Dan Simmons - Literary References

Literary References

Simmons became famous in 1989 for Hyperion, winner of Hugo and Locus Awards for the best science fiction novel. This novel deals with a space war, and is inspired in its structure by Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Many of his works have similarly strong ties with classic literature:

• Carrion Comfort derives its title and many of its themes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• "Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well and Living In Hell", a 1988 short story lampooning televangelists included in Prayers to Broken Stones, is about a brief return to earth by the title character, an inhabitant of Dante's Inferno
• The Hyperion Cantos take their titles from poems by the English Romantic, John Keats.
• The basic structure of Hyperion is taken from the Middle-English cycle of stories The Canterbury Tales. A varied group of individuals are on a pilgrimage to solicit a kind of demon-god called "the Shrike" on the planet "Hyperion" in a universe on the edge of the apocalypse. Each pilgrim tells his or her tale of why they are going to see the Shrike. The Fall of Hyperion is the conclusion to the story of the pilgrims rather than a stand-alone sequel. Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are essentially one work in two volumes.
• The Hollow Man (1992) is influenced by Dante's Inferno and T. S. Eliot
• A short story from 1993, "The Great Lover", is inspired by the World War I War Poets.
• In The Fall of Hyperion, John Keats appears as one of the main characters.
• His Ilium/Olympos cycle is inspired by Homer's works. Both Shakespeare and Proust are mentioned as well.
• The character of Ada and her home Ardis Hall in the Ilium cycle are inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor, which was Nabokov's foray into the science fiction genre and alternate history.
• His collection of short stories, "Worlds Enough & Time", takes its name from the first line of the poem To His Coy Mistress by British poet Andrew Marvell: 'Had we but world enough, and time,'.