Absolutely loved it. Can't wait for the second half. Highly recommended.

Ilium is Simmons at his best: sprawling science fiction with good characters and a mind-boggling story arc. The primary action in Ilium takes place on Earth and Mars, some two millenia in the future, where entities who have fashioned themselves after the Greek gods are replaying the siege of Ilium from The Iliad. The cast includes the gods, the Greek heroes, some post-technological humans, a resurrected Iliad scholar, and a pair of autonomous robots, or moravecs. The humans don't know how to boil water, the moravecs contemplate Shakespeare and Proust, and Hockenberry (the scholar) plays out a Homer-erotic (sorry, couldn't resist) fantasy. It's a heady and intoxicating mix.

If Ilium were written by any other author, I'd worry that there were too many loose ends to be tied up in the second half of this epic (to be titled Olympos), but I'm entirely confident in Dan Simmons to follow through with a satisfying conclusion. Even as is, Ilium almost stands on its own. There are a few examples of deus ex machina, some of which Simmons points out as such, that I hope will be justified in the second book.

On a side note, it appears to me that the character Daeman is being set up as an everyman hero, and therein lies my chief criticism — admittedly a minor quibble — of Ilium. I am somewhat unsatisfied with his story arc so far. To date, his evolution has been a little bit unbelievable, and he hasn't been given very sufficient depth.

One final bit of praise: any novel that inspires its readers to study Homer, Shakespeare, and/or Proust, is to be celebrated. None of those sources are prerequisites for enjoying Ilium (lord knows, I've never read much of any of them), but I suspect they'd enrich the experience. Between now and the release of Olympos, I may well take a look at The Iliad and The Tempest.