in English from Wabash College in 1970, winning a national Phi Beta Kappa Award during his senior year for excellence in fiction, journalism and art.ĭan received his Masters in Education from Washington University in St. It is a work of wit, erudition, and tightly compressed grandeur that only Dan Simmons could have written.ĭan Simmons grew up in various cities and small towns in the Midwest, including Brimfield, Illinois, which was the source of his fictional "Elm Haven" in 1991's SUMMER OF NIGHT and 2002's A WINTER HAUNTING. Skillfully deploying the elements of traditional science fiction-advanced technologies, alien encounters, strange new worlds- Muse of Fire entertains and illuminates while celebrating the best, most durable elements of our cultural legacy. What follows is an intellectual adventure story of astonishing richness and depth in which disparate species face each other across an insurmountable divide, their only point of contact the indelible language of William Shakespeare, the story's true muse. In doing so, they change the course of human-and non-human-history.
A band of Archons-members of the usually invisible ruling caste-enter the makeshift theater and join the audience. A routine performance of Much Ado About Nothing is in progress when an unprecedented event occurs. The story begins on the planet known as 25-25-261B, a regular stop on the players' interstellar tour.
Against this backdrop, Simmons introduces the Earth's Men, a wandering troupe of players dedicated to presenting the works of Shakespeare to every accessible corner of the settled universe. The scattered human remnants occupy the lowest rung of a Gnostic hierarchy that dominates both their secular and spiritual lives. Earth, drained of its oceans and populated largely by the dead, is little more than a distant memory. Muse of Fire takes place in a remote future age in which the human enterprise has all but ground to a halt.
His latest, a novella-length tale of startling originality, beautifully embodies these qualities, reaffirming Simmons's position as one of the finest storytellers of our time. Since the publication of Song of Kali in 1985, Dan Simmons has produced a substantial body of fiction notable for its vigor, variety, and sheer imaginative reach.
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