Ilium (2003)
Ilium is a 2003 greek mythology book written by Dan Simmons.
On a terraformed Mars, beings calling themselves Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite watch the Trojan War unfold below, wired into the battle with technology indistinguishable from divinity. Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first-century Iliad scholar resurrected to report on how closely events follow Homer, keeps his head down until Aphrodite hands him a secret assignment aimed at a rival goddess. Elsewhere, Shakespeare-reading robots from the moons of Jupiter set out to investigate Mars, and the last idle humans of a far-future Earth begin to wonder where everyone else went. Simmons opens a two-volume epic that treats the classics as engineering documents.
Quick answers
What is Ilium about?
On a terraformed Mars, beings calling themselves Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite watch the Trojan War unfold below, wired into the battle with technology indistinguishable from divinity. Thomas Hockenberry, a twenty-first-century Iliad scholar resurrected to report on how closely events follow Homer, keeps his head down until Aphrodite hands him a secret assignment aimed at a rival goddess. Elsewhere, Shakespeare-reading robots from the moons of Jupiter set out to investigate Mars, and the last idle humans of a far-future Earth begin to wonder where everyone else went. Simmons opens a two-volume epic that treats the classics as engineering documents.
When was Ilium published?
Ilium was published in 2003.
Who made Ilium?
Ilium was written by Dan Simmons.
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Explore Ilium guides
Ilium in our writing
- Companion guide: Hyperion Cantos: The Complete Guide to Dan Simmons' Far-Future Epic
A few thoughts on Ilium
The pantheon as a powerful, petty family is exactly the nerve God of War touches, following a god trying to outgrow his own nature. Supergiant's Hades turns the same Greek roster into wry, endlessly replayable myth, and Wolfgang Petersen's Troy stages the mortal war Hockenberry is paid to grade for accuracy.
The Greek gods reimagined as playable, breakable characters
Ilium's Zeus, Hera and Aphrodite are post-humans running the Trojan War like a private production, technology standing in for divinity. Troy tells the same war without the gods' machinery but keeps its scale, Hades turns the Greek pantheon into characters you actually fight and bargain with, God of War does the same for a different mythology, and Saint Seiya puts ordinary young warriors directly under a goddess's command.
Immortal powers staging human conflict for their own reasons
The gods in Ilium restage the Trojan War as an experiment for their own amusement. Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II both run on elder gods forcing champions into a tournament that serves an agenda the fighters barely understand. Phoenix follows one immortal power steering human history across centuries, and Sailor Moon's teenagers turn out to be royalty caught in a war they never chose.