Ilium

Dan Simmons swings for extraordinary ambitions in this Locus Award-winning novel, weaving a resurrected Homeric scholar, passive post-human Earthlings, and robot moravecs from Jupiter's moons into a single story where the Iliad is literally being re-enacted on Mars. The scope is genuinely staggering, and the literary intertextuality — Homer, Shakespeare, Proust, Nabokov — rewards patient readers. For the right adult reader, this is electrifying. But the content warnings are real: graphic violence, explicit sexual content, and an incestuous attraction that makes several reviewers uncomfortable are woven throughout. The first book ends without resolution and requires the sequel Olympos. This is mature, demanding science fiction — rewarding for adults who want their SF to wrestle with big ideas, but not for family audiences or readers seeking a tidy arc.