So the portrayal of Arabs in this book is not nuanced at all. It just gets more ridiculous and stereotypes. Strike one.

By the end of this book, the various plot elements have come together, but the resolution feels rather rushed and arbitrary. There's a lot of questions left. That is fine if the answers the reader can come up with on their own are satisfying. But I couldn't come up with any sane answers, and the ones hinted at in the text are just goofy as hell.

This is shame. I've been a big fan of Simmons since I read his Hyperion/Endymion books, which I think are a truly great epic. I was really hoping that these books would live up to that legacy, but instead Olympos was such a mess that I'm seriously wondering if I want to read any of Simmons's future work.

I'm really not sure what happened here, it's just a train wreck tainted by some nasty racism. But even without the racist elements, it'd still be a train wreck.