Ilium is the Trojan War. The one counted by Homer. But this war, which took place thousands of years ago on Earth, has a much wider scope: it originated on Mars. The Greek gods have set up camp on Olympus Mons, the highest volcano in the solar system, a royal throne for the god of gods, with his supersize ego, Zeus himself.

The gods are super-evolved humans who play, as in chess, and in this game, humans are pawns that the gods boost with nano-implants or quantum manipulation to change an individual’s luck. So Achilles, the superman whose mother bathed him in the waters of the River Styx, has 100% chance of being killed by a precise arrow striking his heel at exactly the right time, but a 0% chance of being seriously injured by anything else. Easy to win every fight with that!

In the Iliad, Homer sings of the beauty of Greek warfare (!): the honour, the superb speeches so elaborate that it’s hard to believe they’re natural…

But in Ilium, Simmons also shows the other side of the war: the incredibly crude but also more lively side of the soldiers: one of the Achaeans insinuates that if Menelas had had a bigger D… , or if he had known how to use it with Helen, the war wouldn’t have happened! Achilles and Patroclus may be gay, but they don’t hesitate to bring in giggling whores to copulate together, and Patroclus snores loudly, afflicted with “a deviated septum”. During one of Agammemnon’s speeches, one of his captains will say that he has “shat square crotin”.

The gods have resurrected scholars of modern times to check that the course of the war is consistent with The Iliad. They are called scholiasts. And one of them is going to use the powers (technologies) entrusted to him by the gods to take on the appearance of Paris and sleep with Helen. Helen, “the tits that started the war”, the most beautiful woman in the world, or at least the one in whose name the most people were killed. The woman for whom the biggest city in the world was besieged. And Helen who said:

A woman may not recognise the smell or the voice of her husband. But she always recognises the way her husband fucks her

will ask the scholiast to help her change the course of the war.

In the meantime, the gods continue to play their games, throwing twists and turns at each other that make politics and the CIA look like a parlor game. And they may have over-evolved, but they are still guided by the same springs: sex, power, violence…

But the gods’ games with quantum physics on a cosmic scale are worrying the Moravecs, biomechanical beings sent in the technological age around Jupiter and Saturn. They decide to send an expedition to bring the gods to their senses… And reason and the gods don’t mix! The Moravian envoys are themselves fans of human literature, and are constantly wondering what Shakespeare or Proust would say in this or that situation…

In Ilium, you’ll be treated to a superb culture lesson on ancient Greece, where soldiers have more holidays and days off than the average Western worker, and where people carry out their actions to the end, with all their soul, thus running “the absolute risk of failure”. You’ll also get an idea of what it’s like to live in a world where nobody works, because there will always be someone to do it for you. You’ll also get an idea of what the Internet could be like in this post-technological universe: an omniscient conscious planetary network that’s totally out of control…