I forget what I’d read of his that made me pick up Flashback. Now I wish I could forget Flashback. He seemed to have the mindset that liberals don’t get to be right on anything. I don’t mind a writer being conservative, I loved Jerry Pournelle who, when he portrayed the other side, did so honestly.. But with the Simmons book, the vitriol dripped off of every page. I am only grateful that I picked it up at a library sale for maybe a buck and didn’t pay full price.
Yes. That’s when I gave up on him. The book was just an excuse to lovingly describe firearms.
That was near his last book. Only two more after Flashback, plus one more that was supposed to be published in 2025, but wasn’t. (It was also supposed to be published in 2017, but wasn’t.) He got a brain injury in 2014 that apparently left him unable to continue writing much.
I enjoyed Hyperion Cantos 1&2, and agree that 3&4 are very different books. I do actually enjoy 3&4, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not sure I’d recommend them to fans of the first two.
I read and enjoyed the Illium/Olympos dualogy, but didn’t feel the stories intertwined as successfully as Hyperion. And with the disappointment of the latter 4 novels, I didn’t read anything else, and thus was ignorant of the changing political tone.
Still, I’m a sucker for anyone who works classic literature, poetry, and history into quality scifi, so I’ll miss their writing, even if not the person they became. 
Oh, I hadn’t heard of that? In what way?
Guess I’ll have to read more and find out.
It’s not unprecedented I suppose: there was James Hogan who started off as a fairly interesting almost hard-SF writer and then went off into woo-woo in later life?
Oh no!
Hyperion is one of my favorite books of all-time too! So, so good. In fact, I just bought an old hardcover copy of Hyperion for my bookshelf. I’ve already read it (more than once) but wanted a nice copy on my shelf. I just got it yesterday.
RIP Dan. One of the best.
Google up some reviews of Flashback.
Also, take a look at this Reddit thread (for just one choice)
Or better, don’t.
Keep a good image of Simmons in you thoughts and dig no further.
This. I prefer to avoid the later works (and news stories) of creators who have gone off the deep end like that, just so it doesn’t tarnish their earlier work in my mind.
T. Kingfisher memorialized him on Bluesky:
I love Ursula but I think she’s being unduly harsh with Hyperion and I suspect she’s having trouble separating the work from the artist.
Dan Simmons blocked me on AOL because I pointed out to him that Paul Dure’s cruciform was removed by the Shrike in Fall of Hyperion so it made no sense to have him resurrected in Endymion.
There was also that bizarro short story that had a time traveler go back to 2002/2004, whenever to tell the protagonist about how all the Moslems destroyed the world. I even started a thread about that, but the link to the original story is broken.
I have just started a reread of Hyperion after all this. It isn’t going to stop being one of my all-time favorite books. (I just recently reread another favorite, the 7 books in Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth.)