Books by Dan Simmons

“I loved this book when I read it. I’m now more drawn to the TV series that was made of it, but the book still has elements that are really good. It’s what pushed me back into writing historical fiction and naval fiction….The Terror uses a real historical event as a springboard to explore quite interesting themes in historical fiction…There are some really good scenes in it. Probably my favourite is when they put on a masquerade to try and keep the men’s morale up, which is something that they did do in polar exploration. The theme of this masquerade is ‘The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe” Read more...

The Best Naval Historical Fiction

Katie Daysh, Novelist

Dan Simmons’ space opera classic borrows its structure from The Canterbury Tales: essentially it comprises six novellas—the stories of various pilgrims who are meeting on board a ship that will take them to meet an mythical creature known only as ‘the Shrike.’ We hear from the Priest, the Soldier, the Poet, the Scholar, the Detective, and the Consul, each of their stories revealing the larger plot a little more. Like Frank Herbert’s Dune, one is left with the sense of a vast and intricately imagined fictional universe—populated with desert planets, ocean worlds and replica Earths—which Simmons would continue to explore in the three further books in the ‘Hyperion Cantos.’

From our article Books like Dune