Olympos by Dan Simmons

After last week's late and sleepy starts, I read Olympos over the week-end to avoid any repetition of that this week. Hey, I'm not totally absorbed in my reading. I realise there are wider considerations. Spending a large amount of time sitting on the couch read is a luxury to be savoured.

Olympos is the closing sequel to Ilium, and reveals the deeper mysteries behind the events of Olympos, as the situation of the last humans on earth goes from bad to dire. Cut off from the automations that made their life so easy, humans must once
again learn to fight as previously benign robots of earth begin killing everyone they can find. Genius can create whole universes, but that's not always a good thing.

Like Ilium, this is a book that forcibly pulls me through the story. My will is not my own as I turn page after page. Just another 10 minutes I think, and then an hour has gone by. People talk about getting lost as though it were a bad thing. Getting lost in a good book is strongly recommended.

Ilium by Dan Simmons

The Trojan War will never be the same again. Dan Simmons has seen to that. Reading this book had an immediate and noticable impact on my life. I was at work late and tired every morning last week.
The reason was, that I had been up late reading Ilium.

It's a strange and intriguing tale of Hockenberry, a resurrected scholar tasked by the gods of chronicling the siege of troy, and informing of any discrepancies
between homer's original and actual events. It's also the tale of Mahnmut and Orphu, two robotic life forms living on Jupiter's moons Europa and Io, who become tasked with finding out the cause of alarming quantum instabilities on Mars. It's also the tale of the last humans on earth, who have devolved into an eloi-like society that unthinkingly moves through the ruins of a once greater society.

All of these threads are connected, and the best part of this book is following the
characters as they unravel the mysteries facing them. It also contains some of the best fighting scenes I've read anywhere ever.

The first book ends with Achilles declaring war on the gods themselves. Good times.