Dan Simmons was born in 1948 in Peoria, Illinois.
He attended Wabash College, graduating in
1970 with a degree in English.
Simmons' first novel, Song
of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award.
In 1989, his Hugo Award-winning novel, Hyperion was published. It is a
novel with its roots in Chaucer and its name taken from
a Romance-era poem by John Keats.
He lives in Longmont, Colorado with his
wife, Karen, and their daughter Jane.
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Dan Simmons Links Dan Simmons Website Dan Simmons Tribute Site ISFDB Bibliography SF Site Review: Olympos SF Site Review: Song of Kali SF Site Review: Ilium SF Site Interview: Dan Simmons SF Site Review: Worlds Enough And Time SF Site Review: The Crook Factory SF Site Review: The Rise of Endymion SF Site Review: Song of Kali |
Bantam Spectra 
In the twenty-ninth century, the universe of the Human Hegemony
is under threat by the rebel Ousters and the schemes of the
secessionist AI TechnoCore. Seven citizens set out on a pilgrimage
to the planet, Hyperion. There, the fabled Time Tombs seem about
to reveal their secrets. But Hyperion is home also to the Shrike,
part god and part killing machine, whose powers are said to transcend
space and time. The seven have been chosen by the Church of the Shrike
to travel on what may prove to be a final pilgrimage. While en route,
the travellers, like another fabled group of pilgrims, share their
stories on why they are on the journey.
Bantam Spectra, Headline 
On Hyperion, the Time Tombs are opening
and seven pilgrims risk their lives to petition the Shrike -- a creature
that may control the fate of all mankind.
Something is drawing the Hegemony, the AIs, and the Ousters towards
the Shrike and the Time Tombs. The novel begins with the arrival of the
pilgrims. Planning to seek out the Shrike and trying to discover
its purpose and their own, the pilgrims are drawn into events
over which they have too little control.
Bantam Spectra, Headline 
The story begins some 300 plus years after
The Fall of Hyperion. A young
girl, Aenea, is foreseen is a great threat to the current
ruling Hegemony in the galaxy, a twisted version of the
Catholic Church that relies on the cruciform parasite
and the promise of resurrection to hold sway. She is
protected by the Shrike and some of her other companions
while she tries to unravel her destiny. Trying to stay
ahead of her pursuers, Aenea, begins the journey to confirm
her role as the coming messiah, one she may not live to fulfill.
Her protector, Raul Endymion, tells the tale from his orbital prison.
Bantam Spectra 
It begins with the death and resurrection of Pope
Julius XV and the coming-of-age of the new messiah,
Aenea. She is thought to be the only person who can
counter the pope and his plan to unleash the Pax Fleet,
the Church's military wing, on a final genocidal Crusade to
gain total dominion over the universe. A Church ally,
the AI Core offers immortality
to humankind but only those faithful who pledge
total obedience to the Church.
The Core has its own motives; Aenea knows what they are.
Together with
the android A. Bettik, Raul Endymion and Aenea
embark on a final mission to find and comprehend the
underlying fabric of the universe.
Meanwhile, the Shrike -- monster, angel, killing machine --
has followed them and is ready
to complete its own mission.
Gollancz (UK) / HarperCollins Eos 
Set on Mars, bio-engineered post-humans are recreating the events reported in Homer's Iliad. A
20th century classics professor, Thomas Hockenberry, is one of them chosen to report on the events taking place. As a scholic,
he's not sure why he is doing it and finds a little extracurricular spying to be of more interest. As long as he tracks events,
nobody notices his absence to become the mole for one of the gods who is planning a murder. At the same time, two Jovian moravecs,
sentient explorer machines, are tasked with investigating why the level of quantum activity is so high on Mars. Arriving there,
they are shot down and marooned all the while keeping up a continuing banter on whether Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and
Shakespeare's Sonnets is better.
Gollancz (UK) / HarperCollins Eos 
Olympos continues the story begun in Illium.
Helen of Troy is mourning her dead husband, Paris, who was killed in single combat with Apollo who left his body
burned and mangled. And Thomas Hockenberry is still sneaking from her bed after their nights together.
The gods still attack from the heights of their besieged Olympos.
Their single-molecule bomb casings are quantum phase-shifting through
the moravecs' force shield and laying waste to Ilium. Or so Hockenberry and Mahnmut, one of the sentient explorer machines,
have tried explaining to her but she doesn't care since she must prepare for her husband's funeral.
Putnam, Warner 
Sometimes compared to Stephen King's It, the novel
concerns a terror stalking a town that only a group of kids
seems to be able to fight. Armed only with that seeming immortality that
all children possess, they leap headlong into a struggle against an evil that needs to be banished.
Putnam, Headline 
A vampire horror novel set in post-Ceausescu Romania, an American hematologist working with
AIDS-infected orphans discovers a vampire child whose blood may hold a cure for AIDS,
only to have him kidnapped by Romania's hidden vampire population.
Bantam Spectra, Headline 
A telepath must come to terms with the death of his (telepathic) wife.
The narrator nearly goes insane following the death his
wife who had telepathically shielded him from the babble of others'
thoughts.
Putnam, Headline 
A Hawaiian resort comes under threat from natural and supernatural forces.
Native Hawaiians summon up their local gods against a millionaire
developer. The summoning gets out of control. Meanwhile, in a
subplot which parallels a little-known adventure had by Mark Twain, Eleanor (our heroine)
tries her best to stop the madness.
Avon 
In 1942, at the height of WWII, Ernest
Hemingway wanted to operate a spy ring from his farm in
Cuba. J. Edgar Hoover gives the go-ahead and sends
agent Joe Lucas to keep an eye on things and report back
surreptitiously. Hemingway has assembled a group called
the "Crook Factory". It includes an
American millionaire, a 12-year-old Cuban
orphan, a Spanish jai alai champion, a priest, and
a fisherman. Unexpectedly, the ring
uncovers a vital piece of
intelligence and this rag-tag group finds itself
in a deadly cat-and-mouse game. And poor old Lucas
doesn't know who's the enemy.
Dark Harvest, Warner Stoker Award-winning epic vampire horror novel about two warring groups who roam around taking control of other's minds. Following a group of four feuding vampires, one man tries to bring an end to their reign of terror.
Bantam Spectra 
A multi-layered novel about an astronaut, Richard Baedecker, who is reflecting
on his life. It follows his thoughts, looping through
events, trying to understand his role in society. He meets a young woman
who takes him on a "past-life" journey to boyhood haunts, the slums
of India and an Oreganian ghost town. At each stop, he meets those most
influential in his life and finds how their presence has and will who
Richard Baedecker is.
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Morrow 
Darwin Minor reconstructs accidents for a living using a combination of science and intuition.
He does it to help the police and for his company which works
for insurance companies. One day, after looking into several accidents, a Mercedes with tinted windows
pulls up next to him on the highway and opens fire with a machine pistol. So begins a series
of incidents which seems to lead into an international conspiracy of intimidation and murder
and opens doors in his past he'd rather left closed.
St. Martin's Minotaur 
Ex-P.I. Joe Kurtz gets out of jail for tossing his partner's killer out of a window and talks his way into a case for a
semi-retired Don to search for a missing Mafia accountant and to find out why his trucks are being hijacked. In the course of events, he comes in contact
other family enforcers, a sadistic druglord and his serial killer pal, a family of inbred Aryan Brotherhood rejects, street gang thugs,
and a crooked cop. It's non-stop action ala Richard Stark's Parker or Andrew Vachss's Burke. But there are the obvious Simmons touches
like the two homeless men arguing in Latin or the retro-discussion of guns; revolvers vs. automatics, steel vs. plastic.
St. Martin's Minotaur 
Dale Stewart is having a bad year. His marriage fell apart, his lover left him to move back east and his job as an
university professor is in jeopardy due to his antics. He wants to get his life together, something that he's been trying to do
since his friend Duane died in a farm accident during his boyhood in Elm Haven, Illinois. Inspired to take a sabbatical,
he rents Duane's family farm as a place to write a novel, a career he's trying to cultivate. Little does he know what's waiting
to welcome him back. Continuing with charcters from Summer of Night, it's not really a sequel as another of life episodes.
St. Martin's Minotaur 
This is second installment of the hard-boiled Joe Kurtz series.
"Little Skag" Farino is the last don of the local crime family. He wants Kurtz dead and is sending in hit men by the score,
beginning with the Attica Three Stooges and moving up through the killer ranks. Little Skag's sister, Angelina,
is back from seven years in Sicily and has Joe in mind to be the patsy in regaining the family empire. Meanwhile Joe is approached by a dying concert violinist
who wants his daughter's killer found. Refusing at first, he is soon on the trail of a man
who is a cold-blooded serial killer, a master of alternate identities and the power to send the "forces of good" after Kurtz.
St. Martin's Minotaur 
This is third installment of the hard-boiled Joe Kurtz series.
Joe is in deep trouble. He's beaten senseless, shot in the neck and back, and manipulated from every side
by various Mafia characters (female and otherwise), cops (male and female),
hit men, an arms dealer, a drug kingpin and his cadre, and a creepy and
prolific psychotic killer known as "the Dodger," unleashed into the world to triple the body count.
Bluejay Books, Tor 
Set in modern-day Calcutta, Song of Kali is the truly
frightening story of a man named Robert Luczak seeks out
the poet, M. Das who hasn't been seen for 10 years. Luczak's
intent is to interview him for The New Yorker.
Events and people, blending half-truths and lies, indifference and deceit, distract
his search. Despite his simple need of an interview,
Luczak finds that he and his family travelling with him
are caught up in a vortex of violence by forces ancient and
inexorable which could spread their chaos to the whole world.
Dark Harvest, Bantam Spectra 
It collects the following stories:
 Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle
Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in 'Hell'
Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds
Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites
The River Styx Runs Upstream
Remembering Siri
The Offering
Metastasis
Iverson's Pits
Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams
E-Ticket to 'Namland
The Death of the Centaur
Carrion Comfort
Warner 
An abridged version of one of the stories, called Death in
Bangkok, was published in Playboy.
It collects the following stories:
Sleeping with Teeth Women
The Great Lover
Flashback
Entropy's Bed at Midnight
Dying in Bangkok
HarperCollins Eos 
It collects the following stories:
Looking for Kelly Dahl
Orphans of the Helix
The Ninth of Av
On K2 with Kanakaredes
The End of Gravity
 Presents of Mind (written with Edward Bryant, Steve Rasnic Tem and Connie Willis)1985 Mile High Futures, November 1986 Asimov's, December
Dying Is Easy, Comedy is Hard (written with Edward Bryant)1990 The Further Adventures of The Joker edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Bantam
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