Muse of Fire

A writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres, winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in the same year, 1990. He has continued to split his output since between science fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night)… although a few of his novels are downright unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for instance, which is a straight literary novel although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror, depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “mainstream” stories, as does his most recent collection, Lovedeath. Some of his most recent books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, including The Crook Factory, a spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway; Darwin’s Blade, a “statistical thriller” halfway between mystery and horror; Hardcase, a hard-boiled detective novel; and A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. Coming up is a new novel, The Terror. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.

Simmons has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the New Space Opera with his glittering, baroque Hyperion novels, and his two most recent novels, Ilium and Olympus, which use the Trojan War as the backdrop for an ambitious space opera duology. In the complex and multi-faceted novella that follows, he takes us on a journey of unparalleled scope and scale, in company with a hapless group of actors who find themselves burdened with the responsibility of putting on the single most important theatrical performance in human history…