Dan Simmons died on February 21st. He was 77. A stroke, in Longmont, Colorado, where he’d lived and taught sixth grade for years before leaving to write full time.

He wrote lots of books, but the one he’ll be best remembered for is Hyperion**.

If you haven’t read Hyperion, I want to be careful not to over explain it, because the structure is part of the experience. The short version is the novel is built like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It features a group of pilgrims traveling toward something terrible, each telling their story along the way. It won the Hugo Award in 1989. It’s simply one of the best science fiction books of the 20the century. *The Fall of Hyperion *completes their story.

The author might have went off the deep end in the last few years of his life. Simmons got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September 11th. Seriously. However, if you can separate the art from the artist, I highly recommend reading Hyperion (and maybe Carrion Comfort and The Terror, too).