Ilium Books in Order

The Ilium books are big, exuberant science-fiction adventures that ask what happens when the Trojan War, quantum physics, and posthuman gods collide. They unfold across Mars, Earth and the outer solar system thousands of years in the future.

One thread follows Thomas Hockenberry, a 20th-century Homer scholar resurrected by beings who present themselves as the Olympian gods and live on Olympus Mons. His job is to observe their re-creation of the Iliad, noting where events drift from Homer's text. Before long he's meddling in the war itself, caught between Achilles, Odysseus and capricious deities who wield near-magical technology.

A second thread takes place on a very changed Earth. The "old-style" humans there live in small, pampered communities, fax from place to place, and spend their days in effortless pleasure, watched over by robotic servants and mysterious infrastructures they no longer understand. Characters like Daeman, Harman and Ada slowly realize that they have been kept ignorant of their own history and that something is very wrong with the bargain their ancestors struck.

A third line follows two moravecs, Mahnmut of Europa and Orphu of Io, spacefaring artificial beings from the Jovian system. They notice alarming quantum activity around Mars and set out to investigate, bringing an outsider's eye, a love of Shakespeare and Proust, and a very different sense of what "life" looks like.

In Ilium, these strands run side by side as battles rage on the plains of Troy, strange creatures roam a mostly empty Earth, and hints of a much older catastrophe leak through. Olympos pulls the threads together, revealing who and what the "gods" really are, why the Earth has been left to decay, and how far the moravecs and humans will go to pull the universe back from the brink.

Along the way you'll see Paris Crater where Paris once stood, voynix packs hunting humans, quantum teleportation masquerading as divine power, and literary in-jokes that nod to everything from The Tempest to modern science fiction. The tone is playful but the stakes are high: extinction, rebirth, and what kind of intelligence might inherit the ruins.

Although there are quiet connections to the Hyperion universe, the Ilium cycle stands on its own. Read Ilium first, then Olympos, and be ready for a dense, idea-driven ride that still makes room for spears on a battlefield and robots arguing about poetry.