Those bad ideas really only emerge to destroy a book in the novel Flashback, which is execrable. Books like The Terror, Drood, Black Hills are all very original, interesting and highly readable. They’re too long, but that seems to go with the territory.
Somebody hasn’t read Ilium/Olympos.
Or they have, and they don’t think bad ideas destroy those books.
I think those were the only books I’ve ever been angry that I read. Like, I stopped 50 pages from the end and was mad I’d wasted so much time reading the preceding 1800 (not a typo, if anyone is wondering).
Summer of Night remains an excellent horror novel, however.
That’s Flashback for me.
Simmons has a gift for imagining unusual scenarios and grounding them in history or literature in an interesting way. So Hyperion is a ghost story that takes the form of Canterbury Tales. Drood is a ghost story set against the career and literature of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. The Terror is a ghost story set against the historical events of the Franklin expedition to the Arctic. The background for Ilium is obvious.
The digressions into history or literature make the books very long but are usually interesting in their own right, especially for readers who don’t know very much about the source material. I doubt scholars of Shakespeare or close readers of Proust are going to learn anything new from Ilium, but it seems fresh and interesting to the rest of us.
But it doesn’t always work. In The Fifth Heart, for example, Simmons pairs fictional Sherlock Holmes and real Henry James as an unlikely pair of detectives chasing a conspiracy. On their first meeting, Simmons has Holmes confess to James that he thinks his whole life and existence is actually a fiction. He points out all the anomalous elements in what he knows from his life: the way his own history keeps changing, how Watson’s war wound moves from one place to another, how Watson is sometimes married and sometimes not and apparently married to two different women. James is intrigued by the mad idea that his interlocutor believes himself not to be a real person, and that is why he agrees to go along with him. But then Simmons never does anything else with the idea. It just disappears and the rest of the book is a straight ‘Holmes and Watson’ story with James in the role of Watson, filled of course with digressions about James’s own life and history, and with a resolution deeply based in the Holmes canon.
The result is, for me, often a very good — or at least interesting — book with a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion.
Honestly, I think the above description can be applied to about 95% of Simmons’s work. He’s a lot like Stephen King in that his concepts, characters, and writing are great… but he just can’t manage to stick the landing.
Agree. I certainly enjoy the books, though he absolutely needs a more aggressive editor. Also like King!
I read The Abominable recently. Very well written, though you have to enjoy long technical sections about mountain climbing. And ends quite adequately.
Thanks for this write up! Very beautifully put. I’ve known about Hyperion since I was a teenager, and I recently read through the free Kindle sample (I sometimes do this to ‘bookmark’ books I want to come back to). At risk of waxing mystical… this book has an aura about it. I don’t think I’ll be able to avoid it forever.
Thank you for resurrecting this thread. This review was really entertaining to re-read.
Btw, it’s funny reading the part about Tom not enjoying the Detective story with Dan Simmons writing like Gibson. Funny because I felt the same way, and then funny because the sequel, Fall of Hyperion, is almost all set in the Gibson/Detective Cyberpunk story, which was the least appealing one in Hyperion.
That’s exactly where I got stalled reading the next book! There was some extended cyberpunk detective sequence and I remember thinking, “What in the world is this bullshit…?” before running out of steam and bailing. I intend to give it another go, but I’ll want to re-read Hyperion first.
I enjoyed Hyperion and wished Simmons had left it alone. I read the sequel and disliked it enough to give up on Simmons as a writer. I can’t even remember anything about Fall of Hyperion other than the Keats character.
I have Drood by Simmons picked up in a sale. I may read that someday but man, Fall really turned me off. Hyperion was great as a standalone but he ruined it with sequels. Can’t blame him. I’m sure it was money on the table waiting to be scooped up.
It gets so much worse after Fall too.
Like some of the worst shit I’ve ever read.
To each their own I guess. While Hyperion is obviously the masterwork of the bunch, I really enjoyed Fall and the Endymion books.
Same. Simmons has written few genuinely bad books, at least among the works I’ve read.
I also enjoyed them all. Hyperion is definitely the best, but I also really remember being very pleased with the Endymion books, though I will confess they have faded in my memory over time, so I don’t remember them, even though I remember Hyperion.
I haven’t read anything from him after his conversion to fanatical conservatism in the wake of 9/11. I’ve been worried it would inevitably impact his work, even if only subconsciously.
I think there is some good stuff post-Flashback, which was 2011. The Abominable is certainly readable, as is The Fifth Heart, and neither seems to be polluted with any overt, shit-crazy politics.
Good to know, I’d been wondering but finding someone trustworthy to make that assessment is a little difficult when it comes to internet reviews. It’s helpful to have it from a reliable source.