Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons (born April 4, 1948 in Peoria, Illinois) is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion. The other novels in this series, which is known as the Hyperion Cantos, are Endymion and The Rise of Endymion.

He spans genres such as science fiction, horror and fantasy, sometimes within the same novel: a typical example of Simmons' ability to intermingle genres is Song of Kali (1985), winner of World Fantasy Award. He is also a respected author of mysteries and thrillers.

Biography

Simmons received a B.A. in English from Wabash College in 1970, and, in 1971, a Masters in Education from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He subsequently worked in elementary education until 1989.

He soon started to write short stories, although his career did not take off until 1982, when, through Harlan Ellison's help, his short story "The River Styx Runs Upstream" was published. His first novel, Song of Kali, was released in 1985.

Horror fiction

Summer of Night (1991) recounts the childhood of a group of pre-teens who band together in the 1960s to defeat a centuries-old evil that terrorizes their hometown, Elm Haven, Illinois.

This novel, which was praised by Stephen King, is similar to King's It, in its focus on small town life, the corruption of innocence, the return of an ancient evil, and the responsibility for others that emerges with the transition from youth to adulthood.

In the sequel to Summer of Night, A Winter's Haunting, the protagonist, now an adult, revisits his boyhood town to come to grips with mysteries that have disrupted his adult life.

Soon after this novel, Simmons, who had written mostly horror fiction, began to focus on writing science fiction.

Science fiction

Simmons became famous in 1989 for Hyperion, winner of Hugo and Locus Award for the best science fiction novel. This novel deals with a space war, and is inspired in its structure by Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

From the beginning, Simmons showed himself to be one of the few genre authors who possessed plot developing abilities, and he proved able to write high-level prose that is derived from his familiarity with the classics. Many of his works have similarly strong ties with literature:

Carrion Comfort derives its title and many of its themes from a Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem
"Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living In Hell", a 1988 short story lampooning televangelists included in Prayers to Broken Stones, is about a brief return to earth by the title character, an inhabitant of Dante's Inferno
The Hollow Man (1992) is influenced by Dante's Inferno and T.S. Eliot
A short story from 1993, "The Great Lover", is inspired to the World War I War Poets.
In The Fall of Hyperion, John Keats appears as one of the main characters.
His Ilium cycle is inspired by Homer's works.
The character of Ada and her home Ardis Hall in the Ilium cycle are inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's novel A Family Chronicle, which was Nabokov's foray into the science fiction genre and alternate history.

In January 2004, it was announced that the screenplay he wrote for his novels Ilium and Olympos would be made into a film by Digital Domain and Barnet Bain Films, with Simmons acting as executive producer. Ilium is described as an "epic tale that spans 5,000 years and sweeps across the entire solar system, including themes and characters from Homer's The Iliad and Shakespeare's The Tempest." In July 2004, Ilium received a Locus Award for best science fiction novel of 2003.