The Harper Collins Morrow EOS catalog of upcoming titles includes the following copy for OLYMPOS' July, 2005, release MULTIPLE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR: HUGO AWARD • WORLD FANTASY AWARD • LOCUS AWARD BRAM STOKER AWARD • SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE AWARD • BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD BRITISH FANTASY AWARD • THEODORE STURGEON AWARD • COLORADO BOOK AWARD
OLYMPOS   Dan Simmons
The author of the Hyperion Cantos delivers his epic-concluding companion to Ilium – the novel that “sets new standards for SF in the new century” raves acclaimed author Peter F. Hamilton
Intertwining Homeric themes of fate, ceremony, friendship, duty, and courage with nonstop action and SF panache, Olympos begins with Greek and Trojan heroes led by the briefly allied Achilles and Hector laying siege to the home of the gods. But the conflict soon spreads far beyond mere humankind and their ancient gods, pitting Beings with incredible powers against one another and humanity – entities with names such as Setebos, Night, Prospero, Caliban, Sycorax, and the Demogorgon – thereby threatening the existence of every living being in our solar system and beyond. A breathtaking work of high-concept science fiction, Olympos will be eagerly anticipated by fans everywhere. Dan Simmons is the author of the Hugo-Award-winning Hyperion, Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort, Worlds Enough & Time, and other respected works. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado.	PRAISE FOR ILIUM: “Simmons’s scope is truly staggering, his inventiveness continues to impress, and the narrative offers something for everyone.” – Kirkus Reviews “Magnificently original.” -- Denver Post “Only Simmons could mix together Homer, Shakespeare, and Proust with black holes, Turing machines, little green men, and big honking robots to come up with a tale of high adventure that’s also an engrossing meditation on humanity’s past and future.” – Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War
MARKETING CAMPAIGN National Print Advertising in Locus, New York Times Book Review   7-City Author Tour: Dayton, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, San Diego, Seattle   On-line Promotion   Official Author Website: www.DanSimmons.com   Reader's Edition Available   9-Copy Floor Display 0-06-079450-X $233.55 ($335.55 Can.)   13-Copy Mixed Hardcover/Mass Market Floor Display 4 copies of Olympos and 9 copies of Ilium 0-06-079495-X $175.71 ($246.71 Can.)	Ilium was a New York Times Extended list bestseller, was chosen as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2003, won the Locus Award, and was nominated for a Hugo Award. Eos will publish the mass market edition in June 2005   The Hyperion Cantos books have more than 1.1 million copies in print.   Special effects giant Digital Domain and producer Barnet Bain (What Dreams May Come) have announced plans to bring Ilium and Olympos to the screen as major motion pictures.    SCIENCE FICTION    0-380-97894-6    $25.95 ($36.95 Can.)    480 pages; 6x9    Carton Quantity: 16

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A sequel to Simmons's Ilium (2003) offers up the Trojan War along with elements from The Tempest, The Time Machine, Victorian poets and pop SF.

Ilium ended with the Greek and Trojan heroes allied against the Olympian gods, advanced space-going robots called moravecs aiding the human side. Meanwhile, in a different reality, a lovely but decadent human civilization is under attack from its feral former servants, the robotlike voynix. A third plot strand now updates the conflict between the sorcerer Prospero, Caliban and Caliban's monstrous god Setebos. And the revived 20th-century American scholar Hockenberry attempts to chronicle the events while making love to volatile Helen of Troy. Simmons brings each subplot to a boil and spins off sub-subplots about Achilles' love for a dead Amazon queen, Odysseus' voyage to the alternate Earth with the moravecs, the arrival of Setebos and his minions in what was once Paris, etc. Everything comes together into a solid adventure story, with all the mysteries explained in respectably up-to-date SF terms. At the same time, Simmons adopts the device of having his characters quote freely from Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, Browning, Proust and a host of other sources that liberal arts majors can have fun spotting. The author often gives his borrowings an ironic twist--as when Odysseus quotes Tennyson's "Ulysses" to a classical scholar who half-recognizes the poem, or when Prospero objects to playing himself in a production of The Tempest, not wanting to memorize so many lines. Homeric tags alternate with tough-guy street talk, and several of the moravec scientists turn out to be Star Trek fans. Simmons's gift for vivid description is evident throughout, as well. He effectively combines a serious subject, ironic perspective, strong action and believable (if not always sympathetic) characters.

Ambitious, witty, moving: Simmons at his best.

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Publishers Weekly Review of OLYMPOS

OLYMPOS
DAN SIMMONS.Eos,$25.95 (576p)
ISBN 0-380-97894-6
DShakespeare’s rawing fromTempest Homer’sand the Iliad, work of several 19th-century poets, Simmons achieves another triumph in this majestic, if convoluted, sequel to his much-praised Ilium (2003). Posthumans masquerading as the Greek gods and living on Mars travel back and forth through time and alternate universes to interfere in the real Trojan War, employing a resurrected late 20th-century classics professor, Thomas Hockenberry, as their tool. Meanwhile, the last remaining old-style human beings on a far-future Earth must struggle for survival against a variety of hostile forces. Superhuman entities with names
like Prospero, Caliban and Ariel lay complex plots, using human beings as game pieces. From the outer solar system, an
advanced race of semiorganic Artificial Intelligences, called moravecs, observe Earth and Mars in consternation, trying to
make sense of the situation, hoping to shift the balance of power before out-of-control quantum forces destroy everything.
This is powerful stuff, rich in both high- tech sense of wonder and literary allusions, but Simmons is in complete control of his material as half a dozen baroque plot lines smoothly converge on a rousing and highly satisfying conclusion. Agent, Richard Curtis.7-city author tour. (June 28)

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OLYMPOS Sneak Preview

click here for OLYMPOS Sneak Preview.

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MISTER KURTZ, HE DEAD

Dan’s extremely hard-boiled former P.I. hero Joe Kurtz is no more.

Although Kurtz had survived attempts on his life by the mafia, the Buffalo P.D., fellow inmates, his mafia-don girlfriend, and assorted hoodlums (and took more lumps than a Brit with a sweet tooth dropping sugar cubes in his tea), Joe Kurtz finally met his demise this autumn by an unlikely hand – his creator’s.

“I owed one more Joe Kurtz novel to St. Martin’s Press,” Dan reported, “but I bought back that book, thus putting an effective end to the Joe Kurtz series.”

The Kurtz books, consisting of the three novels HARDCASE, HARD FREEZE, and HARD AS NAILS – what Dan’s brother Wayne uncouthly referred to as “the Viagra series” – had originally been designed to be a single ultra-hardboiled novel, but Dan had enjoyed the character of Joe Kurtz and the Buffalo, New York, setting, and agreed to do more books about the ex-P.I. who now did private investigations mostly for the Mafia.

“I liked Kurtz,” Dan said, “and I really enjoyed returning to Buffalo and its surrounding areas such as Lackawanna from time to time to seek out some mean streets and scenic locations. I also enjoyed working with my editor at St. Martins, Marc Resnick . . . Marc was always enthusiastic about the Kurtz novels, offered great editorial advice, and was a pleasure to work with.”

So why kill Kurtz off?

“In the end it came down to scheduling,” said Dan. “In both 2002 and 2003 I was doing a major novel such as ILIUM for Harper Collins EOS and then a Joe Kurtz novel for St. Martins in the same year, while trying to find time for screenplays and other projects. After OLYMPOS – which weighs in at 1,300 manuscript pages – I just ran out of steam. I didn’t want to shortchange the next Kurtz novel . . . so I killed him off instead. Think of it in terms of literally buying time for myself.”

The proposed title for the next Joe Kurtz book was HARD DAY DYING. Was it true that Dan was going to throw Joe off Reichenbach Falls in that book anyway?

“As was true in the first three Kurtz books, Joe was in for some rough treatment in the fourth novel,” said Simmons. “But in the end it wasn’t going to be Joe Kurtz who experienced the actual dying part of that hard day. Let’s just say that Joe Kurtz wasn’t a guy you wanted to make an enemy of unless you had to. And I was curious in HARD DAY DYING to see which woman Kurtz ended up with – the mafia babe or the tough female cop. Now I may never know.”

In a mild twist of irony, actor Thomas Jane (Deep Blue Sea, Dreamcatcher, The Punisher) had recently taken an interest in Joe Kurtz as a possible character for a TV series or feature film.

“Joe’s still out there doing his thing – I just won’t be taking notice of it any more,” says Dan. “And his first three books will remain available in paperback . . . I hope. I like Tom Jane as an actor; he reminds me a little of the young Steve McQueen. And I’d enjoy seeing a movie or TV show made based on the character because I love the setting of Buffalo, New York. If they did shoot a series there, many of the street names might be familiar to viewers because the bible for the old “Hill Street Blues” TV show told writers to use Buffalo street names for the unnamed city that series took place in. I bet you didn’t know that.”

No, we didn’t. Thank you, Dan, for that piece of trivia.

And farewell, Joe Kurtz, wherever you are.

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ILIUM wins Locus Readers Poll Award for Best Novel

Winners of the 2004 Locus Awards have been announced in Locus Magazine's July 2004 issue, along with complete results of this year's readers poll. Full results of the voting can be found at Locus online at http://www.locusmag.com/2004/News/
06_LocusAwards.html
 
The Locus Awards are based on ballots sent in by readers of Locus Magazine, the perennially unofficial “official magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field.” Voters run the full gamut of readers, fans, professional writers, agents, editors, publishers, and others with a strong and vested interest in imaginative literature and speculative fiction. This year there were 134 SF novels nominated for Best Novel on 538 ballots.

For the past several years Locus Awards winners have been announced at a banquet during Westercon; however this year arrangements could not be made with the Westercon committee. The awards were officially presented at a ceremony at Worldcon in Boston, Friday 3 September at 11 a.m. Winner for Best SF Novel is -- • ILLIUM, Dan Simmons (Subterranean; Eos)

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      HYPERION as a video game?

Discussions are currently under way to adapt the HYPERION Saga as a high-tech video and computer game. Negotiations are still in progress and Dan is being represented by Michael Prevett of Relevant Entertainment.

(Left) The Hyperion “movie poster” art used here is a work of art from one of our contributors, an artist named “Sparth”.

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Jane K. Simmons: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

As Dan mentioned in his June Message, his daughter Jane Kathryn Simmons graduated from New York's Hamilton College in May as a comparative literature major. During her last two years at Hamilton, Jane's interests focused on James Joyce's ULYSSES and Marcel Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. (In June, 2004, she pursued her interest in Joyce to the Bloomsday celebration in Dublin, where more than 800 scholars from around the world descended on that Irish city to celebrate the annual James Joyce Festival and -- this year -- the centenary of the day in history, June 16, 1904, on which all the events in Joyce's ULYSSES take place. Reportedly, a good time was had by all -- especially, Jane says, during the Official James Joyce Pub Crawl.)

Since then she's attended the Maine Photographic Workshop in filmmaking and video production and currently -- as of December -- is an intern in a documentary film production company. Her dad hopes she hasn't completely abandoned the Word for the Visual.

Part of Jane's senior thesis at Hamilton was a series of her poems based on the characters, themes, and evolving complexity of style in Proust's masterpiece. We've had some nice feedback from readers who enjoyed perusing Jane's poetry -- subsumed under the Wallace Stegner-borrowed heading "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" -- so her proud father decided to keep the poems on this web site for a while longer.

You can reach Jane's poems by clicking here.

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HYPERION Role Playing Game in St. Petersburg, Russia

In May of this year in Saint Petersburg, a role game was created around the Dan Simmons novel HYPERION. Ananev Jurin has sent these interesting photos taken during the playing of this game.