Ilium

Meanwhile, I'm reading Dan Simmons' Ilium as a reward for finishing the term. I admire his serious science fiction because, among other things, he is so ambitious with the conceptual backstory. In his Hyperion Cantos, he heavily used Chaucer and Keats, and Shelley, even while telling a story about a far future. In Ilium he uses Homer's Iliad, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Proust. While weaving a plot including neutrino streams, nanotechnology, quantum singularities, and post-Singularity humanity. It's a fun and challenging read. I've got the sequel, Olympos, but I will have to get to the Iliad and the Aeneid before I start on more SF.