Books by Dan Simmons

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