Wendy has had another duology by him, Ilium / Olympos, on our bookshelf for years, and I figured I should try this series out.
It is a mess.
Much like the Hyperion series it has all kinds of cool ideas. It also has a bizarre fascination with old english poets and playwrights, for some reason. Unfortunately Ilium lacks one of the things that I most liked about Hyperion - the tech. In the Hyperion series the tech is far beyond anything we have, indeed often far beyond what we imagine is possible. However, it all fits together. In Ilium though Simmons just has any random tech he wants for the story and justifies it by using the words quantum or nano. Quantum teleporting. Quantum energy. Quantum field. I quantum the quantum quantums! And if that isn't enough, just call it nano quantum, and you are good to go. If you thought Ant Man and The Wasp had stupid amounts of quantum nonsense, prepare to see it dialled up to 11.
I don't mind wild tech, even tech that violates the laws of physics as we know them. What I can't stand is mindless, foolish explanations that toss around buzzwords and pretend like that makes it all work.
I am cool with establishing new rules in a fictional world. What I can't stand is the author obviously wanting a character to go to a place for a scene, so they have somebody yell about quantuming the quantum nano field to make it happen instead of actually, you know, writing well.
The Ilium duology really made me remember some of my Dungeons and Dragons experiences from my teenage years. Inexperienced Game Masters would come up with a plot and wouldn't know how to get the characters into the story they had written, so they would have a massively powerful character show up and order the characters to do the thing. No good explanation or reason would be given, it would just be 'All of you have to do this thing. No, I won't tell you why or how. Just follow me, or I will punch you out and carry you.'
This often resulted in the entire party being beaten up, tied to horses, and dragged along while the powerful character (who clearly didn't need any of *us* to win the day) lectured us on our flaws.
Ilium has a ton of this, and for the same reasons. Simmons obviously had scenes in his mind he wanted to do and couldn't come up with good reasons for those scenes to occur, so he would just have some nearly omnipotent, omniscient character show up and order the regular people to do some damn fool thing. The demigod would refuse to provide any reasons or context, and if the regular person resisted, they were unceremoniously smacked down. Even after they finally gave in and did what the demigod wanted, it was usually unclear why doing that even mattered in the first place!
It might sound like I think Simmons is a hack and has nothing to say. That isn't true - Ilium has no end of cool scenes and original ideas. The problem is that the plot makes no sense, the characters are inconsistent and unpredictable, and he doesn't tell the reader what the hell is going on because he is so busy getting to the next cool thing. It reminds me a bit of Too Like The Lightning, which I read awhile ago and did not like. Other people lauded it for its ideas, which is fair, but failed to add that the plot and characterization were a hot mess.
Simmons really needed to sit down with his ideas, cross out about two thirds of them, and then write these books. Either that, or maybe add another 4 books to the series so he could actually have the room to make it all make sense. In any case it desperately needs an editor to tear it down and make better use of the gems that are there. For example: There are posthumans who have been given tech to make them into immortal 'gods' who live on Mars and are presiding over an alternate universe siege of Troy on an Earth from another dimension. They have resurrected a human from the 21st century to record the event, and then he is tasked by one god to murder another. Wow, what a wild premise! You could write so much with that! This is about 5% of the premise for the actual story. It is just too much, and Simmons tries to juggle all the things he has created and the reader gets to watch the balls all fall down.
I am sure lots of people liked these books. Unfortunately they hit my personal pet peeves of having weak villains, terrible tech, weak and nonsensical plot, and flat characters. I find that many science fiction books that get all kinds of awards totally fail on these fronts, so clearly some people are good with that.
Me? Not so much.
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