Dan Simmons
Autor(a) de Hyperion
About the Author
Science fiction writer Dan Simmons was born in East Peoria, Illinois in 1948. He graduated from Wabash College in 1970 and received an M. A. from Washington University the following year. Simmons was an elementary school teacher and worked in the education field for a decade, including working to mostrar mais develop a gifted education program. His first successful short story was won a contest and was published in 1982. His first novel, Song of Kali, won a World Fantasy Award, and Simmons has also won a Theodore Sturgeon Award for short fiction, four Bram Stoker Awards, and eight Locus Awards. He is also the author of the Hyperion series, and Simmons and his work have been compared to Herbert's Dune and Asimov's Foundation series. (Bowker Author Biography) mostrar menos
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Séries
Obras por Dan Simmons
The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion / The Fall of Hyperion / Endymion / The Rise of Endymion (1990) 86 exemplares
[unidentified works] 8 exemplares
Looking for Kelly Dahl {novella} 8 exemplares
Shave And A Haircut Two Bites 7 exemplares
Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds [short fiction] 7 exemplares
Metastasis 7 exemplares
Carrion Comfort [original novella] 6 exemplares
On K2 with Kanakaredes 5 exemplares
La mort du centaure 5 exemplares
Death in Bangkok 4 exemplares
Vexed to Nightmare By a Rocking Cradle {short story} 3 exemplares
Ilium and Olympos 3 exemplares
Remembering Siri {short story} 3 exemplares
Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams {short story} 3 exemplares
The River Styx Runs Upstream {short story} 3 exemplares
My Private Memoirs of the Hoffer Stigmata Pandemic 2 exemplares
Dying Is Easy Comedy is Hard — Autor — 2 exemplares
The Vanishing 2 exemplares
The Ninth of Av 1 exemplar
Ilium & Olympos, Part 3 of 7 1 exemplar
L'échiquier du mal 1 1 exemplar
The Offering [teleplay] 1 exemplar
The End of Gravity 1 exemplar
The Offering {short story} 1 exemplar
All Dracula's Children 1 exemplar
Ilium & Olympos, Part 2 of 7 1 exemplar
Ilium & Olympos, Part 1 of 7 1 exemplar
Associated Works
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (2002) — Contribuidor — 516 exemplares
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996) — Contribuidor — 412 exemplares
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994) — Contribuidor — 253 exemplares
The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published (2009) — Contribuidor — 180 exemplares
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine: Vol. 10, No. 12 [December 1986] (1986) — Contribuidor — 13 exemplares
High Fantastic: Colorado's Fantasy, Dark Fantasy and Science Fiction (1995) — Contribuidor — 6 exemplares
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Nome legal
- Simmons, Dan
- Data de nascimento
- 1948-04-04
- Sexo
- male
- Nacionalidade
- USA
- Local de nascimento
- Peoria, Illinois, USA
- Educação
- Wabash College (AB|English|1970)
Washington University, St. Louis (MEd|1971) - Ocupações
- writer
novelist
teacher (high school English) - Prémios e menções honrosas
- World Horror Convention Grand Master Award (2013)
Fatal error: Call to undefined function isLitsy() in /var/www/html/inc_magicDB.php on line 425- Dan Simmons (born April 4, 1948) is an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles, among other works which span the science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres, sometimes within a single novel. Simmons' genre-intermingling Song of Kali (1985) won the World Fantasy Award. He also writes mysteries and thrillers, some of which feature the continuing character Joe Kurtz.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, 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.
He soon started writing 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 and awarded first prize in a Twilight Zone Magazine story competition, and he was taken on as a client by Ellison's agent, Richard Curtis. Simmons' first novel, Song of Kali, was released in 1985.
He worked in elementary education until 1989.
Membros
Discussions
Would you Drood with me? *Spoilers May Lurk Here* em The Green Dragon (Agosto 2022)
Historical Horror Novels by Dan Simmons em Thing(amabrarian)s That Go Bump in the Night (Abril 2009)
science fiction book em Name that Book (Dezembro 2008)
Críticas
There's already a blood bath by page 50 and a main character is killed off half way with the whole thing becoming more and more preposterous.
Continuation of this mind boggling epic. There's a lot to keep in mind in these books and I found some aspects of the denoument rather unconvincing.
I wanted to like this more. It has vast world building and complexity, and layers where religious imagery is played with, for example, an isolated community controlled by a cruciform parasite, and a pilgrimage to mysterious tombs by pilgrims who tell each other stories en route like a futuristic Canterbury Tales. It also reminds me in some ways of 'Dune'. The relationship between the man and his daughter who was aging backwards was moving.
Although I'm used to SF, there is a lot of mind boggling stuff in this book and its sequel. They also might not be a good read for people who don't like graphic violence.… (mais)
Although I'm used to SF, there is a lot of mind boggling stuff in this book and its sequel. They also might not be a good read for people who don't like graphic violence.… (mais)
Listas
1980s (1)
Winter Books (1)
Off on a Quest (1)
Solar System (1)
to get (1)
Unread books (1)
1960s (1)
The Trojan War (1)
Arctic novels (1)
SF Masterworks (2)
SF Masterworks (2)
Favourite Books (2)
To Read (3)
High Priority (1)
Next in Series (1)
Gaslamp Fantasy (1)
To Read - Horror (1)
100 Hemskaste (1)
Prémios
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 110
- Also by
- 46
- Membros
- 59,920
- Popularidade
- #241
- Avaliação
- 3.9
- Críticas
- 1,490
- ISBN
- 977
- Línguas
- 25
- Marcado como favorito
- 275
One unfortunate glitch early on and throughout is the use of American terms by a nineteenth century Englishman: sidewalk instead of pavement, drapes instead of curtains and various others including gotten, the use of which died out well before the nineteenth century. So that was irritating.
It's hard to review this book because it encompasses so many things. The core is the relationship between the younger, forty-something, Collins and Dickens who is about a decade older. Despite what appears to be a warm friendship on the surface - the two men went on various adventures together when they were younger and Collins is a frequent visitor to Dickens' home - Collins is eaten up with envy which develops into a hatred of Dickens that eventually becomes potentially murderous. His character is chockful of flaws, including casual racism (possibly endemic for that era so not unique to him) and misogyny - to him, women are animalistic and bovine - and he has a serious laudanum and opium addiction which worsens over time and eventually involves morphine prescribed by his doctor for his rheumatic gout.
Given that he is drinking enough laudanum to kill anyone who hasn't built up his tolerance level, and pays regular visits to opium dens, he is an unreliable narrator par excellence. Eventually it becomes impossible to believe anything he tells the reader because it becomes so extreme. He is also repellent as a character, especially to anyone with sympathy for either animals or downtrodden individuals such as his common law wife or the servants.
Another issue is that the writing is turgid - if meant to be an imitation of the style of Dickens etc, it doesn't come over as that. Whenever he mentions anybody, Collins gives their entire name, multiple times within a scene, and everything is spelled out repetitively, with constant reminders about things already mentioned, as if the author is being paid by the word. All this contributes to a book that is nearly 900 pages long, and has no need to be - it would have benefited from a lot of judicious editing. There are some powerful scenes of action, but most of the story is so overworked that it becomes tedious, especially with the unnecessary background research recounted in practically every scene. The style and info-dumping more or less kill any suspense that might otherwise attend the appearances of the supernatural Drood and his followers. And the scene on the stairwell involving a certain luckless maidservant is more reminiscent of 'Alien' than anything and has no explanation whatsoever.
I checked Wikipedia to see if any of it had a basis in fact: Collins did live with a widow called Caroline and her daughter, and would not marry her, and she did marry a man with the same name as her second husband in the book, but returned to Collins. Frankly, given how in the book he engineers for her to have such an unhappy marriage, that fails to convince, but of course the real story must have been quite different. He also had children with another woman, as in the novel, but Wikipedia disagrees on the number and gender. And the material on the ex-police chief Charles Field doesn't square with the facts, since he died four years after Dickens, not before him, and only had his pension suspended for four months - reinstated by the Home Secretary because he had already given up the private enquiry work to which the authorities objected.
The problem I find most extreme is that, if Dickens' apology late on in the book is meant to be "true" in the context of the story, it's difficult to know what actually does and doesn't happen. This makes the whole story rather meaningless. At the end, having forced myself through the last two or three hundred pages just to find out what happened, it wasn't at all clear if Collins broke the 'spell' he had been under. Given that I found the book so disappointing, I can only give it one star.… (mais)