Dan Simmons

Daniel Joseph Simmons (April 4, 1948 – February 21, 2026) was an American science fiction and horror writer. He was the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works that span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons's genre-intermingling Song of Kali won the World Fantasy Award. Simmons started writing stories as a child with the goal of mesmerizing his audience with his story telling. 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.

Simmons soon started writing short stories, although his career did not take off until 1982, when, through Harlan Ellison's help, Simmons was invited to the Milford workshop, which Ellison considered to be "the best SF writing workshop in the world". Simmons considered Ellison as a mentor, friend, and the reason he pursued writing full-time.

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 of Elm Haven, Illinois. The novel, which was praised by Stephen King in a cover blurb, is similar to King's It (1986) 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 Haunting (2002), Dale Stewart (one of the first book's protagonists and now an adult), revisits his boyhood home to come to grips with mysteries that have disrupted his adult life.

Between the publication of Summer of Night (1991) and A Winter Haunting (2002), several additional characters from Summer of Night appeared in: Children of the Night (1992), a loose sequel to Summer of Night, which features Mike O'Rourke, now much older and a Roman Catholic priest, who is sent on a mission to investigate bizarre events in a European city; Fires of Eden (1994), in which the adult Cordie Cooke appears; and Darwin's Blade (2000), a thriller in which Dale's younger brother, Lawrence Stewart, appears as a minor character.

After Summer of Night, Simmons focused on writing science fiction until the 2007 work of historical fiction and horror, The Terror. His 2009 book Drood is based on the last years of Charles Dickens's life leading up to the writing of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Dickens had partially completed at the time of his death.

The Abominable (2013) recounts a mid-1920s attempt on Mount Everest by five climbers—two British, one French, one Sherpa, and one American (the narrator)—to recover the body of a cousin of one of the British characters.

Literary references Many of Simmons's works have strong ties with classic literature. For example: His 1989 novel Hyperion, winner of Hugo and Locus Awards for the best science fiction novel, The Hyperion Cantos take their titles from poems by the British Romantic John Keats. Ilium/Olympos deals with Homer, Shakespeare, Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. The title of Carrion Comfort, as well as many of its themes, derives from the poem "Carrion Comfort" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Hollow Man (1992) is a novel influenced by Dante's Inferno and T. S. Eliot "The Great Lover" (1993) is a short story inspired by the World War I War Poets Simmons's collection of short stories, Worlds Enough & Time, takes its name from the first line of the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by English poet Andrew Marvell: "Had we but world enough, and time" The detective in Flashback is named Nick Bottom after a character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream