I finished Ilium and Olympos a few weeks ago and now I've finally remembered to start a thread about them here. My Hyperion/Endymion thread didn't get many responses but people seemed to enjoy those books, and at the time I got a few warnings about what to expect from Ilium and Olympos...perhaps I should have heeded them. 
I really enjoyed Ilium, it seemed to set up a fascinating universe with interesting characters. The Iliad redone in a full-on scifi mode was cool, and I like Hockenberry's explanation of the various "god" powers in terms of scifi concepts we can understand, like quantum teleporting and the quantum reasons Achilles can't be killed. The little ending scene with Hockenberry going to visit his (I had thought forgotten by the plot) companion in B.C.E. Indiana was a cool scene.
The moravecs were fascinating creations with cool ideas behind them; with the humans on the "real" Earth forgetting everything humanity had once created, I thought it was a really interesting idea that robots created BY those humans thousands of years ago were now the keepers of that information. Mahnmut with his Sheakspeare and Orphu with Proust kept alive a part of humanity's soul that had been lost because of ... we don't know what.
The actual Earth part of the story in terms of characters was a bit less interesting, because Daemon was an unlikeable guy who didn't really develop, so much as instantly change during his and Harman's stay in orbit. Ada meant basically nothing and her motivations made little to no sense, like when she suddenly decided to sleep with Harman when they were in the cool future-construct-in-South-America. (That whole area reminded me of the techno-areas in the SNES game Final Fantasy V where you get the airship, but I might just be a nerd
.)
The non-character based things behind the Earth story were much more intersting. The mystery behind constructs like the voynixes and the servitors I thought was wonderful The line about "do you ever wonder if this servitor is the same one as yesterday" was a really cool idea. Also intriguing was the idea of the post-humans, and just when and how they "evolved" was a good set-up for the next installment, even though their "planning" of their own evolution didn't really fly with the real defintion of the word evolution.
So I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs on Ilium...but I don't think I could do it on Olympos. From what you guys and the non-spoiler Amazon reviews I read said, I expected Olympos to get "weird..." I was hoping that meant "weird" in terms of quantum realities, a la Orphu's theory about quantum states of human creativity or TNG's "Parallels." Instead, the book never really got weird per se...it just kept GOING and ended up going nowhere at all. Ever.
It was like 750 pages of more set-up but done much more poorly than Ilium, then at the end Simmons tossed in some half-assed nonsense about Islamic terrorism that didn't tie into the story at all. Harman's forced journey through the Atlantic cleft was for NO reason, (and the thing about him having to have sex with the Last Post-Human Ever was just tacky, and of course she ended up contributing nothing to the story) and the Voynixes being Jew-killing robots was an INCREDIBLY unimaginitave answer to their origins. Then suddenly the Greeks fell into the "present" world and the story kind of stopped. All the cool stuff with the Greeks, the maybe-they're-post-human-Gods, and the alternate-Earth connected to "our" Mars fizzled out. Meanwhile, Daeman remained a suddenly-changed man completely unrecognizable from his first-book character, and the Caliban/Setebos plot sort of disappeared. All the interesting set-up Simmons crafted in his first book went pretty much nowhere, and I was left with an 800+ page paperweight/disappointment.
So did anyone else slog through the 2nd book after the VERY promising first installment? Anyone else as disappointed as me? Or are there people out there who enjoyed Olympos, and if so, tell me why! I could maybe rethink it, because the original ideas were so interesting.
I really enjoyed Ilium, it seemed to set up a fascinating universe with interesting characters. The Iliad redone in a full-on scifi mode was cool, and I like Hockenberry's explanation of the various "god" powers in terms of scifi concepts we can understand, like quantum teleporting and the quantum reasons Achilles can't be killed. The little ending scene with Hockenberry going to visit his (I had thought forgotten by the plot) companion in B.C.E. Indiana was a cool scene.
The moravecs were fascinating creations with cool ideas behind them; with the humans on the "real" Earth forgetting everything humanity had once created, I thought it was a really interesting idea that robots created BY those humans thousands of years ago were now the keepers of that information. Mahnmut with his Sheakspeare and Orphu with Proust kept alive a part of humanity's soul that had been lost because of ... we don't know what.
The actual Earth part of the story in terms of characters was a bit less interesting, because Daemon was an unlikeable guy who didn't really develop, so much as instantly change during his and Harman's stay in orbit. Ada meant basically nothing and her motivations made little to no sense, like when she suddenly decided to sleep with Harman when they were in the cool future-construct-in-South-America. (That whole area reminded me of the techno-areas in the SNES game Final Fantasy V where you get the airship, but I might just be a nerd
.)The non-character based things behind the Earth story were much more intersting. The mystery behind constructs like the voynixes and the servitors I thought was wonderful The line about "do you ever wonder if this servitor is the same one as yesterday" was a really cool idea. Also intriguing was the idea of the post-humans, and just when and how they "evolved" was a good set-up for the next installment, even though their "planning" of their own evolution didn't really fly with the real defintion of the word evolution.
So I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs on Ilium...but I don't think I could do it on Olympos. From what you guys and the non-spoiler Amazon reviews I read said, I expected Olympos to get "weird..." I was hoping that meant "weird" in terms of quantum realities, a la Orphu's theory about quantum states of human creativity or TNG's "Parallels." Instead, the book never really got weird per se...it just kept GOING and ended up going nowhere at all. Ever.
It was like 750 pages of more set-up but done much more poorly than Ilium, then at the end Simmons tossed in some half-assed nonsense about Islamic terrorism that didn't tie into the story at all. Harman's forced journey through the Atlantic cleft was for NO reason, (and the thing about him having to have sex with the Last Post-Human Ever was just tacky, and of course she ended up contributing nothing to the story) and the Voynixes being Jew-killing robots was an INCREDIBLY unimaginitave answer to their origins. Then suddenly the Greeks fell into the "present" world and the story kind of stopped. All the cool stuff with the Greeks, the maybe-they're-post-human-Gods, and the alternate-Earth connected to "our" Mars fizzled out. Meanwhile, Daeman remained a suddenly-changed man completely unrecognizable from his first-book character, and the Caliban/Setebos plot sort of disappeared. All the interesting set-up Simmons crafted in his first book went pretty much nowhere, and I was left with an 800+ page paperweight/disappointment.
So did anyone else slog through the 2nd book after the VERY promising first installment? Anyone else as disappointed as me? Or are there people out there who enjoyed Olympos, and if so, tell me why! I could maybe rethink it, because the original ideas were so interesting.
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