Dan Simmons has long been one of the best genre authors out there, flitting between astoundingly inventive, layered and profound takes on sci-fi and horror with ease.
But so far – apart from tentative interest by Darren Aronofsky in adapting his brilliant debut novel, Song of Kali – he’s remained untouched by Hollywood. So, you should know the phrase that’s coming next.
Until now. For today British producer Graham King announced plans to adapt Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos series of sci-fi novels into movies.
The sprawling, ambitious and award-winning series – of which there have been four so far (assuming you bought the individual books and not the two omnibuses. Omnibi?) – deals with, on the surface, a space war threatening the planet of Hyperion, with its electricity-producing Tesla trees and Time Tombs (artefacts that actually travel backwards through time) and terrifying bladed Shrike monster (think a cross between Shredder and Danger in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men), while seven pilgrims travel to the Time Tombs to stave off the war. Easy enough to adapt, right?
Yet there’s a reason why the books have been left alone for almost 20 years – the structure and timeline are multi-fragmented and incredibly complex, told from the point of view of each of the pilgrims for the first half, crammed with literary references from Chaucer to Boccaccio to Keats that are essential to the plot, and would prove a nightmare to adapt. The bigger themes deal with god and destiny and fate and other big concepts that Hollywood usually skirts around.
So step forward Trevor Sands, the writer with the cojones big enough to try to adapt the first two books, Hyperion and The Fall Of Hyperion, into a single film (with the other two books, Endymion and The Rise Of Endymion, on standby for sequels).
Sands has, apparently, found a way to adapt Hyperion, choosing to pare down the multiple viewpoints of the book and find a throughline without making it all too confusing. What sense that makes for a story expressly modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (at least for the first half) is debateable, but if he succeeds this could be the next 2001.
King, who produced Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, has set the project up at Warner Bros. and will produce via his own company, GK Films.