IliumHarper Collins, 2003 M07 22 - 576 páginas 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 a mountaintop 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. |
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... final guest,” replied the servitor. It hummed into its hemispherical niche and clicked a command; the voynix clamped onto the carriole tongues and began jogging toward the setting sun, its rusty peds and the carriole's wheel raising ...
... final time, to stare down at its torches and doomed inhabitants a final time, and then fly south and west across that wine-dark sea—the Aegean—until I come to the not-yet-Greek Isles and mainland. I could check in on Clytaemnestra and ...
... final twenty klicks or so to the base on the surface after the tidal wave dissipated, but he had no choice. It should be one hell of an entrance. Unless something had blocked the lead ahead. Or unless another submersible was coming out ...
... final days. Well, the final firmary fax and Ascension would soon take care of that. Daeman looked at Ada, their hostess, in hopes that she would intervene to change the topic, but Ada was smiling as if agreeing with everything Harman ...
... final fax is total nonsense. Myths. Folklore.” Ada stepped closer. “Daeman, did you ever wonder where they came from?” “Who, my dear?” “The voynix.” Daeman laughed heartily and honestly at this. “Of course not, my lady. The voynix have ...