thrilled with the results.

Bobby Luczac has a pretty great life at the beginning of the novel He has a beautiful and wealthy wife (who was born in India) and a baby girl, and he's a poet who is actually employed - he works for both Harper's and a small literary magazine. He grabs an assignment to track down an elusive Indian poet thought dead for almost a decade. He packs his family off to Calcutta for what he believes will be a quick and enjoyable vacation, but he immediately hates the dirty, poverty-stricken Indian city. He is also ensnared in a web of intrigues concerning the possibly-dead poet that includes the snooty Indian Writers' Union and a group of cultists to the goddess of destruction, Kali. Because this is a horror novel, these intrigues are bound to take a nightmarish turn.

Simmons has a clear but strong narrative voice, and this novel made me look forward to the upcoming Hugo winner, Hyperion, but this novel never quite grabbed my attention. There are clear mysteries at the novel's beginning, but none of them quite hooked me - the spookiness level remains relatively low until the final quarter of the novel, and then it ramps up a little too quickly. It was only in the epilogue, where Simmons begins to hint strongly about the wider implications of what has happened to the Luczacs, that I really had any emotional response to the book, which is a problem for a horror novel; it's too subtle for the first two-thirds and too much in the final third.

I also had a problem with the novel's slight (unintentional, I think) xenophobia. As I said, Simmons makes exotic travel scary, but he offers little redemption for India. The message seems to be "you think travel to a poverty-stricken foreign country might be frightening? Well, it could be even worse among the poor, dirty, superstitious pagans of Calcutta!" I'm not saying that I think Simmons is in any way racist, but I do think it's unfortunate that a side-effect of this sort of horror set-up is that Calcutta and India come off as so inherently flawed - there's no historical context, just deep, ancient, and foreign evils.

Grade: B-