Dan Simmons Is Dead So It's Time To Read 'Hyperion' | Defector

"This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition."

"The best way I can describe Dan Simmons, who died last month at age 77, is as someone who got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September 11th. Not one but two of his future-set novels feature as major plot points a Global Islamic Caliphate. One of those, Flashback, is basically one long rant about how the American left would ruin the world if they gained power."

"Simmons played around with metafiction in ways that, if they didn't always work, were always interesting. His Ilium and Olympos feature a batshit conceit: What if future humans turned themselves into the literal Greek Gods and moved to Mars and reenacted the Iliad and resurrected scholars from our time to document it? And also there are robots from Jupiter, and Shakespeare's Caliban is real."

Dan Simmons, who died at 77, produced significant contributions to science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres, with works like Summer of Night, Carrion Comfort, and The Terror ranking among the best in their categories. However, his later career was marked by increasingly problematic political messaging, particularly in novels featuring Global Islamic Caliphates and critiques of American leftist politics. Earlier works also contained racist elements. Despite these serious flaws, Simmons demonstrated innovative storytelling techniques, including metafictional experiments in novels like Ilium and Olympos, which featured imaginative conceits combining Greek mythology, Mars colonization, and Shakespearean elements. His work presents the challenge of appreciating literary merit while acknowledging deeply objectionable ideological content.

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