Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is an American science fiction and horror author whose Hyperion — a novel structured as a Canterbury Tales of the far future — won the Hugo Award and is considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of the twentieth century.

Dan Simmons published his first novel, Song of Kali (1985), a horror novel set in Calcutta, which won the World Fantasy Award. He then spent several years teaching elementary school while publishing short fiction before Hyperion (1989) transformed his career. The novel borrows its structure from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: seven pilgrims traveling to the world of Hyperion, home of the mysterious and terrifying Shrike, each tell their story on the journey. The stories — a priest’s account, a soldier’s, a poet’s, a scholar’s, a detective’s, a consul’s — vary wildly in tone and genre, from space opera to horror to romance to political thriller.

The Hyperion Cantos continues with The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1996), and The Rise of Endymion (1997), extending and concluding the universe across two separate narrative arcs. The series is remarkable for its scope — encompassing artificial intelligence, time dilation, the Catholic Church in space, and the long-term consequences of human expansion across the galaxy — and for the quality of individual sequences that have become canonical in the genre.

Simmons has also written literary horror — The Terror (2007), a historically grounded novel about the doomed Franklin Expedition that becomes supernatural — and literary fiction. Drood (2009) is narrated by Wilkie Collins and is about Charles Dickens’s final years. The Terror is perhaps his most accessible single novel and the one most likely to appeal to readers who don’t primarily read science fiction. Hyperion remains his masterwork.