Interview with Dan Simmons

Q: After producing all those bestsellers and selling millions of copies worldwide, after winning literary awards, is there added pressure when it comes to writing new series/novels, knowing that the expectations will always be high?

No. It’s not external expectations that put pressure on a writer – or at least not on me. It’s the fact that with a bit of age and maturity, one’s own expectations keep rising.

Q: This is likely the most frequently asked question you encounter, but fans are always eager to discover if you'll ever consider writing a prequel or sequel to the Hyperion series?

There will be no novel-length prequels or sequels to the four Hyperion-universe books. Not while I’m alive and not from someone else when I’m dead.

I deeply appreciate the reader response – in many countries – to those four interlaced novels, but as I’ve explained before, except for some possible short fiction set in that universe, should I find some new ideas to explore there, those tales are finished. It’s a tempting trap – finding such a lucrative slide and then greasing it for decades – but not one that appeals to me.

As a reader, I know that urge to read the same thing over and over – to go back to the old neighborhood again and again, as it were. But as both reader and writer, I know how destructive such a habit can be to the author (and to the characters and "universe" the author keeps returning to.)

Q: What project will you be tackling next? Rumor has it that it will be something in the space opera vein. Care to shine some light on the topic?

I have several ideas for novels and will be deciding in the next few weeks which one to embark on after this book tour for The Terror is finished. None of these involve another space opera type of SF book.

Q: Will you ever write additional stories set in the Ilium/Olympos universe?

I don’t really know if I’ll revisit the Ilium-Olympos universe. There was one last story – involving Odysseus and the Circe-figure called Sycorax (and her monstrous offspring Caliban) – that I was tempted to explore. It would have been very . . . mmm . . . "adult" fiction indeed, but there are a lot of tales in the queue ahead of that possible book.

Q: There seem to be many common motifs that run through your novels, particularly a love of the literature of past ages. The works of Homer and Shakespeare were obvious influences for your Ilium/Olympos duology, and John Keats seemed to play the role of muse in your Hyperion Cantos. Are there any writers/poets from the past who have been major influences on you but have not been explicitly referenced in your work?

One would certainly hope so. One possible novel that I’m researching now involves Charles Dickens. But as with the historical Hemingway – whom I researched for 7 years for The Crook Factory but who was a writer and a person I was pretty skeptical about before beginning that research – Dickens was not "a major influence" on me. As was true with E.M. Forster, I’ve always tended to be put off by Dickens’s sensibilities, sentimentalities, and even his characters’ names.

But his life . . . ah, that’s very interesting. Especially the last years after his involvement in a train wreck at Staplehurst where he experienced . . . .

But I get ahead of myself.

Q: How would you like to be remembered as an author? What is the legacy you'll leave behind?

I don’t think in terms of legacies. (I tend to think in terms of the next chapter I’m working on.) But I have to admit that as suggested legacies go, I enjoy what I once heard my dear friend Harlan Ellison say about his possible "literary epitaph" – "I’ll be happy if they say after I’m gone – ‘He never popped out of the same hole twice.’"

Q: Honestly, do you believe that the speculative fiction genre will ever come to be recognized as veritable literature? Truth be told, in my opinion there has never been this many good books/series as we have right now, and yet there is still very little respect (not to say none) associated with the genre.

Assume the year is 1930 and substitute the word "jazz" for "speculative fiction" in your query and comment above and you have my answer.