Beneath the gaze of the gods, the mighty armies of Greece and Troy met in fierce and glorious combat, scrupulously following the text set forth in Homer's timeless narrative. But that was before twenty-first-century scholar Thomas Hockenberry stirred the bloody brew, causing an enraged Achilles to join forces with his archenemy Hector and turn his murderous wrath on Zeus and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators.

The swift and terrible mechanical creatures that catered for centuries to the pitiful idle remnants of Earth's human race began massing in the millions, to exterminate rather than serve. And now all bets are off.

Ada and Daeman, with the aid of the crafty and mysterious warrior once called Odysseus, now called Noman, must marshal the pathetic defenses of Ardis Hall in anticipation of the onslaught of the murderous voynix. Meanwhile, Harman, Ada's lover and the father of her unborn child, wanders the Earth on a great odyssey of his own, seeking the limitless knowledge necessary to defeat Setebos, an unspeakable, otherworldly monster.

Back on Mars, the rebellion of Achilles and the intervention of sentient robots from Jovian space ignite a civil war among Olympian gods, threatening to send all things in Heaven and Earth plummeting straight to Hell.

Dan Simmons's Olympos is a monumental work that ingeniously imagines a catastrophic future where immortal "post-humans" restage the Trojan War for their own amusement, blending great science fiction with serious literature.