Dan Simmons (1948-2026)

Sad news from the SF&F+Horror world: Dan Simmons passed away this past Saturday, apparently of a stroke at age 77.

A family obituary has been posted here: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/longmont-co/daniel-simmons-12758871

That’s worth a read, with some background of his early days that you won’t find on his WIkipedia page. Which by the way is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons

I first read Hyperion many years ago, I think around 1995. It won the Hugo award for Best Novel in 1990, beating out offerings from Orson Scott Card, Poul Anderson, Sheri Tepper and George Alec Effinger. The sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, was nominated the next year, but lost to Bujold’s The Vor Game.

Hyperion went on to become a classic and a staple of modern SF&F. Its use of horror elements, such as the monstrous Shrike, presaged a modern resurgence of the horror genre and initiated what we might, in his honor, call a "bleed effect" of horror into the wider genre. But the real gem of the story was its wonderful extrapolation of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Simmons used the stories of the ship's occupants as a framing narrative for the group's pilgrimage to the mysterious Time Tombs. Each traveler's story acts as a short story within the larger narrative, creating a fascinating layered effect.

But the odd thing (to me anyway) is that I didn’t hear much from Simmons after that. He did write four novels in that series, ending in 1997, but none of the sequels really seemed to match up with intrigue of the first one. They had a sort of Poul Anderson feel to them, at least for me. Good stuff, but not really groundbreaking, and I lost track of him for several years.

I perked up again with the release of Ilium and Olympos. It felt like a return to the form of Hyperion, with the conceptual incorporation of Homer’s stories into the mix and setting characters amidst a Trojan War that somehow now included nano-technology and quantum theory. A fun and interesting idea that in the end didn’t quite work for me, but I sure loved the ideas.

I never returned to Simmons, but I noticed that he did achieve some mainstream notoriety recently with the adaptation of his 2007 horror novel The Terror. This was a retelling of the story of the lost Arctic expedition of John Franklin in 1845, with horror elements introduced to explain the “lost” part. I’ve not read or seen this, but I’ve heard it’s really good.

Horror has just never been my thing, but that adaptation is on my to-watch list if it ever shows up on an add-free subscription service other than AMC’s rather pointless one. It’s pretty hard to argue with that cast.

Simmons’ legacy is hard to pin to a single shelf, and that is exactly the point. At his best, he wrote science fiction that remembered it could still be literature without losing any of its momentum, and horror that worked as more than just a cheap jolt or adrenaline. Hyperion is the clearest proof: a book that borrows an old, story-within-a-story architecture and uses it to smuggle in something raw and nightmarish, until the Shrike feels less like a monster-of-the-week and more like a symbol for the way the future can threaten to devour the present.

Even for readers like me who drifted away from his later work, it is easy to see the shape of his influence. He helped make it normal for SF to wear its literary lineage openly, and for mainstream genre fiction to let horror “bleed” across the borders and deepen the emotional stakes. Whether you came to him for the pilgrimage, the myths, or the fear, you came away reminded that the speculative imagination can still be beautiful, unsettling, and ambitious at the same time.

That’s an impressive legacy, if you ask me.