Books by author: Dan Simmons

Of the three recent "period" novels Dan Simmons has written, Black Hills is my favorite. Where Drood fell flat for me by being too Dickensian, and The Terror seemed to plod a bit here and there, Black Hills kept my attention throughout. The ending was a little too preachy, but the overall historical texture made up for it.

Mind Vampires! One of the best horror novels I have ever read. My mother-in-law even liked it!

A superb re-interpretation of the Vlad Dracula myth.

This is a bit of a departure for Simmons, whose novels typically are firmly in the world of fantasy. The Crook Factory, however, is a fictionalization of Ernest Hemingway's spying activity in Cuba during WWII, and so is at least loosely based in fact (not unlike DeLillo's Libra. True or not, the story is quite good, and Simmons's writing is solid, though not awe-inspiring.

This novel is typical of Simmons's work, but not among his best novels. He sustains the action and suspense skillfully and writes with a practiced ease, but he fails to break new ground here. His recent The Crook Factory is a better novel, and his classic novels Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are better places to start if you are new to Simmons's work.

In Drood, Dan Simmons weaves a narrative around documented events in the lives of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Simmons's research appears to have been quite thorough, and real-life details are exhibited in abundance, at least as far as a comparison to the relevant Wikipedia pages reveals. The novel is narrated by Collins, a contemporary of Dickens, and the style is dense (in stark contrast to most of Simmons's other work). Collins is an unreliable narrator, and his narrative is colored by his opium addiction. The end result is long-winded, sometimes confusing, and too often dull.

It seems that as Simmons has tried to become more of a "serious" writer, I have liked his work less. I have a lot of respect for what he tried to accomplish in Drood, but the end result does not align well to my taste. My previous comments about Simmons's deceptively simple and transparent prose do not apply here.

Endymion is the third of four proposed books in the Hyperion saga, and I had been wanting to start it for a while. Overall, this was an enjoyable, albeit quick, read. Without a doubt, Simmons has created an intriguing universe, with much relevance to our own. I can't wait for the next one.

For me, this book really tied together Hyperion. Things seemed to drag on a bit here and there, but in general, the flow was wonderful. I highly recommend this series and eagerly await the release of Endymion.

Another decent outing by Simmons. This one isn't as compelling as some of his earlier stuff, but it's a good quick read. Enjoyable, but lightweight.

In his day job, Dan Simmons writes brilliant speculative fiction, with near-perfect novels such as Ilium and Hyperion. But at night, he burns the midnight flame and cranks out greasy detective novels. Joe Kurtz is Simmons' Spenser, and Buffalo is his Boston. I can't quite fit in Hawk to this analogy, but if you've ever read any Robert B. Parker, you've already got the idea. The Joe Kurtz novels are "lightweight" in the same sense as Parker's, but a bit more bloody. There are no mindblowing ideas here, just gritty suspense, tense shootouts, and a handful of doublecrosses.

Hard as Nails may be the weakest of the Joe Kurtz novels — the twist ending isn't completely satisfying, and the Artful Dodger character is a little too surreal — but it's still ripping good entertainment. Simmons has never written a dull story, and his prose flows so well that it's easy to lose yourself in it for hours. This novel won't be nominated for any awards, but you could do a lot worse on a winter afternoon.

Another solid potboiler by Dan Simmons. One of the wonderful things for me about reading this novel was that so many vivid images jumped to mind from the previous installation in the Joe Kurtz series, Hardcase. I was shocked at how much I remembered visually, and I attribute this to Simmons' clever writing. Lightweight fun.

Simmons is one of my favorite authors, not because he's a brilliant wordsmith but because he consistently entertains in creative ways. Hardcase is not his best book by any stretch. ( The Crook Factory and Hyperion are my favorites among his work.) It's a potboiler with no literary pretense, and I'd guess that Simmons wrote it purely for fun. I read somewhere that he planned to release it under a pseudonym — I'm glad he didn't because his writing is always enjoyable.

I'm sorry to say that is my least favorite Dan Simmons novel. There are some good ideas, but the book is bogged down in really bad fake math-speak. Still worth a read, however.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this one. The writing was good and the story was interesting. My only complaint is that it seemed like a bunch of good short stories linked together by a rather tenuous plot. I was a bit startled when he launched into the I remember Siri section, which I had previously read as a stand-alone short story. Very interesting ideas, and good science fiction.

Absolutely loved it. Can't wait for the second half. Highly recommended.

Ilium is Simmons at his best: sprawling science fiction with good characters and a mind-boggling story arc. The primary action in Ilium takes place on Earth and Mars, some two millenia in the future, where entities who have fashioned themselves after the Greek gods are replaying the siege of Ilium from The Iliad. The cast includes the gods, the Greek heroes, some post-technological humans, a resurrected Iliad scholar, and a pair of autonomous robots, or moravecs. The humans don't know how to boil water, the moravecs contemplate Shakespeare and Proust, and Hockenberry (the scholar) plays out a Homer-erotic (sorry, couldn't resist) fantasy. It's a heady and intoxicating mix.

If Ilium were written by any other author, I'd worry that there were too many loose ends to be tied up in the second half of this epic (to be titled Olympos), but I'm entirely confident in Dan Simmons to follow through with a satisfying conclusion. Even as is, Ilium almost stands on its own. There are a few examples of deus ex machina, some of which Simmons points out as such, that I hope will be justified in the second book.

On a side note, it appears to me that the character Daeman is being set up as an everyman hero, and therein lies my chief criticism — admittedly a minor quibble — of Ilium. I am somewhat unsatisfied with his story arc so far. To date, his evolution has been a little bit unbelievable, and he hasn't been given very sufficient depth.

One final bit of praise: any novel that inspires its readers to study Homer, Shakespeare, and/or Proust, is to be celebrated. None of those sources are prerequisites for enjoying Ilium (lord knows, I've never read much of any of them), but I suspect they'd enrich the experience. Between now and the release of Olympos, I may well take a look at The Iliad and The Tempest.

Since the end of February, I have read just about everthing I could find by Dan Simmons. What a superb writer! Never before have I been so caught up by such a variety of work by a single author. All of his work is highly recommended.

I have been a Dan Simmons fan for more than a decade, and whenever he releases something new, I buy a copy right away. Until now, that has always worked out great. In this case, however, I paid $24 for a hardcover copy of a new Simmons book without noticing that it's a 100 page novella. I think that's a ridiculous amount of money for such a short work of fiction.

On the plus side, Muse of Fire is pretty good, as is nearly everything Dan Simmons writes. Here, Simmons extends his homage to the eternal greatness of Shakespeare (as evidenced by Shakespeare-quoting robots in Ilium). In fact, he turns the volume all the way up, suggesting that the works of Shakespeare are the pinnacle of human accomplishment.

Frankly, I find this view a bit depressing. Still, the image of a post-apocalyptic troupe performing Hamlet for our alien overlords to save the human race from extinction is at least amusing.

Because of the cost, this one is for die-hard fans only. Hopefully the upcoming Drood will offer quite a bit more bang for the buck. [Just noticed that Drood is in stock at Amazon — MUST ... ORDER ... NOW!]

One of the biggest problems with massive multi-book arcs is that, if you read them as they are published, you have to wait a long time between installments. In this case, it was nearly two years between books, and although I thoroughly enjoyed Ilium, I read nearly 100 books between the day I finished it and the publication date of its followup Olympos.

My opinion of Olympos suffers greatly as a result. I had lost my familiarity with the characters and the setting, and I found that in the second installment, I was never able to care much about the characters or the massively complicated web they inhabit. It took me more than two weeks to read the first 300 pages, in part because I was bored enough to put it down midway and read Harry Potter instead.

At any rate, I can report that the many loose ends at the end of Ilium are tied up in Olympos, but I don't have much else to say. Olympos is almost certainly a better book than I'm giving it credit for, but I'm massively disappointed in one of my favorite authors, and I'm going to be a lot more careful in the future to avoid starting multi-book series until they've all been published.

A wonderful character study about an ex-astronaut coming to terms with his place in the universe. I can't possibly say enough good things about the work of Dan Simmons. Afterthought: Especially good reading in preparation for seeing "Apollo 13" (a very well-made and engrossing movie — no mean feat when everyone knows the ending!).

A collection of short stories, including precursors to Carrion Comfort and The Hollow Man.

Dan Simmons is an amazing writer. His prose is consistently readable and fluid (though most of the time unremarkable); it is his imagination that stands out. I don't read very much science fiction, but I won't let myself miss any that this genre-hopping scribe produces.

It is a much stronger novel than Endymion, but not as good as the first two novels in the series, which can be read as a pair ( Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion). Many of the loose ends from the first three novels are resolved in the final novel of the series — most of them satisfyingly — but the main flaw is that too many of the plot twists have a deus ex machina quality to them. Raul Endymion is somewhat awkward as a hero, and both he and Aenea remain remarkably shallow characters for the 1000+ pages devoted to them. My main complaint is that Simmons devotes more energy to developing the planets that the characters visit than to the characters themselves. On the plus side, some of the characters from the first two novels do gain in depth during the final installment of this epic.

I have been told that Song of Kali is the best description of modern Calcutta ever written. Believe me, I'll be vacationing elsewhere. It's a great read, however, and very deserving of its critical acclaim.

I've said many times before that Dan Simmons is one of my favorite writers, partly because he hops genres with ease, but mainly because he writes highly descriptive but never obfuscated prose, and because his ideas are usually quite fresh.

Summer Sketches is autobiography. In it, Simmons writes about the places he traveled to during Summer vacation (while he was a teacher), the notebooks he kept, and how the experiences of visiting various places had an impact on the settings and atmospheres of several of his stories and novels. The book is filled with reproductions of his notebooks, including wonderful hand-drawn sketches of various settings and people, as well as long-hand notes. These reproductions are accompanied by extensive anecdotes and relevant excerpts from Simmons' fiction. It's a rare and wonderful insight into the craft of writing, and it should give hope to writers with day jobs.

If you are a writer or a Simmons fan and I've piqued your interest, I must now apologize. You are going to have a hard time finding a copy of this book at a fair price. I believe there were only five thousand copies printed, most of which were signed by the author. I got mine through an Amazon partner for about $35, but there aren't a lot of copies available at prices that low (many resellers are looking to get over $100). It's a slim volume, but for me it was well worth the price.

Dan Simmons's latest novel takes on the legendary Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition. For the first two-hundred pages, it's unclear whether it's a straight fictionalization of the ill-fated expedition or a work of fantasy. Simmons drenches his work in historical accuracy, and it's a wonderful read. From the history books (or, in my case, wikipedia ), we know that no one survived the expedition, that the crew was very likely stricken with lead poisoning from poorly-tinned canned food, and that they likely resorted to cannabalism at the end.

Simmons weaves all of these details into his reimagining of the expedition, and he adds a couple of twists that could (perhaps) be interpretable as hallucinations due to lead poisoning. Regardless of how firmly the novel is based in reality, it's a knuckle-whitening read. Good stuff.

A Winter Haunting is a sequel to Simmons' Summer of Night. It's not one of Simmons' stronger outings, but it isn't bad. Recommended to fans only. Newcomers should start with Hyperion or The Crook Factory to see what Simmons is capable of.

Imagine my surprise while browsing through Wordsworth's in Harvard Square, to find a collection of novellas by one of my favorite writers — a collection that had been published months before, but of which I had no knowledge. I stood there in confusion for a minute or so before running to pay at the register and making off with my unexpected treasure.

This particular collection is a long-awaited return to science fiction for Dan Simmons, and it is mostly very successful. I found three of the five novellas excellent, and the others okay (I didn't really get the one about the Jews in the distant future). The return to the Hyperion universe in one piece was a joy. The final piece, which revolves around the Russian space program, is particularly topical in these weeks after the space shuttle Columbia disaster.

Simmons is unlike most of the other authors I enjoy. His prose has a poetry of simplicity and is never shrouded in clever language. His writing is straightforward, but the simplicity is almost desceptive; there is depth, but you won't find it in wordplay. I don't recommend this collection as a starting point for Simmons' work — his novels are better — but Worlds Enough & Time will be a treat for long-time fans.