(15) DAN SIMMONS –

ILIUM & OLYMPOS (2003-2005)

Where to start with this genre-crossing author, spanning fantasy, horror and SF?

There’s where it all started – with his 1986 World Fantasy Award winning novel The Song of Kali, a psychological horror about a journalist encountering a latter day cult of Kali. Or his other horror themed works – or perhaps his dark fantasy Summer of Night, reminiscent of Stephen King with its group of adolescent boys facing a supernatural terror with a long history behind it, or his take on psychic vampires in Carrion Comfort.

However, it’s his towering SF classics which earn him special mention. The Hyperion Cantos was a close call for this entry with its frame story, modelled on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and its diverse group of ‘pilgrims’ to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, sent by the galactic Hegemony and the Church of the Final Atonement to face the terrifying Shrike.

But really, it’s his other towering SF classic in two parts, Ilium and Olympos, that seals the deal here. What can I say – I’m a sucker for the Iliad and the Trojan War. How can I resist an SF duology in which the Trojan War is reenacted by post-humans posing as the Olympian gods on a terraformed Mars around – where else? – Mons Olympus.

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