When Dan Simmons's 2003 novel Ilium begins, the Trojan War is in its ninth year, just as it is at the beginning of Homer's Iliad. The events that unfold upon the field of battle some time around 1200 BCE, however, are manipulated by gods, actually technologically enhanced post-humans, who live on Olympus Mons on Mars, and broadcast the war to the dwindling and degenerate surviving population of “old-style” humans who still inhabit the earth sometime in the late fourth millenium CE. The novel plays not with the well-established science fiction trope of the time paradox, as one might expect, but rather with the idea of narrative temporality itself. The text of the Iliad, often quoted, operates like destiny: the readers outside the text know how it ends, and so do some of the readers inside the texts, the “scholics” kidnapped from early twenty-first century Classics departments to report on the degree to which a given day's events do or do not map onto Homer's account. And when events begin to diverge from that account, when Achilles and Hector join forces to make war upon the meddling gods, all kinds of possibilities seem to open out: what if Hector didn't die? What if the city never fell? What if narrative time and destiny were not one and the same?