Dan Simmons, whose many novels in multiple genres featured explorers stuck in the Arctic ice and terrorized by a giant monster; Sherlock Holmes and the writer Henry James investigating a death in Gilded Age America; seven pilgrims trekking to a war-torn galaxy; and a young Sioux warrior possessed by the spirit of Gen. George Armstrong Custer, died on Feb. 21 in Lakewood, Colo. He was 77.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by a stroke, said his daughter, Jane Simmons. He lived in Longmont, Colo., about 40 miles north of Denver.
“Writing fiction isn’t an activity for the fainthearted,” the critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 2007, “and anyone who has managed, as Dan Simmons has, to generate two dozen books (in an impressive variety of genres) in just 22 years clearly deserves credit for discipline, diligence, resolve and, most of all, confidence.”
Mr. Simmons wrote more than 30 novels and short story collections under the rubrics science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, crime and historical fiction — always listening to his own muses.
“He said from the beginning that he wanted to write what he wanted to write,” his wife, Karen Simmons, said in an interview, “and if the publisher didn’t want him to go in that direction, he’d switch publishers.”
Mr. Simmons was perhaps best known for the “Hyperion Cantos,” a space opera in four volumes. The first, “Hyperion” (1989), is an apocalyptic epic about a galactic war set in the 29th century, where seven pilgrims travel to the doomed planet Hyperion to face off against the Shrike, a terrifying creature also known as the Lord of Pain.
In The San Francisco Chronicle, the critic Kate Regan called “The Hyperion” “science fiction’s answer to ‘The Canterbury Tales.’”
Mr. Simmons juggled horror and historical fiction in “The Terror” (2007), his take on the British explorer Capt. John Franklin’s failed Arctic expedition to find the Northwest Passage that began in 1845. Basing his book on the tragedy of more than 100 icebound men on two British Navy ships who would all perish, Mr. Simmons added a fictional mutiny, a tongueless Inuit woman and an enormous, supernatural polar bear-like creature.
When “The Terror” was adapted into a 10-part series on AMC in 2018, it was “fun on all sorts of levels,” Mr. Simmons told Wabash magazine, a publication of Wabash College, his alma mater, in 2019. It boosted his hope — to date unrealized — that one of his books would be turned into a movie.
“I want the Technicolor movie screen,” he said.
His agent, Richard Curtis, said the attention the series drew vaulted sales of his books to “unprecedented levels.” Millions of Simmons books are in print, he said, and “Hyperion” has gone through at least 100 printings worldwide.
Mr. Simmons’s honors included a Hugo Award for science fiction; two World Fantasy Awards; four Bram Stoker Awards for horror works; and a dozen Locus Awards, given in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres.
Daniel Joseph Simmons was born on April 4, 1948, in Peoria, Ill., and grew up in Brimfield, Ill., and Pittsboro, Ind. His father, Robert, worked for an automotive testing company, and his mother, Kathryn (Catton) Simmons, managed the home.
Dan began writing stories as a child — one of them, about a man walking on the moon, drew doubts from his teacher, in 1956 — and loved watching B-movies.
He graduated from Wabash, in Crawfordsville, Ind., in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in English. After receiving a master’s degree in education from Washington University in St. Louis in 1971, he pursued a 16-year career as an elementary schoolteacher in Washington, Mo., Buffalo and Longmont.
In the classroom, he gave students a preview of his literary future: Years before he wrote “Hyperion,” he told them the basics of the story in daily installments.
Mr. Simmons had nearly given up hope of being a published author when he reluctantly paid to attend a writers’ conference in Colorado in 1981.
One of the writers who critiqued his and others’ stories was Harlan Ellison, a cantankerous star of science fiction and fantasy, as Mr. Simmons recalled in 2013 in an interview with Nightmare magazine. At one point, Mr. Ellison read a 5,000-word story by Mr. Simmons, “The River Styx Runs Upstream,” and commented: “Mr. Simmons, you’re a writer. Whether you ever write anything else again or not doesn’t matter because you are a writer.”
The story, about a mysterious group that resurrects the dead, ran in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone magazine in 1982 — Mr. Simmons’s first published work. “I loved my mother very much,” it began. “After her funeral, after the coffin was lowered, the family went home and waited for her return.”
Mr. Simmons left teaching five years later, after the publication of his first novel, “Song of Kali” (1985), a horror story about a magazine editor searching for a manuscript in Calcutta by a missing poet, and before the release in 1989 of his second novel, “Carrion Comfort,” a horror story featuring “mind” vampires who prey on people by imposing their will on them.
His many other books include “Hardcase” (2001), the first in his series of hard-boiled detective novels; “Black Hills” (2010), a story that begins when Custer’s ghost enters the Sioux warrior Paha Sapa at the Little Big Horn; “Flashback” (2011), a dystopic science fiction novel about a bankrupt United States where immigrants pour across the border from Mexico, Americans take a drug to recall better times and a mosque is built on Ground Zero; and “The Fifth Heart” (2015), the Holmes-James mystery.
“Some authors find one thing they do well and do it repeatedly: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle,” said David Morrell, a friend of Mr. Simmons’s whose own genre-hopping oeuvre includes “First Blood,” which introduced the Rambo character to popular culture in 1972. “But Dan had this awesome ability to pick up any genre he was interested in.”
Before he died, Mr. Simmons had nearly finished his last book, “Omega Canyon,” a spy thriller set in the final days of America’s building the atomic bomb in 1945. He wrote it over several years and through various illnesses, Mr. Curtis, his agent, said.
Mr. Simmons married Karen Logerquist in 1974. In addition to her and his daughter, he is survived by a brother, Wayne, and two grandchildren.
The novelist Stephen King, another friend, said in an interview that he had a dream about Mr. Simmons after learning of his death.
“I was walking on my road, and he came along in an ATV,” he said. “I held up a note for him to read, but he just went by me — and into the fog.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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