(This is a carbon copy of my post)
Newsgroups: alt.books.roger-zelazny
Subject: "Ilium" by Dan Simmons
A while ago, someone quoted an article in Locus Magazine, in which Dan Simmons wrote that he had turned down an offer to write prequels of some beloved SciFi series, presumably Zelazny's Amber series.Now I'm reading Simmons's new novel "Ilium" and am surprised how it is Zelazniesque. On Mars, in far future, some mysterious entities are playing Greek gods using very advanced nano tech (Lord of Light!), and interfering re-created Trojan War. They can "Phase Shift", or Quantum Teleport, to a destination by visualizing it in his/her mind (Shadow Shift!). A 21 century Homer scholar is ressurected by the gods in the middle of the war and reports the progress of the war through his presentday viewpoint (typical of Zelazny protagonist), and he is involved in a Machiavellian power game played in the Pantheon of Olympus (Amber). Beside these, some characters (in another story thread) are taken from Shakespeare's Tempest (in RZ's "Exeunt Omnes" he did a parody of The Tempest).
I highly recommend this novel to RZ fans.
