Taking the events & characters of the Iliad as his jumping- off point Dan Simmons has created an epic of time travel & savage warfare. Travellers from 40 000 years in the future return to Homers Greece & rewrite history forever their technology impacting on the population in a godlike fashion. This is broad scope space opera rich in classical & literary allusion from one of the key figures in 1990s world SF. Ilium marks a return to the genre for one of its greats.