I found the start very confusing and disjointed. Three totally unrelated stories, one of the battle of Troy, a second robots on Io, and a third humans living on a reconstructed world with essentially no knowledge of their history or geography, and obnoxious mostly.

I finally stopped trying to make sense of the story and just read it. At the end, of course, the three pieces come together. However, I found that even so, much of it made little sense to me, as to the whys and wherefores.

I'm undecided if I will read book 2. ( )

F/SF

Like all of Simmon’s this is worth the read. It is not quite in a league with his epic Hyperion saga though.
( )

What if the Greek epic of Troy were a science fiction, and there were kind-of immortal humans on Earth who got to meet Odysseus, and then in the space of six hundred pages those involved in the sci fi fighting of Troy never met up with the cast of characters on Earth? Why, then you'd have a somewhat frustrating lump of a book that is really more like two books, and then towards the end you'll realise that of course this is the first in a series, and that it's just a little bit too much work to read more in the series and so all the problems and mysteries set up across these six hundred pages will have to remain mysterious for you. ( )

Clearly, Dan Simmons must be insane.

I read the back of the book, I read Simmons before, I should have been prepared.
Seriously though, I loved this book. I read the Iliad during my last year of high school, so a lot of it came back to me reading this, which was nice. I have no knowledge whatsoever about Shakespeare (or Proust) which made some of the more poetically inclined chapters a bit abstract to me. This is of course not Simmons fault, but it did make me feel that I missed out on a piece of the grander story. Also, it did genuinely make me want to know about the plays by Shakespeare, how about that.

There is something about Simmons writing that makes me lose any concept of "sensible". Simmons goes: "Trojan war on parralel universe earth and gods on Mars" and I go: "Okay, go on". Simmons goes: "Robots reflecting on Shakespeare and Proust on the moons of Jupiter" and I go: "Fine". Simmons goes: "Quantum Teleportation, Brane Holes, Little Green Men, Invisibility Hat" and I don't even blink an eye. Any other writer would have got me shouting at the book "Get it together man! This is just getting too much too fast, where in gods name are you going with this?", but for some reason Simmons makes me go: "Sure". This is some kind of magic I thourougly enjoy, and I will be reading much more of Dan Simmons from now on. ( )