RIP Dan Simmons

Sci-fi and fantasy and horror and everything else author Dan Simmons passed away this week, and I've been seeing a lot of people on social media talking about his works that had an effect on them. One or two have mentioned his drift rightwards, but most focused on his Hyperion Cantos, which are the books that put him on the map for me.

I first encountered the series in the pages of Bonelli's Almanacco della Fantascienza, a yearly digest they did around their SF character Nathan Never (Dylan Dog had a horror almanac and Martin Mystere had a mystery almanac), which included articles about notable books and movies and other stuff of interest to Italian science fiction readers. One year the almanac mentioned the Fall of Hyperion, the second in the series, but when I picked it up (in English) I was confused by everything and didn't go back to the series for a while.

When I did, I started with the first book, Hyperion, which became one of my foundational texts as a science fiction reader, up there with Foundation and 2001 and Dune and the Hitchhiker's Guide. I even wrote a blog more than ten years ago about how good the first paragraph is at setting the scene and introducing the themes that float throughout the entire series. The cover of Hyperion is so distinctive that I notice it whenever I see it on someone's shelves, for example in some of Sal Khan's videos on Khan Academy.

Hyperion blew my mind when I finally read it, and Fall of Hyperion did it again when I was ready for it. Endymion and Rise of Endymion broke my heart when I got to those. Most of the discussions of the Hyperion Cantos I've read this week indicate that the last two books weren't as well-received as the first, but I remember them being great, and I remember my dad loved them too. In any case, the Hyperion Cantos overall had enough of an effect on me that I went out and read the book by Teilhard de Chardin, whose philosophy plays such an important part in the story (less of a foundational text for me, but then, I've never really grokked philosophy).

After those books, I was ready to follow Dan Simmons anywhere, and was excited to pick up Ilium. Some of it felt derivative of the Hyperion books, but it had a similar mix of philosophical and literary DNA powering it, and I frequently think about Simmons's portrayal of the Homeric Greeks. Unfortunately Olympos wasn't as successful, in part because by then Simmons had been radicalized by 9/11 - his depiction of the modern world ending because of an Islamist plot felt thin even in 2005 or 2006, or whenever I read it.

It then seemed he'd gone even further down that rabbit hole, when I read a passage from a newer book of his that seemed to imply that Texas was free because they paid full price for healthcare. I'll admit that put me off reading any of his stuff after Olympos, just like Orson Scott Card's increasingly unhinged rants did (at around the same time).

I didn't only read Simmons's books. As I mentioned in my previous blog about him, I spent a lot of time in the 2000s reading his Writing Well columns, now sadly unavailable because his website is no longer up. He did a good job in those columns of deconstructing the craft of writing, and while some of the advice hasn't served me as well as I'd have liked, I still live by his maxim, taken from F Scott Fitzgerald, that you should read at least six top-flight authors every year. I've managed it every year since I moved back to California, and in that time I've also read six non-male SFF authors, in the same spirit, i.e. to broaden my horizons.

While I'm less interested in Dan Simmons's political screeds, I've been thinking it would be nice to revisit the Hyperion books, and to go back to some of his earlier horror books, which seem to evoke the same spirit as early Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. I've heard good things about those, too, so here's hoping.

And even apart from that, I'll always have those indelible images from the Hyperion books he painted: the Consul in his spaceship at the start, the story of Sal and Rachel Weintraub, the world tree ships, and so much more.