Ilium

The sequel to Ilium is Olympos, published in 2005, which concludes the two-part science fiction epic. Olympos continues the story of the Trojan War reenactment on Mars, the evolved post-humans of Earth, and the conflict involving the Greek gods. Together, the two novels form a complete narrative arc spanning both books.

Ilium reimagines the events of Homer's Iliad on a terraformed Mars in the far future, where the Trojan War is being literally replayed under the supervision of powerfully enhanced beings who take the roles of the Greek gods. A group of resurrected twentieth-century scholars, called scholics, are tasked with monitoring whether the events match Homer's account. The protagonist Thomas Hockenberry, a classics professor, is one such scholic who becomes entangled in the conflict.

The moravecs are a race of sentient, Shakespeare-loving robots who dwell on the moons of Jupiter and are loosely named after roboticist Hans Moravec. In Ilium, moravec characters like Mahnmut and Orphu of Io are sent to investigate strange quantum disturbances on Mars. Their subplot provides both comic relief and a philosophical counterpoint to the Homeric and post-human storylines.

In Ilium's far-future timeline, Earth is populated by a small number of carefree post-humans who live in a state of idle pleasure with no understanding of their own history. A separate population of primitive humans also exists on the planet in a more traditional survival setting. The novel slowly reveals how this world connectis to the events unfolding on Mars and the broader mystery of who engineered these realities.