A short life of the author
Dan Simmons (b. 1948) was born on 4 April 1948 in Peoria, Illinois. He studied English at Wabash College and the Washington University MFA programme, and spent eighteen years as an elementary school teacher in Colorado before becoming a full-time writer.
Life and Career
Song of Kali (1985) — a horror novel set in Calcutta — won the World Fantasy Award and announced his willingness to go to dark places. Carrion Comfort (1989) — a massive vampire novel about psychic parasites who feed on human violence — was equally ambitious.
Hyperion (1989) was the masterwork. Structured as a Canterbury Tales in space, it follows seven pilgrims travelling to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, each telling their story — the priest’s tale, the soldier’s tale, the poet’s tale, the scholar’s tale, the detective’s tale, the consul’s tale. Each tale is written in a different genre and style (horror, military SF, cyberpunk, literary fiction), and together they build a portrait of a far-future civilisation in crisis. It won the Hugo Award and is one of the genre’s highest achievements. The Fall of Hyperion (1990) concluded the story; Endymion (1996) and The Rise of Endymion (1997) extended the universe.
Ilium (2003) and Olympos (2005) — in which posthumans re-enact the Trojan War on a terraformed Mars while sentient robots from the outer solar system read Proust — were perhaps the most literarily ambitious science fiction novels of the 2000s.
The Terror (2007) — a historical horror novel about the lost Franklin Expedition, in which the crews of HMS Erebus and Terror are stalked across the Arctic ice by a supernatural creature — was a critical and commercial success, adapted by AMC (2018).
Major Works and Themes
Simmons writes about the intersection of literary tradition and genre imagination. His fiction is deeply allusive — to Keats (Hyperion), Homer (Ilium), Dickens (Drood), and Proust — and his ambition is to demonstrate that genre fiction can engage with the Western literary canon on equal terms.
Key Works
- Hyperion (1989)
- The Fall of Hyperion (1990)
- Carrion Comfort (1989)
- The Terror (2007)
- Ilium (2003)
Collecting Simmons
Song of Kali (1985, Bluejay Books) — his debut — brings $50–$200.
Hyperion (1989, Doubleday Foundation) — the Hugo winner — brings $100–$400 for fine firsts.
The Terror (2007, Little, Brown) brings $30–$100. Simmons signs at conventions.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carrion Comfort A massive horror epic about 'mind vampires' — beings who feed not on blood but on the psychic energy released by violence, manipulating humans into killing and dying for their entertainment, a conspiracy spanning from the Holocaust to Hollywood to the highest levels of government. | 1989 | Dark Harvest | English |
| Drood A massive literary thriller narrated by Wilkie Collins, who becomes obsessed with Charles Dickens's claim to have met a spectral figure called Drood in the aftermath of a real 1865 railway disaster — an unreliable narrator spiraling into laudanum addiction, jealousy, and possible madness. | 2009 | Little, Brown | English |
| Endymion Set 274 years after The Fall of Hyperion — Raul Endymion is resurrected from death to protect a child named Aenea, the daughter of a previous pilgrim, who threatens the Pax (a theocratic empire built on resurrection technology controlled by the Catholic Church and the TechnoCore). | 1996 | Bantam | English |
| Hyperion A Canterbury Tales structure set in a far-future interstellar civilization — seven pilgrims travel to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion, each telling the story of their connection to the terrifying Shrike, a creature that impales victims on a tree of metal thorns. | 1989 | Doubleday | English |
| Ilium A wildly ambitious novel interweaving three storylines: resurrected scholars on Mars observe post-humans reenacting the Trojan War, 'old-style' humans on a depopulated Earth live in ignorant luxury, and sentient robots from Jupiter's moons set out to investigate quantum disturbances near Mars. | 2003 | Eos | English |
| Olympos The conclusion to Ilium — the Trojan War spirals into chaos as Achilles allies with Hector, the old-style humans on Earth face extinction from voynix attacks, and the moravec robots discover that the quantum disturbances threaten the fabric of reality across multiple universes. | 2005 | Eos | English |
| Song of Kali Simmons's debut novel and World Fantasy Award winner — an American poet travels to Calcutta to retrieve a manuscript by a Bengali poet who supposedly died years ago, and is drawn into a nightmare world of the Kali cult, culminating in an act of violence that destroys his family. | 1985 | Bluejay Books | English |
| Summer of Night A coming-of-age horror novel set in rural Illinois in 1960 — five boys discover that their school harbors an ancient evil connected to the Borgia Bell in the belfry, a malevolence that has been feeding on children for over a century and is now awakening to full power. | 1991 | Putnam | English |
| The Abominable A climbing thriller set on Everest in 1925 — a team of mountaineers searches for a missing lord's body on the North Face, but discovers evidence of Nazi occultists and something ancient in the high Himalayan ice, blending historical mountaineering detail with supernatural menace. | 2013 | Little, Brown | English |
| The Fall of Hyperion The conclusion to the Hyperion story — as the seven pilgrims confront the Shrike at the Time Tombs, an interstellar war engulfs the Hegemony, and the true nature of the TechnoCore's plan for humanity is revealed through the eyes of a cybrid recreation of John Keats. | 1990 | Doubleday | English |
| The Rise of Endymion The final volume of the Hyperion Cantos — Aenea, now grown, teaches humanity the 'language of the dead' (a means of sharing empathy across space and time), threatening both the Pax and the TechnoCore, while Raul Endymion narrates from a Schrödinger cat box where he awaits execution. | 1997 | Bantam | English |
| The Terror A historical horror novel based on the real lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror through the Arctic Northwest Passage in 1845 — the crews face starvation, scurvy, lead poisoning, madness, and something on the ice that is hunting them, something connected to the Inuit spirit world. | 2007 | Little, Brown | English |