He questions the ramifications of God’s call for Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, which Weintraub sees as parallel to time’s slow consumption of his daughter. Simmons chronicles the anguish of a father watching his vivacious and accomplished daughter lose a day of her life each day, waking a day younger and, as if she had Alzheimer’s, with no memory of anything past her new biological age.Īnd so Weintraub argues with God. When we first meet Weintraub, he is holding his now infant daughter, and is in a literal race against time to find a cure for his daughter’s condition before she reverse-ages out of existence. Weintraub’s daughter, a brilliant archaeologist, is afflicted with a “temporal condition” which causes her to start aging backwards. One of the main characters in Hyperion, for instance, is Sol Weintraub, a Jewish university professor from a planet described rather like the Peoria of Simmons’ youth or the Indiana where he attended Wabash College. Although neither Jewish nor even, as far as I can tell, a conventionally believing Christian, many of his novels feature Jewish characters, and the fate of Israel and the persistence of anti-Semitism have been repeated themes in his writing. Simmons is also the major science fiction writer whose work most frequently focuses on Jews. Olympos is even dedicated to Harold Bloom-presumably inspired by the Yale scholar’s literary criticism and not his bad fantasy novel, The Flight to Lucifer.

For instance, Hyperion and its three sequels ( The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion) weave Keats and his poetry into their imagined future, while Ilium (2003) and its sequel Olympos (2005) play out Homer’s Iliad on Mars with the aid of nanotechnology, and depict cybernetic organisms that debate the merits of Proust as they explore the icy seas of alien planets. His six major sci-fi novels, beginning with the 1989 Hyperion (which won the Hugo Award), treat the classic sci-fi theme of the relationship between technology and humanity, and they also feature a more distinctive concern with the nature of literary genius. Not all of them are science fiction-he works in other popular genres too-but most are bestsellers, and many have won awards. Science fiction writer Dan Simmons is the author of more than two dozen novels.

Olympos dan simmons