Dan Simmons, the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections spanning horror, political thrillers and science fiction such as Hyperion and The Terror, has died at age 77.
Simmons died in Longmont, Colorado on 21 February, with his wife and daughter at his side, his obituary announced.
The author was best known for Hyperion, his 1989 science fiction novel that won the prestigious Hugo award for best novel and a Locus award; Simmons later wrote three sequels.
Over his career he also won two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, while his 2007 novel The Terror, a fictionalised imagining of what happened on the doomed Franklin expedition, was adapted into an acclaimed television series in 2018.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons grew up in Illinois and Indiana. He worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years, in Missouri, New York and Colorado, where he was once finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year.
“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school,” his obituary reads. “As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”
Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985. His other books include his 1989 vampire horror Carrion Comfort, 1991’s Summer of Night, the sci-fi epics Ilium and Olympos, and 2009’s Drood, based on the last years of Charles Dickens’s life.
His 2011 political thriller Flashback, however, was widely criticised as an anti-left rant, imagining a dystopian future where mass immigration, the climate change “hoax”, “socialist entitlement programs” and foreign policy failures under Barack Obama have led to the ruin of America, a “Second Holocaust” and the rise of an Islamic “New Global Caliphate”.
In response to the criticism, Simmons pointed out he’d written a short story version in 1991 that imagined a post-Reagan US, telling an interviewer: “I’ve been called a Nazi. I’ve been called a racist. People who have no idea of my life, what I’ve done, how I’ve worked for civil rights throughout my life, or what my politics have been, and what Democratic candidates I’ve written speeches for … They think I was just going after Obama in the book; well, it used to be Reagan, and if I had waited a few years it would be whoever else would be president.”
“Like his early reading pursuits, Dan always wrote about what he loved,” his obituary reads. “He defied literary norms by writing across genres, switching between major publishers, and defying pressure to conform to formulaic novels.
“Dan was a profoundly curious learner who delighted in connecting with other curious minds, and the many stories he dreamed up helped him connect with others throughout his entire life.”
