Dan Simmons (1948–2026): Remembering the Author of Hyperion
Dan Simmons died on 21 February 2026 in Longmont, Colorado, at the age of 77. His family obituary confirmed that his wife, Karen, and daughter, Jane, were at his side; Ars Technica reported that his death followed a stroke.
The news returned me not first to a list of awards or a summary of his career, but to Hyperion. I read the series as a teenager, and few books from that period of my life remain quite so vivid. Simmons wrote across science fiction, horror, historical fiction and thrillers, but for me his name will always summon a group of pilgrims travelling towards the Time Tombs—and the stories they tell along the way.
The Book That Stayed
Simmons was best known for the four-volume Hyperion Cantos, beginning with Hyperion in 1989. The novel went on to win the 1990 Hugo Award for best novel, but its importance to me was never primarily a matter of prizes.
The first book remains, in my view, the strongest of the four, largely because of its unusual structure. Framed as a kind of science-fiction Canterbury Tales, it presents a series of interlocking pilgrim narratives, each distinct in voice, mood and even genre. One is a military story, another a detective narrative, another theological horror. Together, they gradually reveal the world without reducing it to a conventional sequence of explanations.
Of all the stories in Hyperion, the most haunting for me was that of Sol Weintraub and his daughter Rachel, who suffers from “Merlin’s sickness,” a condition that causes her to age backwards. Watching a parent slowly lose a child not to death but to time itself is a devastating conceit, and it has stayed with me for decades.
What is striking in retrospect is how little the grand machinery of the novel has to do with the part I remember most clearly. Hyperion contains interstellar civilisation, artificial intelligence, time distortion, war and the monstrous figure of the Shrike. Yet the story that survived most powerfully in my memory is about a father caring for his daughter as she gradually forgets him.
That may be one reason the book endures. Its scale is enormous, but its most effective wounds are intimate.
Beyond the Cantos
Although I am most familiar with the Hyperion books, Simmons’s work extended far beyond them. His debut novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985 and won the 1986 World Fantasy Award for best novel. He went on to write horror such as Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night, historical fiction including The Terror and Drood, and crime and political thrillers.
There is a temptation in any brief remembrance to flatten a writer into a bibliography or a stack of awards. Simmons’s career resists that treatment because the books do not sit comfortably on one shelf. Epic space opera, supernatural horror, historical reconstruction and hard-boiled crime all attracted his attention. Whatever one thinks of every individual result, the range and ambition were unmistakable.
It is always sobering to see someone who shaped one’s early reading life pass away. The authors encountered in adolescence can seem strangely permanent, as though both they and the books have always existed and will continue to do so. Their deaths expose the illusion, while also reminding us that the work has acquired a life separate from its creator.
Simmons’s passing makes me want to revisit the Hyperion Cantos, this time with older eyes, and perhaps finally explore more of his horror work. I do not expect to recover the experience of reading Hyperion as a teenager; that version of the reader no longer exists.
But the book still does. And when I return to Sol and Rachel, the story will meet someone older—someone who understands time, parenthood and loss differently than he did decades ago. That may be one of the truest forms of literary survival: the writer is gone, the reader keeps changing, and the story waits for the next encounter.
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