The Art of Assimilation: A Profile of Dan Simmons by Dorman T. Shindler

The following article orginally appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, July/August 1996. Dorman T. Shindler is the Science Fiction columnist for the Des Moines Sunday Register and a contributing writer/reviewer for the Dallas Morning News, the Denver Post, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel the San Antonio Express-News the St. Petersburg Times the Bloomsbury Review and The Armchair Detective. The review is Copyright © 1996 by Mr. Shindler. Many thanks for this article go out to Erinyes and D.T. Schindler

The Art of Assimilation: A Profile of Dan Simmons

In the spring of 1991, during a convention at Stoneybrook University, Dan Simmons gave a speech in which he challenged the "genre" writers who had gathered to rise to the task of integrating their fictions into the mainstream. He compared the unspoken feud between fiction labeled "mainstream" and that known as "science fiction" or "horror" with the rift that arose between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, healed only during the latter years of their lives, when wisdom overcame shortsightedness. He urged the writers to forge trails into the new and exciting territory.

Having minded his own advice, Simmons often creates fiction with ties to various genres and themes linked to numerous poems and classic works of literature. The Hollow Man (Bantam,1993) is thematically linked to T.S. Eliot and Dante, and it's plot and structure are based on The Inferno; his award-winning science fiction novel, Hyperion (Bantam, 1990), owes its structure to The Canterbury Tales, and both it and a companion volume, The Fall of Hyperion (Bantam, 1991), explore the same themes and ask the same questions as do the poems by John Keats; Carrion Comfort (Warner, 1990), his epic novel about psychic vampirism, derives its title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins and shares thematic concerns as well; and a 1993 novella, "The Great Lover," owes its lifeblood to the poet-soldiers who fought (and often died) in the trench warfare of World War I.

Yet, though Simmons may revel in the idea of expanding the parameters of different genre readerships by mixing various formulae and tropes from science fiction, mystery and horror into his novels, he knows it can be a foolhardy attempt to fly in the face of success and fame. As he noted in 1994, "The next two books are gonna either validate my theory of bringing together separate and equal readerships or they will not. So I will either be out on the street sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown bad, or I will be on easy street."

The amount of success he has thus far realized (be it large or small), did not always seem inevitable. Born in East Peoria, in 1948, Dan Simmons became an elementary teacher after earning a master's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, in 1971. For the next ten years, Simmons worked in the field of education, eventually helping to develop a gifted education program. During that time, he wrote short stories and submitted them to magazines -- several times he came close to publication, only to have the magazines "fold" (due to economic problems) before his fiction was published. As recently as the early eighties, Simmons told his wife that if he didn't receive encouragement at a Denver writer's conference, he would quit trying for professional publication and devote more time to his teaching career. "At the time," Simmons recalled, during a recent telephone interview, "in 1981, the idea of pursuing a professional career as a writer, and even getting published, seemed far away. For a lot of us writers, even at the beginning, it doesn't seem real." Reality, in the form of writer sui generis Harlan Ellison, made itself known. Never one to mince words, Ellison informed Simmons that he would rip his nose off if he didn't keep writing.

Ellison then asked permission to enter Simmons' short story, "The River Styx Runs Upstream," in a contest for beginning writers. Simmons won the contest, and publication, in 1982. Three years later, his first novel, Song of Kali (Tor,1990), won a World Fantasy Award.

Since then, the prolific Simmons has published ten novels (including an excellent mainstream novel entitled, Phases of Gravity, Bantam, 1990), two collections of short stories (Prayers To Broken Stones, Bantam, 1992; Lovedeath, Warner, 1994), and two nonfiction books about writing. Accolades he earned for this prodigious output include a Hugo Award, two World Fantasy Awards, a Theodore Sturgeon Award for short fiction, eight Locus Awards, the British Fantasy and Science Fiction Awards, and four Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers of America.

But it was the publication, and best-selling success, of the "Hyperion books" which secured Simmons' fame as a science fiction luminary. Every bit as lengthy and complex as the poems by John Keats, the "Hyperion Cantos (as the two volumes are collectively known)" helped usher in a new respect for a sub-genre known as "space opera." Mixing cliffhanger plot devices with thoughtful writing, Dan Simmons won over a large portion of the SF audience, and a permanent spot on the annuals of that genre. The success of these books (they've become favorites on college campuses) can likewise be attributed to the structure of Hyperion, the first volume. Patterned after The Canterbury Tales, it uses six separate stories to relate the history of a far future society and to reveal the connections each of the travelers has to their destination: the planet Hyperion, where structures called the Time Tombs, as well as a deadly avatar known as the Shrike, await them. In addition to the many connections to John Keats' poems, there are symbolic relations to mythology (characters named Brawne Lamia and Martin Silenus, a ship called the "Yggdrasill"); and if that weren't enough, Simmons adds a metafictional sensibility by naming futuristic hardware, software, fusion drives and space ships after SF writers and actual twentieth century scientists (the Gibsonian Matrix and the Hawking drive, are respectively named after William Gibson and Stephen Hawking). Each of the separate tales is related in singular voices reminiscent of famous SF authors such as Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven or Philip Jose Farmer. On the whole, Hyperion's popularity might be attributed to the fact that it is the perfect Rosetta stone for those unfamiliar with science fiction.

Now, six years after he took the science fiction community by storm, Dan Simmons is revisiting the society he created with Hyperion. Having embarked upon the same themes as did Keats (falling in love with a goddess, the evolution of gods, the discovery of the cosmos's "Pleasure Thermometer" of epistemological revelations), Simmons has said that this will be his last foray into that far future society. And though he has just completed the first of another two-volume epic (Endymion), based on another poem by John Keats, and set just after the time of the "Hyperion Cantos," Simmons is not jumping on the bandwagon of writers who create an endless series of novels.

Even if he did have such an urge (he once mused about delving deeper into the political aspects of the "Hyperion" books), as Simmons pointed out, "I can't do the (book) I wanted to do of what I called the Hegemony, the interstellar society I created for the first two books -- because I kicked it to shreds at the end of the second book! But I've got this other society I've built here, the Pax, based on the church's control. So, yeah, I really do want to look at the political ramifications of that. In Endymion, I touch on it, and in the book I'm writing now, The Rise of Endymion, I hope to look at in a little more depth."

Exploring the social ramifications of immortality provided by a church-ruled society isn't the only reason Simmons has revisited the Hyperion universe. Recently, "I had to go back and reread the 'Hyperion' books, and deconstruct them in a serious way." Because, in addition to writing the new novels, Simmons has been creating an interactive CD-ROM, for Microsoft, based on the "Hyperion Cantos." It is a large project (the novels totaled nearly 1000 pages!), and as Simmons noted, "if this Microsoft project were a major motion picture, the budget would be about 600 million dollars."

Although the writing of another book in the Hyperion saga, and the translation of the first two volumes onto CD-ROM, would be enough to keep many writers busy for years to come, Dan Simmons continues turning out short stories as well. And even in that fictional arena he strives to assimilate the tropes of various genres. Mixing the ingredients of SF, fantasy and horror, Simmons recently wrote a novella entitled "Looking For Kelly Dahl," which was initially published in cyberspace, via Omni On-line. Contemplating the origins of that story, Simmons said, "In the past, I've quoted (Mario) Varga Ilosa, who said, 'writers are exorcists of their own demons.' And I'm sure I'm doing that. When asked to write a horror story, after 18 years of (working in the field of) education, to me, horror is some of the things I've seen done to kids, and some of the things our society continues doing to them...I like that story a lot. It's one of those stories where there's no commercial, or career reason to write, other than you just have to write the damn thing."

And Simmons has many other works-in-progress, or in the planning stages, as well. A rumored collaboration on a novel with Harlan Ellison nearly took place in the summer of 1995. As Mr. Simmons recalls, "...we both had problems that didn't allow it to happen. I'm probably talking out of school here, but I think our plan is good. We're going to go off to France to write it. We have a publisher friend over there, a French publisher, who has a summer place in Central France, who said, 'Come spend a month or two here.' We said, 'Okay!' I hope it happens."

Until then, Simmons still has a full plate. "With the finishing of the second 'Endymion' book, I will have fulfilled all contractual obligations. And that will be the first time in about thirteen years that that's true. So I'm gonna head off to Cuba and finish some research that I've been working on for the last few years about Hemingway. The Hemingway novel (The Crook Factory, Avon, 1998) will be 'halfway house' for me...a literary detective story trying to figure out who this Hemingway character really was. But then beyond that, I do want to write a (mainstream) book like Phases of Gravity. And I know what it is, and when I have time and space to write it, I'm looking forward to it."

In speaking about the differences between mainstream and genre fiction, Simmons has said that structure is a "lost form" in contemporary writing -- that genre fiction seems to have the best grasp on that particular facet, although serious fiction does seem to be "moving back in that direction." If that is so, if mainstream fiction is, indeed, moving back to the structures of plot that Henry James so often reviled, and which Robert Louis Stevenson championed, one can be certain that Dan Simmons will be at the forefront of that movement, urging the others on, telling them to forge ahead to new trails, and to fearlessly seek the help (and the tools) of their literary fellows -- be they genre writers or otherwise.