Dan Simmon’s Terror
For many years now, I’ve proclaimed author Dan Simmons one of the best writers alive, mainly on the strength of his Hyperion science-fiction series. Hyperion is both small and impossibly grand in scope; poetic, blunt, and always challenging. It also has what may be one of the greatest villain/monsters ever (the Shrike). So it will come as no surprise to anyone that I have enjoyed his new historical fiction, “The Terror”. Basically, it takes the doomed arctic voyages of the HMS Terror and Erebus, already filled with real terror and horror enough for any book, and adds layers of imaginative nightmarish speculation to that. In other words, a monster. Whereas the Shrike is purest black, the “Thing on the Ice” is all white, but there the practical differences end. Simmon’s monsters are not so much plot vehicles as they are cattle prods for the reader, cruelly tricky ways to make a reader guess and squirm. Don’t expect a traditional monster book here or a traditional disaster book, just to be taunted with their near presences. Like the end of another of my favorite modern fiction novels, Thomas Harris’ “Hannibal,” even your carefully crafted conceptualization of “heroism” may well get somewhat battered by the end of the story. Also like Hannibal, the story virtually revels in its ghoulishness; gore doesn’t begin to describe it. That intensity is greater because this is what the lost arctic explorers would have literally gone through…Simmons stays within the historical facts on this trip, giving a literal weight (positively and negatively) to his story. My take is that the story is about how much it can take for us to truly change our perceptions and attitudes. If you don’t mind the horror-ride, there’s something at the end worth the multiple amputations and the long, cold journey though the ice.
And if you haven’t read it, drop everything and read the Hyperion Series, which is simply as good as science fiction has yet become.