User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Watch in awe while the last, currently, written science fantasy epos of one of the most fascinating authors of our time comes to an end.
In the second part of the series, the world is more and more escalating, fractions getting mad, gods being sad, Mars getting hot, poor protagonists stumbling around between mighty entities, and the big aha moment towards the end gives a satisfying conclusion.
In contrast to the Hyperion series, the a bit stronger focus on mythology and magic makes if more fantasy than science, although whenever the two clash, the old saying that advanced enough technology is indistinguishable from magic is true. There would be even a third way, the often underrepresented biopunk option, that could see much more use in hybrid works, because already simple seemingly fantasy magic vs technology, especially nano, makes incredible plot goals, characters´ motivations, suspense potential, possible, and biotechnological fueled Gaia fraction would be great extra to see.
I wish Simmons would have continued writing big science fantasy series, maybe even with a bit of horror, instead of starting to just keep writing standalone novels, often with close to no real fantastic elements as far as I see from the reviews and descriptions, just some magic and stuff. The real irony is that most of his newer novels seem to be even that bad that I won´t ever read them and that readers first confronted with whatever happened to one of the greatest authors will never touch his groundbreaking Hyperion and Ilium series, which is a true shame.
Nobody knows what might have happened here, I don´t know examples of authors who downed their rating in such a way, especially not in that order and timeline and never when they´ve once been so good. Bad first works are ok, everybody has to learn, but getting weaker and seemingly even below average?! Maybe the lonely writing in the cabin in the woods in the mountains concept has had some substantial change or something, I really can´t grasp it.
And that´s such a sad development, so please, go with the classic and forget the rest of his work, do as if it doesn´t exist.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
Rating: really liked it
Oh, frack it. I’ve started and deleted and restarted this review too many times already. Dan Simmons’
Ilium and
Olympos have left me speechless. (If you ask my wife, you’ll discover that’s a rare occurrence indeed.) I don’t think I can put together an entirely coherent review, much less something with any significant insight on the author’s ideas. So I’ll just share what I’m able to get out in a little solitary brainstorming session.
First of all, you have to realize that
Olympos isn’t merely the sequel to
Ilium; neither book is complete without the other and I must review them together. That bugs me insofar as I like the idea of a book standing on its own. Prequels and sequels and subsequesequels (that should be a word, yes?) are fine and dandy—indeed I encourage them so long as the author doesn’t screw it all up with some lazy cop-out—but each book, or at least the first book, should be able to stand on its own. Ian Tregillis’
Bitter Seeds is a good example of a book that clearly leaves the door open to be part of a larger series but stands on its own as a satisfying story. I can see how Dan Simmons wanted
Ilium to stand on its own, how he left the story at a good place to pause, but that’s all it was: a good place to pause.
Ilium by itself simply is not a satisfying read. And it’s too bad, really, because
Ilium is fucking brilliant—I was stunned by the breadth of imagination and creativity expressed while maintaining depth and quality of character—you’ll read nothing like it, I guarantee. But I give it four stars because it doesn’t stand on its own.
Olympos gets three stars because it also doesn’t stand on its own and because it’s just not as good as
Ilium, which seems to be the near-universal consensus if GR reviews are to be trusted.
(Admittedly, I gave five stars to Dan Simmons’ other epic work,
Hyperion , despite the fact that it doesn’t stand on its own.
Hyperion, however, is different, and someday when I review
Hyperion properly I’ll explain why.)
Second thing you have to realize is that
Ilium and
Olympos are long, grueling, complex, at times tedious ... oh, did I mention they’re long? Put together they are 1,664 pages in paperback or 1,296 in hardback. I read both books on the iPhone Kindle app and, let me tell you, it was A LOT of page turning. Still, I don’t have a problem with length if it’s needed and if the story is worth it. In this case, the main story arc is complex enough to justify a great deal of length by itself, but the author threw in sub-plots and side-plots that, although interesting, when all was said and done, served to
lengthen the books without adding significantly
adding to the books.
Now, having said all that,
Ilium and
Olympos were fascinating, original, creative, challenging, and, in the end, rewarding. I put a lot of time, and expended a good deal of mental energy, into reading and understanding these books and I’m glad I did. The author’s central idea around which he crafted the Ilium Universe is intriguing, to say the least, and presents some awesome opportunities for original world-building.
(view spoiler)
[Okay, I'm trying out the new embeded spoiler function here. Dan Simmons' idea is that, when the mental energy of some super-genius writer, like Homer or Shakespeare, is focused sufficiently, that energy pops off into a new universe where the writer's imagined story comes true. So, when Homer wrote the Iliad, a universe popped into existence full of Greeks and Trojans fighting and killing each other. When Shakespeare wrote The Tempsest, that also came true in its own universe. The characters from Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Tempest play central roles in Dan Simmons' story. (hide spoiler)] So doesn’t that mean they’re good books? Isn’t that why we read books? To be challenged and rewarded? To learn new ideas? And if we’re glad we read something, then what’s the problem?
I’ll tell you the problem: I’m stuck in Dan Simmons’ goddamn self-indulgent head-trip of a universe. That’s the fucking problem. The books were so loooong and so complex that, now that I’m done, I don’t know what to do with myself. I was roommates with the main characters, whether they be ancient human, old-style human, post-human, moravec, or god (it’s hard to explain ... you just have to read it) and, now that I’ve moved out, I’m finding it difficult to make new friends. I need a literary pallet cleanser. I need a new best friend. I need to move on. Any recommendations?
Rating: really liked it
(Contains spoilers towards the end)
This is my least favorite book.
It's not the worst book I've ever read. "Manos: The Hands of Fate" is perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's not my least favorite. It takes more than simple technical ineptness to rise (or sink) to the rank of my least favorite. A least favorite work needs to commit some special crime. Olympos' crime is that it took the plot threads of Ilium, one of the top two or three most creative and ambitious science fiction books I've yet encountered, and bungled them to an astonishing, almost insulting degree.
Ilium, as I've just said, is an incredible book. It's perhaps Simmons' most imaginative work so far, and that's saying something. In what other single book can you find posthumans posing as Greek gods on Mars, intelligent machines discussing literature on the moons of Jupiter, a legendary Greek hero hunting prehistoric mammals on the pampas of South America, and a society of pampered partiers to whom getting devoured by an Allosaurus causes scarcely more of an inconvenience than a bad hangover? And that's just the tip of that book's iceberg of wonderful and unlikely inventions. All of these unusual and fascinating things are packaged into three more or less distinct storylines, each of them exciting, purposeful, and compelling. I found the Caliban sequence towards the end to be a somewhat abrupt and strange change of pace, but I could live with it. When I put the book down, I could not wait to dive into the sequel.
It was bad.
Hockenberry's tale in Ilium was exhilarating. Hockenberry, a seemingly rather weak character, through deception, desperation, and pure ballsiness managed the manipulate the Greeks and Trojans into turning their war against the cruel posthuman Gods. He's not given anything nearly as interesting or compelling to do here. In fact, besides flying halfway to Earth with the Moravecs and then deciding to teleport back, I don't remember him doing much of anything notable. As I found his story in Ilium to be especially compelling, this was a real let down. Simmons instead chose to spend much of his time on the Greek side of things with Achilles and his campaign against the gods. Which is unfortunate, because Achilles really does not have the depth to carry such storyline weight. Olympos should have stuck with the continuing story arcs from Ilium rather than focusing so much time and energy on this.
But, it turns out, that's what Olympos does. It sidetracks. It goes on tangents, abandoning the story arcs that made Ilium so compelling. Take Harman's storyline, for example. For the most part, it is rather interesting, and actually does contribute to the story and our knowledge of the mythos of this world. However, near the end of his journey his story arc veers wildly off course to focus on a wrecked submarine containing black hole bombs. Where did that come from? How did that contribute in any way to the plot? What mysteries did that solve? With so many interesting possibilities in this wonderful setting, why did Dan Simmons choose this non-sequiter as the climactic moment for one of his main characters? It makes me want to tear my hair out!
That is another thing Olympos does: introduce things at the last minute. We finally meet Syxorax/Circe well towards the end of the book, after hearing so much about her. Her scenes do nothing to explain things, and in fact only serve to make it less clear exactly how the Odysseus of the Trojan war became the Odysseus that Harman and company encounter on Earth. Introducing an important character like that with only a small fraction of pages left makes things feel very cramped towards the end. In fact, the entire last section of the book felt very rushed and crampled; I was reading the half-hearted and generic epilogue almost before I even realized it.
I'm just getting started with the laundry list of things that frustrate me to no end about Olympos, but by now I'm getting tired of typing and you may well be tired of reading, so I'll keep the rest brief. Major conflicts peter out to nothing. Setebos, who seems to be the ultimate evil of this story, flees and vanishes without a fight. In the final showdown between Caliban and Daemen, nothing more climactic happens than Caliban uttering a few more of his inscrutable verses. Even Zeus' demise felt meaningless and disappointing. Childishly gross as well, honestly. And finally, most of the major mysteries put forth by Ilium never get solved. I still don't know how or why the Posts of Earth became the Gods of Olympos. I still don't know how Odysseus ended up on Earth. An explanation is put forth as to where the alternate ancient Greek Earth came from, but I found it extremely weak and unsatisfying. An afterthought. Dan Simmons throwing up his hands and admitting that he doesn't know.
So yeah, this is a rather long review. But, my frustration and contempt for this book has been stewing in me for years, and I needed the catharsis of getting it all out in a place where others could perhaps commiserate with me. Thanks for reading, and may all sequels you read be better than this one.
Rating: really liked it
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
I have tremendous problems with this book, not the least of which is that I wanted to enjoy it so badly. Simmons has a talent for writing good scenes and decent characters, but the overall structure of this book is so sloppy and disappointing that I can't help but feel cheated. I felt this way at the end of Rise of Endymion as well, and I'm starting to think that it's systemic to all of his epic sci-fi narratives. He comes up with a neat idea, creates hint that he's going to explain everything at the end, and after thousands of pages arbitrarily ends things without any sense of resolution.
What was this book about? What was the conflict? You begin thinking that it's about the gods of Olympos and the quantum disturbances they're creating that threaten the very existence of the solar system. Okay. But then it turns out that the Olympian gods are pawns of larger gods or Gods, including Setebos and Prospero. At this point I'm enjoying the direction of the book, thinking that events will hinge on what these larger gods are planning. But then, with a little more than 200 pages left in the combined 1700 pages of Ilium/Olympos, a heretofore unmentioned 2500-year-old Islamic submarine carrying 700 mini black holes becomes the focus. While the submarine is being taken care of, Setebos just... goes away. Zeus' out-of-nowhere desire to become the One God of the Universe is foiled by Achilles and Hephaestus begins his reign on Olympos, clearing up those pesky quantum disturbances from way back in the book as an afterthought.
There were so many unnecessary elements. Where was Simmons' editor in all of this? You could have cut out anything to do with Sycorax and Odysseus, and the narrative wouldn't have changed. You could have deleted almost everything going on with the Trojans and Achaens and the only thing that would have been affected would have been Achilles killing Zeus at the end. But that didn't matter either, because there's no reason for the gods' storyline either. They were post-humans, now they're gods, maybe there are larger forces at play. That's the sum total of the gods in the course of the story.
If I may, a partial list of things that are set up but never resolved:
-Why did Prospero want to elevate the post-humans to god status?
-If each universe is created by "singular genius," wouldn't the Greek gods already exist in the universe the Trojans and Achaens come from? In fact, why did the post-humans choose the Iliad to recreate at all?
-What the hell was the point of the Titan war at the end?
-Why did Zeus all of a sudden want to become the One God? There's no mention of this desire anywhere in the book.
-Who was the Quiet? It's mentioned for 1000+ pages, and then without showing up, everything is resolved when Setebos senses it coming and runs away.
-Why didn't Daeman and Caliban get to fight when they meet at the end?
-Why did Hephaestus put all of the humans into a blue tachyon beam on Ilium-Earth?
-Why were the voynix afraid of the Setebos egg?
I could go on. It seems like Simmons is okay with the explanation for any of these events being "for some reason." I guess it's deeper and more ambiguous that way. I don't think I'd be nearly this upset if the promise of Ilium/Olympos hadn't been so great. I gave the first book 5 stars, and I stand by that. The setup was incredible. The individual parts are amazing. But the whole is so utterly disappointing as to make me angry.
Rating: really liked it
I enjoyed the beginning of this book as it picks up where Ilium left off. Leading up to about the middle of the book the story line is interesting and exciting. And then wham! Stinky turds from there on out. The rest of the story is a classic example of everything I can't stand about bad science fiction.
No or very little insight into the science... The author just assumes you know what the *+!? he is talking about.
So many people and characters interacting in blurry loops of potential meaning that go nowhere. For example about 5/8 the way through you are introduced to a "historical" character named Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep! (Say that three times fast) I'm sorry but as a reader I'm so tired of being brutalized by authors with names like this. Crap like this even makes skimming irritating.
Characters reintroduced/reincarnated after having their heads bitten off - the only difference is now their boobs don't sag.
Chapter 91: You get to enjoy the back seat activities of two teenage characters you've never even been introduced to. Oh come on! If I wanted to read this kind of shit it's all over the internet or TV.
I LOVED Hyperion. This "series" isn't worth the paper it's printed on and unfortunately you'd give yourself a paper cut on your bunghole if you used this book properly.
Rating: really liked it
It's like Simmons wanted to write a sequel to Ilium but told himself he was going to make it the exact opposite in almost every way imaginable. This book was much darker in tone and much more violent then the first book but it still totally worked for me. None of what's in these pages should make any sense being an amalgamation of many different styles and influences as well as many characters, real and imagined, from history and literature but holy hell it is entertaining. Almost all the characters from Ilium are back with some taking on bigger roles while others have smaller but Simmons does a great job of explaining everything and tying up loose ends. Not EVERY single question is answered but the majority of them are, enough to satisfy me and help me "see" what was really going on, but since Simmons does not seem to be writing anymore (Omega Canyon has been in the works for years), I doubt there will be any sort of final book to wrap everything up nice and pretty. Regardless, these books both deserve five stars IMO.
Rating: really liked it
didn't answer anything.
the quite one didn't show up.
setebos just left.
islamophobia left a bad taste in my mind.
Rating: really liked it
Mind-blowing, adrenaline-pumping, world-expanding science fiction at its very best. Dan Simmons has big ideas and grand schemes, and he is never content to simply tell a story; no, he must weave it into our own reality in a seamless fashion, reaching backward and forward in time and literature. In this story (I’m grouping the previous book, Ilium, into the “story”), he brings together Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, quantum teleportation, terraforming, robots, and so much more. Each new bit that unfolds reveals new amazements, filled with both horror and wonder. I definitely recommend both Ilium and Olympos to any fan of science fiction. Or Greek/Trojan history. Or Shakespeare. Or ignore all of the connections and enjoy it for its own sake!
Rating: really liked it
If you ever plan to read the Ilium duo-logy then i recommend doing it back-to-back. I picked up Olympos 18 months after Ilium and experienced a great deal of confusion. My usual go-to Wikipedia let me down so i resorted to finding spoiler reviews, which gave me snippets of names, events and what went down. I would still need to re-read Ilium to fully appreciate Olympos.
It continues in the same vein as Ilium with the three story lines still separate but slowly making their way to the inevitable convergence; the Moravecs and Hockenberry are investigating the quantum disturbances emanating from old Earth, the Trojans and Greeks are fighting the Gods of Mount Olympos and Harman, Ada and the rest of the Old-Style Humans are fighting the Voynix who've turn against them.
Much like his other science fiction classic, Hyperion, Olympos is thoroughly entertaining and packed with philosophy, psychics, history and likable characters. My only gripe is the length as at least 100 pages could have been cut.
Rating: really liked it
Dan Simmons'
Olympos consists mainly in two threads. In the one, most of our various characters (Harman and Daeman, the moravecs, Odysseus, Achilles, et al) undertake long journeys in time and space, bringing them at an unbearably slow pace towards the future Earth. On these journeys, they endure various ordeals of little consequence, and a great deal of nothing occurs and is described at great length and in extraordinary detail by Simmons. In the other thread, we are treated to pages and pages of expository monologues from Prospero, Moira, Harman and others as Simmons attempts to explain
just what the fuck is going on and unload the enormous backstory omitted from the largely-incomprehensible
Ilium . This exposition is heavy-handed and clumsy. Explanations proffered for the events we have followed and wondered about for over a thousand pages vary from merely stupid to jaw-droppingly, cringe-inducingly idiotic. Simmons repeatedly "solves" mysteries he has been building since the first page of Ilium in a single tossed-off sentence or paragraph. His explanation of the voynix (complete with unnecessary and unconvincing connection to the Voynich Manuscript) in particular is not just unsatisfying but infuriating, while I actually had to put the book down and walk away after he tried to explain Setebos through World As Myth bullshit stolen from Robert Heinlein and mixed with New Agey quantum mysticism.
A word on mechanics. Simmons's prose is by and large effective, and deserves no special praise or blame. Where the story falls is in the construction of the plot, which in addition to its overall incoherence proceeds in fits and starts, with long stretches of inaction punctuated by world-changing events treated in brief. Both gods and machines regularly serve as
dei ex machinae, with characters brought together on the thinnest of pretexts to haul one another out of intractable jams. The novel's conclusion is full of these convenient escapes, plot holes and simple omissions, and several major threads are left unresolved.
Simmons' fascination with juvenilia is a distraction and regularly breaks the flow of the narrative, ranging from fart jokes and locker-room obscenities in the mouths of Greek gods to pervasive, explicit descriptions of sex (including rape and thousand-year-old entities in 16-year-old bodies) and of nude bodies, done throughout in a register not just clinical but often creepy.
Simmons' literary approach to science fiction does deserve praise and is something I would like to see more of. He has a strong familiarity with Homer, Shakespeare and Proust, although I was annoyed by many egregious errors in his use of Greek. Unfortunately, Simmons' sometimes-delightful festival of allusion is hamstrung by his failure to convincingly integrate the use of literary connections by his characters and in his backstory into the plot. Both literary allusion and descriptions of sexuality carry the sense that the author feels he is getting away with something, delivered with a smirk and a self-congratulatory chuckle. While his audaciously-literate story occasionally soars, it never reaches the joyful madness it could have had in the hands of a writer like Roger Zelazny (of whom more below) or Umberto Eco, someone who understood and reveled in its absurdity. Simmons takes himself far too seriously.
I mention Roger Zelazny because
Ilium and
Olympos really demand comparison to his classic, Hugo-winning
Lord of Light . There are so many similarities between the novels — the post-human, nanotech-infused gods recreating mythology, the elaborate literary allusions, the domed/forcefield-protected citadel on an inhospitable mountaintop, the oppressed, preindustrial populace reincarnating through "divine" machines, the war between gods and men, the final injection of Christianity into the conflict — that I cannot help but think Simmons is straight-up lifting from Zelazny.
So how do the two stories stack up? On my reading,
Lord of Light wins on virtually every dimension. It is much, much shorter, at about 300 pages against close to 1800 for
Ilium and
Olympos together. It is tightly plotted. Although like Simmons' epic the story is convoluted in time, it ultimately makes more sense and is far better structured. It is funnier and spends more time enjoying its own audacity. Zelazny's use of mythology (Hindu and Buddhist, in this case) and literature is woven more effectively into the structure of the novel than Simmons' bizarre combination of Homer, Shakespeare and nonsense. Zelazny is happy to handwave most of the science behind his creation, avoiding Simmons' ad-nauseum repetition of the words "quantum" and "Calabi-Yau", well-defined scientific terms whose meanings I don't believe Simmons understands. Above all, Zelazny embraced the lunacy he created.
Lord of Light is joyful, funny, occasionally insightful and always mad, with none of the cringing, self-conscious titillation of
Olympos. It's simply a better novel and a more enjoyable read.
Rating: really liked it
Welllll... I just can't get excited about this book now that it's over. After wading through 900 dense pages of literary influenced sci-fi, I feel a little cheated by where we ended up. Harman's journey into what was supposed to be the Earth's past (our future, I guess) was pretty dull considering the tantalizing hints Simmons drops. I love the idea, for example, that a Global Caliphate arose sometime in the 22nd Century, developed time travel and quantum spacetime science, and destroyed the bulk of civilization with a virus targeted at killing non-Muslims. That's comedy GOLD right there.
What's missing is the "so what?" Ultimately where our Earthen characters end up is so arbitrarily decided that it robs you of any real satisfaction for the closure. It seems that Simmons abandons his literary template for quick resolutions... and by page 800, you crave them anyway. It's ultimately unsatisfying if not for the allegorical comparisons between Shakespeare, Homer, Virgil, and other classic epic poets and those poets' effects on a future full of quantum teleportation, moravecs, and black holes. But as fun as that can be, it doesn't help move a plot anywhere.
Sadly, there was a ton of potential in this story. The fates of so many characters could have been much better handled to much more satisfying ends (WTF was up with that shit between Odysseus and Sycorax???). Oh well.
Rating: really liked it
A very ambitious science fiction duology (Olympos being the direct sequel to Ilium). (MILD SPOILERS AHEAD:) This is a multi-universe far-future epic involving Greek gods and Homeric heroes, Artificial Intelligences obsessed with Proust, nanotech-enhanced posthumans, a resurrected Professor of Classics from the 20th century that attempts to seduce Helen of Troy, anti-semitic killer robots, characters from Shakespeare that have come to life due to Quantum-wave parallel universe framistatwhatsits (apparently Quantum=Magic), bloody battles, and evil telepathic brain-monsters.
While fascinating and stimulating as a whole, the ending of this novel seems very hurried, with some rather anti-climactic climaxes, and is lacking in some promised explanations of certain phenomena, and has several characters act oddly with only some vague explanation.
I also want to repeat here an observation made by another reviewer whose name I cannot remember: almost all the female characters in the book are described primarily through the size, shape, and consistency of their breasts. Simmons has written books with excellent, strong female characters. But he's rather gotten into the spirit of the Heroic Age of Achilles , though there are a couple of female characters in the story that are three-dimensional, including, in my opinion, Helen of Troy.
I honestly wonder if Simmons went a bit mad during the writing of this book, as plot threads were incoherently unresolved, characters suddenly leave the story, foreshadowed entities never appear, and his politics enter the story out of nowhere, seemingly only so he can point out that Islamic Jihadists are evil. What does this have to do with posthumans, quantum gods, and Shakespeare? Nothing really. A disappointing mess. Perhaps it could be rescued if Simmons were to write a third book, but that doesn't seem likely.
Rating: really liked it
"Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens."Hour 1 of the 37 hour-long audiobook:
Not impressed with the narrator. Another 36 hours, sigh. The Greeks are a silly lot. Glad to have made it past the first few chapters and to Hockenberry.
Hour 2... mostly bored. The gods are not much of an improvement over the Greeks.
Hour 5. Oh my goodness, another 32 hours of this... Greek gods in a SF setting really do feel silly. Especially when this inept. And Simmons‘ description of women is very dated. Getting used to the narrator though. Although narrating female voices or doing various characters at all is not his strength.
This is going well.
Hour 16 or so. I have lost the will to live. There are some interesting bits and bobs, but mostly I am just massively bored. Queen Mab is fun, that‘s about it. Sorry, DNF around 46%.
I would actually quite like to know where this is all headed, but there seems to be plenty of reviews out there indicating that this is not going anywhere. Fast, slow, with the help of nuclear explosions or otherwise.
Rating: really liked it
This was too long, but so worth the long hours.
Rating: really liked it
I almost couldn't believe this book was written by the same author as Hyperion and Ilium. The various plots meandered while none of the big mysteries were answered. And where did all the misogynism come from? Simmons has always written such strong female characters. Suddenly Helen of Troy is calling herself a cunt and the formerly powerful/strong modern-day human female characters are suddenly crying and moody all of the time, while the men take front-seat on the adventures. And the Goddesses all become slutty, contemptible temptresses. The term "bitch" gets thrown around way too often by Achilles and the gods. Oh, and worst of all, there's a male character that is forced by a wizard to rape a sleeping female character in chryo-sleep because his ejaculate is the only way to wake her. And it's critical to the survival of the Earth for her to be awakened. So the dude wretches and forces himself to do the horrible deed. And hundreds of pages later at the end of the book the awakened female character has literally made no contribution to the plot. She pops into the picture and just walks around with an invisibility cloak on occasionally. What happened to her being the most important piece to human survival?
Then there are anti-Islam and anti-gay slurs in the last 1/3 of the book. Not to mention his absurd over-use of the term "interdict." I didn't count, but I bet it was in the hundreds. This book really disappointed me on a number of levels. I'll be very cautious before picking up anything new he writes.
