This downshifting from hyperbole to humbling everydayness is sometimes deliberately funny, wittily changing only a single word ('Friends don't let friends teleport drunk') or even part of a word ('Star Truck'). The comparison of a sound to 'a boy running a stick along the rib cage of a skeleton' makes the boy as real as the sudden skeleton, which pops up where we are expecting a picket fence. 'Achilles doesn't like being dead' is, for a reader who has been living with Achilles for hundreds of pages, not just an abstract truism about death but a compressed expression of the particularity of one man's confrontation with his own mortality. Since the sense of astronomic scale is measured against the yardstick of an individual human life, the epic effect does not work without the detailed foregrounded portraiture of individual lives, lifespans, and deaths.

The wonder is also linguistic - a spaceship is a 'matte-black fractal bat', the human mind 'a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront' - but it doesn't always depend on polysyllables or scientific precision it can sometimes spring from the contrast between the simplicity of the words and the size of their meaning: 'On the cart is a cage. No one knew why the skulls were there, only that they always had been.' This sense of scale, temporal and spatial, contributes to the sense of wonder that, more than any other genre, epic generates. Teenage sex in the back seat of a car, fumbling with 'the round snap-stud' of a garter, co-exists with a vision of the river Seine 'dried up and paved with human skulls. Like so many epics and space operas, Olympos measures individual lives against a cosmic scale. Sci-fi wants it all, and craves the sorts of complication that produce an opening sentence such as: 'Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens.'

Like its predecessor Ilium, Dan Simmons's new novel combines the historical and literary Trojan war with biotechnology, nano-engineering, quantum physics, geology, astronomy, sex, politics, and religion. Science fiction is the most ambitious of contemporary literary genres.

Dan simmons ilium review