His shallowness is written to humorous effect, and luckily we readers can make out the import of everything that happens around him by paying close attention to the text. Perhaps modelled on Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry from The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is a dandy of the upper-class society, hoity-toity, and a completely shallow, thickheaded sex-maniac. They are both literature enthusiasts and during their mission to Mars present literary criticism to each other about Shakespeare and Proust.ģ) The third storyline is that of Daeman, one of the few authentic humans left on the planet Earth. Mahnmut’s big friend is the robot Orphu of Io. He joins a small team of robots, each coming from another moon in the solar system, to travel to Mars to see what the hell is going on back there with those crazy posthumans. Hockenberry gets mixed up in plots between the godsĢ) The second storyline is that of some sort of cybernetic organism called Mahnmut, who lives on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

In any case, the post-humans are playing the roles of the ancient gods in the tale. It is unclear whether this is just a recreation of the war, or some sort of projection, or the actual war brought to Mars using some kind of quantum space-time shenanigans. For, at the foot of the mountain rages the Trojan War – you know, the Greek war that Homer wrote down in his Iliad. Godlike, post-human creatures are living on Mars, on the giant volcano Mount Olympos, and have brought Hockenberry back to observe and report on a war. I will describe shortly the starting point of each of them, just so you know what kind of novel we are talking about.ġ) The first storyline is that of the 20 th century scholar Hockenberry, who is resurrected a few thousand years into the future, on the planet Mars. Ilium starts with three crazy storylines and we will just have to deal with it.

Ilium book review