Dan Simmons, the acclaimed author whose work spanned science fiction, horror, and political thrillers – including the Hugo Award-winning novel Hyperion and the critically lauded The Terror – died on February 21st in Longmont, Colorado, at the age of 77, according to an obituary released by his family.
Simmons authored over 30 novels and short story collections throughout his career. Hyperion, published in 1989, established him as a major voice in science fiction, later spawning three sequels. His 2007 historical horror novel, The Terror, a fictionalized account of the Franklin expedition’s ill-fated attempt to navigate the Northwest Passage, gained further recognition and was adapted into a successful television series in 2018, as reported by The Portalist.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons spent his formative years in Illinois and Indiana. Prior to becoming a full-time author, he dedicated 18 years to teaching elementary school in Missouri, New York, and Colorado. He was once a finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year. His obituary recounted a unique teaching practice: “Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school… This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”
Simmons’s debut novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985. He continued to explore diverse genres with works such as the vampire horror novel Carrion Comfort (1989), Summer of Night (1991), and the science fiction epics Ilium and Olympos. His 2009 novel, Drood, offered a fictionalized exploration of the final years of Charles Dickens’s life.
However, Simmons’s 2011 political thriller, Flashback, proved controversial. The novel presented a dystopian vision of America grappling with mass immigration, climate change denial, and perceived foreign policy failures, drawing criticism as an anti-left polemic. In response to the backlash, Simmons explained that the core concept originated in a 1991 short story imagining a post-Reagan United States, stating that he had been labeled with politically charged accusations regardless of the presidential administration in power.
His obituary emphasized Simmons’s willingness to defy conventional literary boundaries. “Like his early reading pursuits, Dan always wrote about what he loved,” it read. “He defied literary norms by writing across genres, switching between major publishers, and defying pressure to conform to formulaic novels.” He received numerous accolades throughout his career, including two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, in addition to the Hugo and Locus awards for Hyperion.
