Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons is an author.
Dan Simmons taught elementary school for eighteen years while writing at night, and Harlan Ellison pushed him into publishing. He then won the World Fantasy Award for a horror debut, the Hugo for a space opera built on Chaucer and Keats, and went on to write historical fiction about the Franklin expedition. Very few writers move between genres that far, and fewer do it that well.
Books (15)
- Summer of night (1991)
- Worlds Enough & Time (2002)
- The Living Dead (2008)
- Drood (2009)
- The Terror (2007)
- Olympos (2005)
- Ilium (2003)
- The Rise of Endymion (1997)
- Endymion (1996)
- Children of the night (1992)
- The Fall of Hyperion (1990)
- Carrion comfort (1989)
- Phases of Gravity (1989)
- Hyperion (1989)
- Song of Kali (1985)
Where to start with Dan Simmons
Hyperion is the one, a Canterbury Tales structure applied to science fiction, and it is still the best thing he wrote. The Fall of Hyperion completes it. The Terror is the Franklin expedition novel and the best entry point for non-genre readers. Song of Kali is the World Fantasy winner, Carrion comfort is the enormous horror one, and Ilium takes on the Iliad.
The Hyperion Cantos
Four books built on Keats, plus the Iliad pair that does the same trick with Homer. Hyperion is the one to read; the sequels expand the universe enormously and never quite recapture the pilgrim-tale structure that made the first work.
The horror and historical novels
The other half of the career, and for many readers the better half. Song of Kali took the World Fantasy Award, Carrion Comfort is seven hundred pages of psychic vampires, and The Terror puts the Franklin expedition in the ice with something following it.
Dan Simmons on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: Hyperion Cantos: The Complete Guide to Dan Simmons' Far-Future Epic