he great 20th-century philosopher Bernard Williams, who died this month, once spent some time thinking about some of the same things Dan Simmons has also put his mind to, just now, in Ilium. Williams argued that there was a deep distinction to be made between what he called "thick" and "thin" concepts of proper behavior in the world.
A thin concept, like "good," could be understood in terms of abstract propositions, but a thick concept, like "courage," was so complexly interwoven into the kind of traditional society likely to recognize it that it became, in Williams's terms, a "piece of knowledge" for that society, a form of understanding, too deep, as Wordsworth said, for tears, that made that society work. But that kind of knowledge, Williams suggested, does not travel well. It cannot easily be lifted from one world and inserted into another. The motives underlying much of the action of Homer's Iliad are not, for instance, easily understood by anyone today.
Dan Simmons clearly knows this very well, and it may well be the case that some of the oddities of Ilium come about from an impulse on his part to make storyable the long arduous process involved in even beginning to understand just what the Achaians thought they were doing, 33 centuries ago around the walls of Troy (which is also known as Ilium). The Homer of the Iliad (who may not quite be the same Homer who wrote or sang the much more "civilized" Odyssey) certainly knew what his story meant, and the more we learn about the time of which he told, the more it seems likely that something rather like the siege of Troy did somehow happen.
But we misrepresent Ilium if we give the impression that it is mainly an exercise in learning how to learn about the past; it is very much more (and sometimes a bit less) than that. Ilium is an iliad and an odyssey and a guided tour and a space opera and a quest and an Exemplary Fable (out of SF's Exemplary Fable Stable) about how to make an eloi into a Man Guy, and perhaps we should say something about the whole of the thing before returning to the problem of what on earth courage—or aristeia or agon or arete (I quote directly from a passage late in Ilium: "'Tell us again about arete' came a voice from the front row.")—could have possibly meant to a loon like Achilles.
Life after death in a far-flung future
As a whole, Ilium is divided into three parts, which dovetail into one story, but not for a while.
Part One is told by Thomas Hockenberry, a dead 20th-century Homer scholar who has been resurrected (as a kind of quantum-wave partial with memory loss) a millennium or so after our own time by the Greek pantheon, which is now housed on Olympus Mons on a version of Mars terraformed to suit these deities, who may (or may not) be the "post-humans" who abandoned Earth a few centuries before, after an unclear sequence of events involving the extinction of most humans by a virus known as rubicon and the rapture (by "final fax") of the survivors into a condition volume two (Ilium's sequel will be called Olympos) may explain, or may not.
Hockenberry spends his time shuttling between Olympus and the plains of Ilium. He travels by QT, an acronym for Quantum Teleport, and seems to think that he travels through time, that the Ilium he visits is the true historical Ilium we (here on Earth in 2003) find so difficult to understand fully, but the text never confirms that this Ilium is exactly historical, and Hockenberry (who doesn't realize Olympus is on Mars for hundreds of pages) is not a reliable witness. Nor are the Achaians and Trojans entirely plausible, either: being too good—too densely and exultantly the exact same figures Homer drew so much larger (we assume) than life—to be true.
But Hockleberry, who morphs into the shape of various spear-carriers so he can stay close to the action, attempts valiantly to convey some sense of what's going on, and it is these attempts that Simmons uses as his main story-shape for imparting Ilium infodump stuff, much of it extremely intriguing. We begin, for instance, to understand how aristeia—"warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor"—could both define the nature of war and prolong its anguish. We learn lots about Ilium, but we never know why the deities or post-humans or what of some future age have focused upon this particular epic moment of early Earth history.
Part Two takes place on Earth apparently at the same time that the Greek pantheon is shuttling Hockleberry (and other scholics) to Ilium and back. Only a million human beings are left. They are eloi (from H.G. Wells' The Time Machine): ignorant, effete airheads who are taken care of by mechanical "servitors" and shepherded by the mysterious Voynix, who may be from another dimension. One of these airheads, young Daeman, faxes himself (only late in the book do we learn that this form of instantaneous travel is very much like a fax: that a copy of the original is what appears at the destination faxnode) to Ardis Hall, the estate of young Ada, whom he wishes to seduce. (Simmons' use of Vladimir Nabokov's unearthly 1969 novel Ada, whose incestuous, eloi-like protagonists somehow exudate an Anti-Terra to play in, is either too subtly integrated into the overall structure of Ilium for me to understand or will be explained in the next volume, or both.) But Ada is not interested, and the story moves elsewhere, fast.
A braver eloi named Harman wishes to find out more about the world (and the two rings that circle it and that is where dead eloi are supposed to go after a century of life and enjoy heavenly bliss) and persuades the others to go with him. They soon meet Savi, a 1,300-year-old woman known as the Wandering Jew, and Odysseus, who seems to be the same Odysseus that Hockleberry warily observes—warily because Odysseus is very sharp indeed—and who makes it clear that Earth's eloi are living on thin ice, that something very dreadful is about to happen. Ilium shuts before that can happen (Volume Two will explain just what transpires), but the Companions discover and experience much, including a tasteless moment in which the recorded voices of ancient muezzin call all Voynix together to kill the Jews in Jerusalem, and a long complex interaction, on one of the rings in orbit, with much of the cast of The Tempest, including a hologram version of Prospero (who is the avatar of the logosphere of Earth, which is what the Internet becomes after spam is a thing of the distant past) and an extremely savage Caliban (a cross between Gollum and the alien of Alien who may not be dead at novel's close).
Part Three begins on the moons of Jupiter and proceeds to the same Mars we have already met, where the Greek pantheon's wholesale use of QT has begun to slice universe-threatening holes in the fabric of reality (like the eponymous subtle knife in Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, 1997). The heroes of this section are two moravecs (Simmons' term, an homage to the real robot scientist Hans Moravec, for autonomous bio-mechanical AIs) who are sent from the moons of Jupiter to Mars to implant a Device there that will do something Volume Two will explain to the holes in reality. The moravec Mahnmut is a Shakespeare scholar; his colleague, Orphu of Io, specializes in Proust. Neither knows why their minds have been constructed so as to respond obsessively to early human writers, and each speculates as to why; Volume Two will explain. After their spaceship is demolished by a god in a chariot who throws a range-finding missile at them, their adventures on Mars become a kind of odyssey, though not, I think, the Odyssey. They are eventually captured and taken to Olympus just in time for the plot to thicken.
Superb storytelling stopped short
But here the reviewer halts short. The first two-thirds of Ilium have displayed a facility with the modes of storytelling that amounts at times to superba (or should we say hubris). Chapters close in exquisite Perils of Pauline; straightforward expositions of straightforward stuff segue suddenly through back doors, secret ingresses into the inner software of the Dan Simmons storyteller engine, where we find out stuff that makes us dizzy to think we can be told so much so fast so smooth so jubilantly; puns jostle with splatterpunk moments of honesty about what happens to a human being when he is wounded unto death, and more, and more, and more. The invention is constant, an exquisitely pulsed superflux of action and turn and tumble only permissible—only conceivable—within the arena of the one contemporary form that works best when worked to excess: space opera. Ilium is a Theatre of Memory of space opera. Ilium is perhaps, as well, the first successful space opera of Troy—Brian Stableford's Dies Irae trilogy from 1971 was fatally surly about its Homeric understory—and is so, I think, because it is the first story to respond to the Iliad as though Homer himself had written a space opera. Ilium is Arena Iliad.
But we stop here, because the final third of Ilium suffers something of a sea change. Up to this point, while never ceasing to pump his engine, Simmons has also been paying proper heed to the difficulty of understanding the thick concepts that govern the lives and actions of the heroes and heroines of the Iliad, and there is a sense that he similarly grants to his pure space-opera characters (like the moravecs and like the eloi) a thick-concept untransparency of being and behavior, a sense that he believes them to be more real, and more obscure, than the words he uses to tell them. But suddenly it all turns to SFX. Presumably because there is lots and lots of story still to tell, and some pretty intricate docking maneuvers to engage upon if each strand of the tale is going to fit properly into every other strand, every member of the vast cast suddenly strips off any thick-concept Beingness the author may have granted him or her and buckles down to the thin-concept job of treating Life as identical to the shorthand Simmons now uses to describe every action remaining before he can slingshot his horde and his conundrums and his loose ends into Volume Two.
Well Bernard Williams, and Dan Simmons when he's not hyperventilating, know very well that Life is not identical to anything we can say. So it's a shame that Ilium turns into The Bobbsey Twins Meet Alien and hippety-hops to terminus, but a great relief may be in store. We may all meet again. And maybe Volume Two, which will surely explain much, will stop short of explaining all.
