Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmonsis an American science fiction and horror writer. He is the author of the Hyperion Cantos and the Ilium/Olympos cycles...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 April 1948
CountryUnited States of America
movie four definitions
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
science thinking fiction
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
evil deities innocent
Any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being evil.
essence civilization ideas
Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.
wall light law
There were reprints of American editorials. Liberals saw it as a resurgence of social protest and decried the discrimination, poverty, and hunger that had provoked it. Conservative columnists acidly pointed out that hungry people don't steal stereo systems first and called for a crackdown in law enforcement. All of the reasoned editorials sounded hollow in light of the perverse randomness of the event. It was as if only a thin wall of electric lighting protected the great cities of the world from total barbarism.
hero rocks water
A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.
life real way
Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
art opportunity skills
Seduction... was both a science and art - a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
support language nightmare
This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...
real imagination people
...speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...
identity tests acid
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
book men two
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
sex pain mistake
To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.
long humanity evolution
Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.