Hyperion, Dan Simmons, And Life
Life keeps life-ing
Subscribers to this Substack probably are wondering why I have not posted in a while. As Neil Gaiman so eloquently put it in his famous post George R. R. Martin Is Not Your Bitch:
…sometimes, and it's as true of authors as it is of readers, you have a life. People in your world get sick or die. You fall in love, or out of love. You move house. Your aunt comes to stay. You agreed to give a talk half-way around the world five years ago, and suddenly you realise that that talk is due now.....
In my case, I’ve been having adventures of every stripe, from health issues to family issues to job issues. In the spirit of Harlan Ellison’s nonfiction, I’ll bias for candor and say 1) I’m fine, I donated a kidney, which required about a three-month recovery, 2) my mother passed away, and it’s complicated, and 3) I left one job and started another, lucked into yet another job opportunity, and started work at the newest job last week. There are other issues that have hindered my productivity, and postings to this Substack have suffered accordingly. For that, I apologize and I’ll endeavor to do better moving forward. But, life keeps happening…
Anyway I wrote a long-form post on a different social media platform commemorating the life of one of my favorite author, Dan Simmons, who passed away recently from a stroke.
From this tweet I learned of the passing of the inimitable Dan Simmons, whose first fantasy novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; whose first horror novel, Carrion Comfort, won the Bram Stoker award; and whose first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. Just as Lord Of The Rings was a single work published in 3 volumes, Hyperion was published as The Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion and The Fall Of Hyperion), followed by Endymion and The Rise Of Endymion.
Simmons was not a hard SF author, not exactly. (For SF fans, ‘hard’ means SF written within the confines of science as we understood it when the work was written, though the distinction must be qualified by one of Arthur C. Clarke’s Laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) But his most transcendent work, like Clarke’s, tested the limits of our scientific understanding to explore how technology intersects with the human condition. Hyperion is widely-cited as a prescient take on artificial intelligence, with even members of Congress weighing in.
Simmons came into the field via a most unusual journey. He majored in English, an influence that found expression in his work through his modeling his own novels on famous literary works (Hyperion, for example—the first book, not The Hyperion Cantos—is modeled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with its stories within stories). And he entered the field later in life than most, submitting and getting rejections so many times that he registered for a writing seminar at his wife’s urging. By his account, if this seminar didn’t result in his learning how to become a professional writer, he would abandon the endeavor and focus on being a high school teacher.
That seminar changed his life. Because one of the teachers was Harlan Ellison, the pugnacious and incandescently gifted author whose work defies categorization. Ellison was a genius in every sense of the word and did not suffer fools gladly.
When I wrote about Ellison’s legacy upon learning of his passing, I mentioned that he’d “discovered” Dan Simmons. The story of his discovery may be found in the Simmons story collection Prayers To Broken Stones. Ellison walked into the hallway with a slush pile of the execrable stories that get submitted to entry-level seminars, (unlike the famed Clarion West, the one Simmons was attending and that Ellison was teaching did not require attendees to be published authors). He’d gotten so frustrated at the poor quality of the submitted work that he had exploded at one of the attendees and mercilessly criticized their work in front of the whole class: the characters were cardboard, the plot predictable, the story wooden, etc.
I’ll try again to find Ellison’s account of Simmons’s discovery because I am not doing it justice here. By his account, he tore the hapless author of this work to shreds, then called for a break, not because he’d likely reduced a grown man to tears in front of a crowd of strangers, but because he’d asked the poor man how many books he’d written and found out that it was 60, or something. So what had sent Ellison into the hallway wasn’t just that his latest victim’s work was terrible, but that he had spent many years toiling away, getting feedback from editors that his work needed work, but never improving his craft enough to publish.
So Ellison was in the hallway, having publicly humiliated one of the participants in this seminar, when he hit upon the story Simmons had submitted. He started reading and fully finished it in the hallway, with tears streaming down his face. Once he’d recovered his composure and re-convened the seminar, he held up the story and asked the class: “Who. Wrote. This?!”
Simmons, with understandable reluctance, raised his hand. And Ellison delivered them a speech in praise of Simmons’s story (later his first publication, “The River Styx Runs Upstream”) that was at least equal to the one he’d just given about the other participant’s lesser work. In Ellison’s telling, it almost reads as if he condemned Simmons to be a writer, a calling where, by Ellison’s account, one does not choose the profession so much as it chooses you.
So Simmons got that story published in 1983 or so, the year he turned 35. And I wouldn’t say he was prolific, exactly, but he was productive, and acclaim followed him into every genre he tried.
This linked tweet is about Hyperion, which is getting renewed attention as AI takes over our economy and our collective imagination. And I can’t say too much about why Hyperion is so relevant to this day and age because Simmons had a gift for writing work that was 1) impossible to discuss without spoiling it, and 2) near-impossible to adapt to the screen. Hyperion has been rumored to be slated for adaptation, but Simmons issued a rare public statement to the effect that Disney had hired some of the best story doctors on the planet to solve that problem, and even they had come up empty. (The Terror, a fictionalized account of the disappearance of two British ships attempting to discover the Northwest Passage, was capably adapted by SyFy into a miniseries.)
Simmons reportedly had taken up the novel Carrion Comfort on a dare by editor Ellen Datlow, and his later work reads as if it, too, had been inspired by dares. Or perhaps he was just trying to integrate his various story ideas into unified works for the sake of efficiency. His blog Writing Well, now relegated to the Wayback Machine, features complaints about the folks who approach writers with ideas, as if writers want for ideas as opposed to time.
Simmons got started as a professional writer later in life than most, and he was taken from us by a stroke earlier than some. I wish he’d had more time to share his creativity with the world, but we can console ourselves by picking up and reading or re-reading Hyperion, or Carrion Comfort, or really any of the work that he published. One of the redeeming qualities of writing that is difficult to adapt, is that it invites back into a world where we read.
