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
life waiting found
God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
support language nightmare
This is every writer's nightmare--the sudden breakdown of meaning in the language that sustains and supports us...
life real way
Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.
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.
time memories weekend
She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things-the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
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.
real childhood geography
What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
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.
science thinking fiction
But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.
understanding lasts welcome
It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by mysteries even if this is to be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome some glimmer of understanding but, failing that, working on the puzzle will suffice.
perfect creative mixtures
Mystery. The strangeness of place so necessary to some creative spirits. A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the pagan mystery.
truth powerful skeletons
Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
writing relax exhausted
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
moving careers truth-is
The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.