The Last Odyssey (Sigma Force #15) - James Rollins Page 0,153

that way.

Author’s Note to Readers: Truth or Fiction

We come to the end of another odyssey. Maybe not one sung by ancient Greek choruses, but hopefully one that entertained well enough. In the past, Homer had mixed facts and fiction. He told the tale of the historical fall of the Troy, but he layered in myth and magic. Unlike that great bard of yore, I will attempt in these last pages to separate the truth from fiction found in my story, while perhaps letting a little light into my own writing process.

Let’s start with the two bibles that I found immensely valuable in crafting this tale. Of course, countless other volumes were consumed, picked apart, and studied, but these two books I found not only informative and inspiring but also damned good reads. So, I encourage everyone to check them out.

The first delves deep—and I do mean deep—into the mythos of what lies underground, why we look there, and why it continues to fascinate us. I read it not intending to use it as a research text, but simply from my love of caving. But in the end, it moved me enough to write this novel and challenged me enough to write it better. What more could anyone ask? Please check it out:

Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane

I picked up the second bible for research and references, but I got lost in the wonderful writing, and was awed by the concept, and ultimately I found this book instrumental to the core of this novel. Still, my story barely scratches the surface of ancient technology, the blend of myth and science, that can be found in the following work. If you would like to know much more about the historical details and speculations raised in my novel, do read this book:

Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, by Adrienne Mayor

That said, let’s do look deeper into the history raised in The Last Odyssey. And we’ll start all the way back in the Greek Dark Ages (from 1100 to 800 B.C.), what has been called the Homeric Age.

Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey

I hinted at the true history buried in the myths of these two epic poems at the start of the novel. But I was not the first to explore that line between fact and fiction found in those stories. One of the earliest was the Greek historian Strabo, who in his travelogue of the ancient world—his multivolume masterwork Geographica (from 7 A.D.)—sought to do what I did in my story: to try to map out Odysseus’s fateful journey across the Mediterranean. Much of the speculation raised in this book (with the exception of the role of tectonics) came from Strabo’s texts.

World War Zero

Archaeologists and historians readily accept that there was a major Mediterranean-wide war that led to the downfall of three major Bronze Age civilizations: the Greek Myceneans, the Egyptians, and the Hittite kingdom of Anatolia. This conflict has been dubbed “World War Zero.” It was a corner of this war that Homer related in his twin epics. What remains a mystery that continues to today is: who attacked those civilizations and brought about the Greek Dark Ages? The prevailing opinion is that it was the enigmatic Sea People, but even their identity remains clouded in speculation. Some believe they were a coalition of various tribes, others that they belonged to another Anatolian kingdom called the Luwians. I, of course, have my own opinion on the subject, which is shared in this novel.

The next section I’d like to tackle revolves around ancient knowledge, technology, and science. Let’s break it down into pieces.

Banū Mūsā brothers and Ismail al-Jazari

The Islamic Golden Age ran from the ninth to the thirteenth century. The three Banū Mūsā brothers were scientists and engineers at the beginning of that age, and Ismail al-Jazari continued on their tradition of innovation and design near the end. As related in this novel, the Banū Mūsā brothers did indeed preserve and build upon knowledge that was nearly lost following the fall of the Roman Empire. Though the fourth Banū Mūsā brother—Hunayn—is my own creation, much of his actions, interests, and skills were patterned after the three historical figures. It is also known that Ismail al-Jazari—who is sometimes referred to as one of the “fathers of robotics”—was greatly influenced by those three brothers’ work. As was someone else—

Leonardo da Vinci

Volumes of work have been written about Da Vinci, but one of the best is Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci,