ollowing up on a 2003 e-mail interview, Dan Simmons took time out of his preparations for a book tour to discuss his new novel Olympos, sequel to Ilium, the first half of his action-packed SF epic that takes on the themes of Homer's The Iliad and Shakespeare's The Tempest (among others).
Our cyberspace talk found Simmons juggling a number of film deals: "More than a few of my books are optioned now," Simmons advised, "not just Hyperion and its sequel, but all of the Hyperion-universe novels and novella are optioned to the same studio, down to the last note, jot, map, doodle and tittle—and some of the directors involved with other optioned material include names such as Costa-Gavras, Jean-Luc Godard, Aronofsky."
The award-winning author of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion (not to mention The Crook Factory, A Winter Haunting and many others) is currently at work on a new book entitled The Terror. Simmons advised that it's a "supense novel based on a real historical event" and that it is "the first novel I've written 'on spec'—just for myself with no publisher waiting for it—since 1989 (when I brought Hyperion, Phases of Gravity and Carrion Comfort all to the marketplace at once), and I'm very excited about it. I hope to finish it in the autumn, but there's no deadline on it and I'll keep researching it and writing and rewriting until I get it right."
You've said that Ilium and, particularly, Olympos (which feature three different narratives, quantum teleportation, parallel universes, dozens of characters, etc.) were two of your most complicated novels. Now that you have some hindsight on the project, what was the most difficult aspect of writing it?
Simmons: Beginning writers, most reviewers and critics, and even Ph.D. candidates picking over the literary bones of their chosen authors frequently underestimate the importance of structure in the success or failure of a novel.
With Ilium and Olympos, the structure was essentially triune—the complicated tale of the contemporary observer named Hockenberry suddenly thrust into the Trojan War, the long odyssey of my "moravec" (organic cybernetic intelligences) heroes as they crossed the solar system to try to save all our worlds from quantum destruction, and finally the tale of the few hundred thousand post-literate, post-cultural, post-societal, post-anything-interesting "old-style" humans left here on a future Earth.
It's one thing just to tell a simple picaresque tale with characters heading off in different directions in which to have their adventures—"Sam, Frodo, you go that way ... Leg'O'Lamb, Gamgulp, Gimpy, you come with me ..."—but quite another challenge to have the three structural plotlines reflect the three different deep themes of the diptych and then to sublet sections of each strand out to different characters for long periods. For instance, in parts of the long Hockenberry-Trojan War strand of Ilium and Olympos, we might follow Achilles for many chapters, or perhaps the ongoing struggle between Hera and Zeus, but we could never lose sight for long of our only first-person narrator, Hockenberry. In the old-style humans strand, we'd stick with Harman, Ada, Daeman and others for many pages, but then they'd go their separate ways and we'd follow the individual characters as each reflected some specific commentary on a post-literate, post-courage world where humanity has lost most of the elements that make us human. The moravec strand was the most consistent—Mahnmut and Orphu of Io were good friends and stuck together through most of the entire megillah—but they certainly had a lot of territory to cover: Jovian deep space, Europa and Io, the oceans, coasts and inland seas of terraformed Mars, Mount Olympos of the gods, Phobos, a spacecraft voyage between Mars and Earth in a 1950s-style atom-bomb-powered spacecraft with a Coca-Cola conveyor-belt delivery system for the Coke-can-sized bombs, the Rings of Earth and the undersea oceans of our future world ... they got around.
But every paragraph and page of each separate helix strand had to connect thematically and in terms of overall plot with the other strands.
The structural result was a mega-novel hung on the spine of a spiral triple helix, with each major story strand—braided over 3,000-some pages of manuscript and containing hundreds of thousands of elements—connecting, reinforcing, advancing and illuminating the other plotlines. And always while never allowing the complex helix structure of the tale to get in the way of the storytelling.
At least that was the plan.
Early on in Olympos, Orphu comments on "the staggering complexity of human consciousness," and, later, during a big revelatory scene, the moravec gets into a discussion about representing human consciousness as a "standing wavefront phenomenon" and how the human mind works as an interferometer, "perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts." This is territory you've walked through before in The Hollow Man. What originally drew you to this cutting-edge area of physics?
Simmons: It's a cliché to say that "space is the Final Frontier," but I think the people who say that—whether in William Shatner's voice or not—are wrong. Human consciousness may be the final frontier of our species' exploration—human consciousness and the consciousness of all sentient creatures yet to be discovered or invented. And the scope of that consciousness with its possible connections to the underlying quantum reality of the universe itself may make astronomical spaces between solar systems and galaxies look small.
I'll pause here to say that I'm not into New Age mysticism and the myriad Dancing Wu-Li Masters/Tao of Pooh oversimplifications of quantum theory—such prattlings make my gorge become buoyant—but I would suggest that ongoing research leading us to think that the brain ain't most like a computer, is not digital and is not the mere electrochemical mulch of the kind that would make frog's legs jump, but rather may be a standing wavefront interaction with that other standing wavefront that is physical reality ... well, this is scary stuff.
One reviewer recently commented, rather condescendingly I thought, something to the effect that in Ilium and Olympos "Simmons uses the word 'quantum' to substitute for 'magic' whenever he needs something magical done and never really explores the quantum machines the way a more traditional SF tale would."
Something like that. I'm not going to go dig up the review to get the precise wording. But he was right. All true. Mea culpa. When the post-humans create "Brane Holes"—contact points along the membranes of string-theory universes twisted through 12-dimensional Calabi-Yau space—I don't stop the narrative for five pages to discourse on quantum theory, even if I understood it well enough to do so. And although I've read everything I can dig up and download about ongoing research (and successes) of quantum teleportation (real teleportation! Too damned bad it's only of subatomic bits and only if no information is allowed to go along with the quanta), I didn't devote chapters to explanation of how it works or how it might science-fictionally be extended to big things like atoms, human beings and chariots carrying pissed-off gods.
The basic themes of Ilium and Olympos deal with the interaction of consciousness and the physical cosmos on a quantum scale. The quantum devices don't interest me too much—the reviewer was right to say that I took more care in describing the Eiffelbahn—an Earth-encompassing cable-car system chugging between thousands of Eiffel Towers. But the implications of quantum theory meeting standing wavefront consciousness theory are pursued and explicated throughout the two novels. (It just looked as if our moravec characters were talking about art and literature.)
If sentient consciousness really does resonate on the string- and quantum Calabi-Yau-space level of reality in the sense that we're beginning to see that it might, then we have a consciousness-cosmos to explore of such a scale that once again we may have to fall back onto religious terminology to describe the significance of it. And in scientific terms, we haven't even launched our first quantum-consciousness Sputnik into low Earth orbit.
A metaphysical postulation made by one the characters suggests that other universes may have been created, essentially, by the imaginative ardor of artistic geniuses such as Shakespeare. That, too, seems like an idea that took hold of your imagination some time ago. (I recall a conversation between two characters in Hyperion during which one tells the other that some fictional characters—such as Tom Sawyer—often seem more real to us than people we have met, but never really connected with, throughout our lives). Were there particular novels you read as a youth that planted this idea in your head, or is it something you developed on your own?
Simmons: This theory of mine may have come from that disease and period of mental illness we've all suffered our way through—you know, "adolescence." It's a time of unbridled solipsism. Most of us went through the dementia of thinking of ourselves in the third person—"Danny is walking down the street now." "Danny looks damned good in the mirror today, if only that acne of his would clear up."
One definition of sanity (and even more of empathy) is knowing that you're not the only real person in the world, that the universe is not a figment of your imagination peopled by lesser folks there only to serve in supporting-actor roles. The alternative is to be a sociopath.
And yet ...
... when I read Tom Sawyer when I was about 8 years old, it struck me then that Tom and Huck and Jim, mere literary characters (although I probably thought in terms of mere made-up guys), were more real than a lot of kids I knew in "real life." They were certainly more interesting. And then I soon met Holden Caulfield, and Scout and Gem and Boo, Lord Greystoke, Yossarian ... working my way up to that ultimate encounter with fictional consciousness, Mr. Hamlet. They all seemed more real than the vast majority of walking-talking human beings around me.
The idea that a writer—some dead guy named Mark Twain—could create a kid more interesting and alive to me than those walking-around kids I'd see the next day on the streets and in the yards and on the playing fields made me pause, think and chew on the bill of my baseball cap.
If the universe really does exist, beneath all or most other layers of perception, as essentially a vibrating-string note among a wild symphony of equally vibrating harmonic or non-harmonic quantum notes being played on similar strings, and if consciousness is primarily a wavefront phenomenon which allows us not only to resonate to such notes but to play a few of our own back here where we sit among the other quantum woodwinds, what effect might genius—that rarest of human artistic and creative anomalies—have on the structure of things?
Shakespeare might well be a supernova amid the galaxies and starfields of lesser consciousness, the shockwave rearranging star systems and irradiating barren worlds into mutation and new forms of life. Rembrandt could well be a black hole tunneling right through consciousness-space and popping out elsewhere on the continuum of our understanding of ourselves and everything else. Beethoven may be the consciousness-cosmos equivalent of colliding galaxies.
What would be the laws of gravitation, light, radiation and evolution in a universe of consciousness-reality in which genius exploded on the cosmic scene from time to time to change the very rules of reality? Could this be true? Could it be more than a mere SF-y, sci-fi-ish, speculative-fiction speculation?
Probably not. It's probably all piffle and floof. But it was a great joy to write about, especially when the triune structure of the two huge novels were there precisely to deal with the three stages in the history of humankind itself—the preliterate heroic, the height of literate creative and the post-literate decadent—focusing on what we lose when we lose our racial memory of such works of genius.
I'm not the first to notice this, but obviously themes found in SF novels are usually commentary about the present—not predictions about the future. In Ilium and Olympos—before the s--t hits the fan—the old-style humans are illiterate (or preliterate) and don't function well during their daily lives without the help of gadgets which do things for them or make their lives considerably easier. Are these commentaries on present-day society? If so, care to elaborate further?
Simmons: Not really. The 3,000 or so manuscript pages of Ilium and Olympos were my effort on elaborating further on the idea of healthy and unhealthy trends in today's (and tomorrow's) social trends. Who was it—Jack Warner? Sam Goldwyn?—who said, "If you want to send a message, use Western Union."
But I am pleased that at least one other reviewer has seen and explicated the deep structure beneath Ilium and Olympos—the attempt on my part to look at the heroic early stage of humankind as epitomized in The Iliad, a time with no writing, almost no mercy and nothing of what constitutes our modern humanist ideals of the 21st century—but an age in which what was lacking in subtlety and empathy was certainly made up for in courage, honor and a ceaseless striving for excellence in all things.
And then there is the Heroic Literary Age that keeps reappearing in the two novels—that brief time in which physical courage and empire-building and heroic sense of self could coexist with Shakespeare and Browning and Tennyson and Yeats and Frost.
Finally there is the age of the live-for-today (because we can't remember yesterday) post-humans in Ilium and Olympos—an age that must come to an end either with the extinction of our species (good riddance after what they've devolved into) or with a rediscovery of these earlier, bolder, stronger, gutsier yet more reflective elements, of the human spirit, synthesized by our long maturing process over many millennia.
I always swore that I'd never write a coming-of-age novel—all that solipsistic whining and adolescent angst bores the socks off me—but here I've gone and written two of them. It just happens to be the coming of age of the human race.
Your novels obviously work on many levels for readers, but do they satisfy different elements for you as well? You were a teacher for over 18 years, so it's hard to imagine the desire to pass on knowledge—even through a novel—would be completely out of your system. Obviously your novels must satisfy the aesthete in you. But do they satisfy the teacher in you as well? After all, so many readers are either introduced (or reintroduced) to the classic works of literature: the poems and plays of Keats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Dante, Shakespeare, etc. As a former teacher, I would think that feeds some sort of fire in you.
Simmons: Is there any greater cliché than the writer who says he (or she) writes to please himself (or herself)? But most of us do. He do. She do. I do.
And any book that works on only one level would be pretty abysmal, wouldn't it? Actually, it wouldn't be a book. We usually call that a movie. (Or maybe we call it The Da Vinci Code or the Left Behind series.) (Note—don't publish my phone number or e-mail address with this interview.)
And if I have an aesthete in there demanding I write aesthete-goodies for myself, he should go over and sit in the corner until he gets over himself. (Or herself.)
And, no, I never write to teach. But I do read to learn. Always. There's a paradox there, but I'll let someone else figure it out. Maybe that over-refined dandy I sent over to the corner.
Do you plan on dipping your toes back into the short-fiction pool again, now that you've put the enormous pressure of writing Olympos behind you? It's been three or four years since your last piece of new short fiction was published, depending on whether one counts your film treatment "The End of Gravity" (from Worlds Enough & Time) as a piece of short fiction.
Simmons: You live in Kansas City. Do you know the Southern and Midwestern sport ... (sic) ... of coon hunting?
The "hunters" sit around a campfire all night drinking and talking and eventually sleeping while the coon dogs—wonderful animals—chase the raccoon in ever-widening circles, baying and howling as they go to let the "hunters" know where they and their prey are. Eventually, toward dawn, the coon gets treed, the bays and howls change in timbre and tone, and the "hunters" rouse themselves to go shoot their next day's supper.
The trick is never to let your coon dogs get a taste of the raccoon. Once they do—once they're blooded that way—you won't even find a tail when you get to the source of all the howling.
I revere short stories. I love the discipline and art of writing in a form where every syllable has to serve at least three purposes to earn the right to appear in that sentence. I love the frisson a properly told short story awards the reader with. I love being able to sit down and consume an entire literary meal (or at least snack) in that one sitting.
I started my career with short fiction, and that was a deliberate choice.
But I'm afraid I done et the raccoon of the novel and discovered that I'm a novelist. I love the structure of novels, the plotting required, the subplotting required and the generous space and time a novel gives both writer and reader to learn about the characters. I love the scope of a novel—even the shortest kind—and the potential it has to create a new universe out there somewhere in nonsemiotic-undeconstructive-quantum-cyberconsciousness.
So, to be disgustingly honest, I find that I'd rather spend the short time I have on this planet writing parts of novels rather than series of short stories, even while I continue to admire those who concentrate on short fiction or—somehow—make a living writing it exclusively.
I didn't mean to make this decision. As the cannibals said to the missionary's family who came to take the lady's clothes away after they ate her—"It was an accident. It shan't happen again."
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