Ilium

Whew that was a lot of pages for not a lot of payoff.

At the center is a very clever book. A wildly imaginative sci-fi premise, sprawling over three interconnected stories. Some very well read intertextual writing, steeped not just in The Iliad and The Tempest but a lot of other literary sources too. At times it's really engaging.

But then it's also a mess. The story takes a long time to go anywhere. Then when it does it's in the most pot-boilery cliffhanger writing. It works but it's a cheap trick. I was mostly OK with it until the last 5% of the book when it was clear "oh god he's setting up a sequel". I gather it's a much lesser book, and this one wasn't so great, so I won't be reading it. I'll just pretend the war on Olympos ended immediately and the Garden of Eden folks went back to their horny lives.

The part that left a bitter taste in my mouth is Simmons' het male worldview. There's a lot of male gaze in this book. That's OK: straight men are allowed to like women's boobs and write about that. But there's a whole lot of it and it's kind of cartoonish and not to my interest. And then on top of that some of Simmons right-wing nasty worldview is starting to leak through in this book. Several gratuitously homophobic passages, him grinding some ax about Shakespeare's gay poets or the love between Achilles and Patroclus. He could have just left those few paragraphs out and it would have been a better book.