Dan Simmons Is Dead So It’s Time To Read ‘Hyperion’

Call it the Orson Scott Card problem. You want to recommend a piece of sci-fi to a friend, but you know that if you do you'll have to include the disclaimer that the author's politics are diametrically opposed to your own, and you find them downright objectionable. You truly love the book, and you think your friend will love it too, but you wonder if you even want to bother with the whole rigamarole the disclaimer requires.

The best way I can describe Dan Simmons, who died last month at age 77, is as someone who got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September 11th. Not one but two of his future-set novels feature as major plot points a Global Islamic Caliphate. One of those, Flashback , is basically one long rant about how the American left would ruin the world if they gained power. Not that Simmons didn't have some taste issues before— Song of Kali , his World Fantasy Award–winning first novel, has some moments that read decades later as stunningly racist—but late-career Simmons was at times totally unredeemable.

This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror , which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.