Master of the Universes

Changing genres as easily as others change clothes, the novels of Dan Simmons have won major awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Hugo Award. Ilium , the first book in the science fiction diptych completed by Olympos , was the Amazon.com top science fiction pick of 2003. He's written horror, mystery, historical fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and science fiction.

How does he do it? With pleasure, as he reveals in this Amazon.com interview.

Amazon.com: It's a fact--there's no interview question worse than "Where do you get your ideas?" But Ilium and Olympos encompass such a grand, twisted plotline that the question begs to be asked. Did this plot come fully formed? Or was it worked out over the course of your writing?

Dan Simmons: "Twisted plotline?" Please, sir. I prefer to think of it as a complicated spiral helix of a plotline. As in "DNA helix."

And to answer your question ... no. No plot or novel of mine has ever come fully formed. My "careful outlines" usually start out as hasty scribbles and devolve into doodles. But with every novel of mine, the thing either comes alive in 100 pages or so or else it gets scrapped. I think of this as the quickening--the word used in the midwifery sense--and once the tale finds this life of its own, it's more a matter of hanging on than of shaping.

"It’s not an exaggeration to say that I chose to write the huge SF diptych of Ilium and Olympos --dealing in part as they do with the Trojan War--primarily for my own pleasure of spending up to four years reengaged with the Iliad ..." -- Dan Simmons

Amazon.com: Do you have previous experience in Greek classics? Shakespeare?

Simmons: I was lucky to have blundered into an astonishingly wonderful undergraduate liberal-arts education at Wabash College in Indiana. It introduced me--with some serious expectations of paying attention--to Homer, the Greek classics, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Browning, and a bunch of the rest of those DWMs [Dead White Males], and then it gave me the hunger to keep grazing in those particular fields during the decades since.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I chose to write the huge SF diptych of Ilium and Olympos --dealing in part as they do with the Trojan War--primarily for my own pleasure of spending up to four years reengaged with the Iliad through many of its translations and critical studies. The original power and alienness of the thing are almost beyond description.

Amazon.com: You've been honored for work in many different genres--horror, science fiction, mystery--do you start a new story thinking, "Now it's time to write some hard-boiled crime fiction?"

Simmons: Nope. Not now. Not never.

But there is the fact that most of the novels I've published have been presold on a wing and an idea, and partially paid for in advance, so the publisher (and their lawyers) might be surprised if I delivered a tale of suburban adultery when an epic SF-novel had been contracted.

As to why I write across multiple genres, I was quoted once as saying that it was due to my early childhood in the Midwest. Anyone born there knows that the crops have to be rotated--never the same corn or beans or wheat planted for too many years in a row--or else the soil becomes fallow.

But never trust an author who quotes himself.

"Ideas are paramount in SF, but never--one prays--at the expense of the characters, the prose, or the fact that describing the human heart in conflict with itself is still the only reason for the tale to be told." -- Dan Simmons

Amazon.com: Do you find certain genres more difficult to write than others? Is there any genre you haven't tackled yet that you'd really like to try?

Simmons: In one way or the other, every genre is more difficult to write than the others. (And that's really not the paradox that it sounds.)

Mainstream fiction--and I’ve written my share of it--requires of the author, to misquote Kurt Vonnegut, one of those miner's canary's hypersensitivity to noxious gases. When the little yellow bird (read novelist) goes feet- and belly-up in his little cage out at the end of that long pole, there's something poisonous in the air of our culture.

Speculative fiction demands that plus the ability to fill a big honking canvas with not only bright but believable colors. Even the language of SF presents a unique series of demands. (With many words to be coined that should be different, evolved, evocative, convincing, colloquial, but never silly.) Ideas are paramount in SF, but never--one prays--at the expense of the characters, the prose, or the fact that describing the human heart in conflict with itself is still the only reason for the tale to be told. (Even when the human heart in question might not be human--see my Ilium and Olympos moravecs Mahnmut and Orphu of Io for explication on this point.)

Horror fiction--if it works--demands that the author light the lantern the rest of us sensibly leave on the wall and descend beneath the basement of human anxieties, down through the deep-fear dungeons to a deeper, darker labyrinth where most sane folks choose not to go.

Mystery fiction--or at least the kind of "Richard Stark" tough-guy, modern-noir, hard-boiled-to-the-extreme tales I chose to do in my three-book Joe Kurtz series--demands an eye for verisimilitudinous detail, a mind for plot, and a stomach for violence that few other forms of writing even consider.

(Is "verisimilitudinous" a word?)

Historical and suspense fiction, such as my The Crook Factory based on Ernest Hemingway's year of playing spy in Cuba in 1942-'43, or, say, the incredible absurdities of accident reconstruction and insurance fraud investigation in my Darwin’s Blade, require research up the proverbial wazoo. (There are people out there who really know this stuff.)

And yes, of course, there are genres I haven't tackled yet and hope to write within before I deliquesce. (Writers never retire, you know--we simply go face-down into the keyboard someday and fully expect our agent to sell that page.)

I have a Western in mind that I’ve been toying with for years ...

Amazon.com: What is your next project? Do you have a working title for it yet? When can we expect it?

Simmons: I’m 300 pages into a novel called The Terror that I’m very excited about. All writers say they are very excited about their next book, even if that book is only a gleam in the eye, but I'm half done with this novel and ... I ... am ... very ... excited ... about ... it.

It's not horror, per se. (It's much more frightening than any horror I've written to date.) It's based on one of the greatest unsolved historical mysteries of the past 160 years.

This is the first novel that I’ve written "on spec"--i.e., no publisher waiting for it--since 1989 and if I screw it up, it's my own damn fault. The fascination of the story behind The Terror , in and of itself even before the fictional telling, is profound. I get the urge to skip the writing and just go door to door to tell people the historical facts about this horrific human mystery.

But I stifle that urge.

Amazon.com: Finally, are there any authors or books that you particularly enjoy but feel haven't been discovered by the public yet?

Simmons: Sure. There are gifted young writers out there of whom I know, all just trembling on the cusp of wider publication, fame, and Western Canon-hood, but the young buggers are also lined up to take my job, so why should I toot their horns for them?

Seriously, there are too many to list here, but this what we readers do with and for each other, isn't it? Books are the last thing sold primarily through word-of-mouth from trusted friends and other readers, not via commercials or print ads.

I was just back for a reunion at my aforementioned Wabash College and a dean there recommended a novel set in Indiana about modern farming (??) called South of the Big Four by Don Kurtz, which I read during and after my long drive back to Colorado. I can't get the story, place, or characters out of my head. And I'll never drive through the Midwest again and look at the fields, farmhouses, or people there quite the same.

That's what reading's all about, isn't it?

Finally, the former teacher in me hopes that just as some people say they rediscovered (or first discovered) the poetry of John Keats through my four Hyperion novels, that Ilium and Olympos may lead some readers back to such writers as Homer, Browning, Tennyson, and even a certain Mr. Will S.