…Ilium
To say there is a whole lot going on in Ilium would be a huge understatement. The novel begins with three separate settings and sets of characters, each of them completely compartmentalized from the others. In one narrative, a far-future recreation of the Trojan War is underway, in which technologically augmented gods descend upon the battlefield to intervene in those mortal affairs. Another narrative deals with a small population of post-singularity humans on Earth, a planet now occupied by illiterates and lazy pleasure seekers, their every whim addressed by robotic servants. The last storyline deals with “moravecs,” a race of explorers (and apparently, literary critics) that are a durable fusion of organic tissue contained within mechanical shells. Although the date is never specifically referenced, Dan Simmon’s characters give the impression that Ilium’s events are occurring in a faraway future, perhaps thousands of years from our present day lives.
Ilium, similar to many science fiction novels set in a distant future, explores explicative variants of transhumanism and extropism (see also extropianism), but this isn’t the expected world of hyper-intelligent, virtually immortal, god-like humans. The inhabitants of Earth are one small step above monkeys: completely uneducated, ignorant of their history, and unable to explain the basis of the technologies that simultaneously serve them and limit their freedoms. However, their days are filled with leisure, nourishment and shelter are provided to them, they are able to travel the globe in a moment, and they are never troubled by illness or injury; even untimely death is no obstacle. Still, a race of pampered morons is hardly the idyllic future I would hope for. The gods watching the battle of Troy seem much closer to a transhumanist ideal: flawless in form and function, virtually immortal, able to teleport at whim, their intelligence and strength augmented by nanotechnology. But at the same time, they are strangely trapped, locked within the rules of a mythology. Similar to the humans of Earth, their lives are dictated for them. Who created these disparate but mirrored worlds, and what forces these populations to live within such narrow limitations?
Only the moravecs have a life that seems chosen on their own, and they are more machine than man, unconcerned with humanity. Little care is given to the old human ideals of beauty, youth, wealth, or power. Instead, their days (and years and even centuries, for they live on a completely different time scale) are filled with their own private explorations in the far reaches of the solar system. They are supremely tough, able to work in unthinkable environments. They have the luxury of time enough to think about whatever captures their interest; in the case of the two protagonist moravecs, they study and debate the “ancient” literature of Proust and Shakespeare. The moravecs work and explore with a degree of cooperation, but no mention is made of money or property. Little time is spent exploring the culture or society of moravecs, perhaps because these would be completely unrecognizable to us. Of the three societies explored in Ilium, these robots, wandering deep in space, have come the closest to absolute freedom.
How odd that the seeming transhumanist ideal is no longer even human. Is this the future that awaits humanity?