ILIUM by Dan Simmons - SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOK
See all titles by Dan Simmons.From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus
and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon
a momentous battle, observing -- and often influencing -- the legendary
exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies
of Greece and Troy.
Thomas Hockenberry, former twenty-first-century professor and Iliad
scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and
report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw
fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new
assignment for the wary scholic, one dictated by Aphrodite herself.
With the help of fortieth-century technology, Hockenberry is to
infiltrate Olympos, spy on its divine inhabitants ... and ultimately
destroy Aphrodite's sister and rival, the goddess Pallas Athena.
On
an Earth profoundly changed since the departure of the Post-Humans
centuries earlier, the great events on the bloody plains of Ilium serve
as mere entertainment. Its scenes of unrivaled heroics and unequaled
carnage add excitement to human lives devoid of courage, strife, labor,
and purpose. But this eloi-like existence is not enough for Harman, a
man in the last year of his last Twenty. That rarest of post-postmodern
men -- an "adventurer" -- he intends to explore far beyond the
boundaries of his world before his allotted time expires, in search of
a lost past, a devastating truth, and an escape from his own inevitable
"final fax." Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian
space, four sentient machines race to investigate -- and, perhaps,
terminate -- the potentially catastrophic emissions of unexplained
quantum-flux emanating from amountaintop miles above the terraformed
surface of Mars ...
The first book in a remarkable two-part epic to be concluded in the upcoming Olympos, Dan Simmons's Ilium
is a breathtaking adventure, enormous in scope and imagination,
sweeping across time and space to connect three seemingly disparate
stories in fresh, thrilling, and totally unexpected ways. A truly
masterful work of speculative fiction, it is quite possibly Simmons's
finest achievement to date in an already storied literary career.