I read Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Ilium, and Olympos and decided I needed to read more Dan Simmons. So I bought The Terror a couple years ago. Instead of getting the next book in the Hyperion series set on a different planet in a different time like the four other books I enjoyed, I decided to pick up a novel set on Earth involving arctic travel in the 1800s. Pretty risky for a boring person!!!
About halfway through it I was thinking that a lot of the story seemed¬†sort of real and then looked it up and found out that it’s based on a real expedition that was sort of a big deal in the 1800s. I didn’t want to spoil it for myself so I stopped reading things online about it. But after I finished I consumed a bunch of book reviews and then browsed some historical articles. Anyway, I stumbled upon a forum of apparently sophisticated people (think: the exact opposite of YouTube commenters) sharing actual coherent thoughts online. And none of them shared the experience of not knowing it was based on a true story. I’m basically that guy that was surprised by the ending of The Perfect Storm. Never going back to that message board.
But as I said, I bought the book a couple years ago and never read more than a paragraph of it until a couple of months ago if I remember correctly. My brother Dan said it was one of the best books he’s read and I remember him staying up pretty late to finish it months ago. And he’s right, it’s really really good. It’s only based on a true story, so like Steven Conrad taking The Pursuit of Happyness and making the slight change of Chris Gardner’s son from a toddler to a five-year-old, Dan Simmons took similar liberty and threw in a hyperintelligent monster polar bear.
And it all works. Eventually you realize the terror isn’t any one thing, it’s everything involved in the expedition that’s trying to kill the sailors: bears, cold, starvation, Eskimos, scurvy, etc. And the most interesting parts are the descriptions of day to day life. Dreary. And cold. For instance, don’t take your gloves off and touch your gun barrel or it’s goodbye skin and chunks of flesh.
My favorite thing about the four Dan Simmons novels I read previously was that he was able to create intricate worlds and tie timelines and different perspectives together. It really blew my mind that one person could think of it all and make anything cohesive out of it. This book has the multiple timelines and character perspectives. But the difference, as mentioned earlier, is that it’s set on Earth and based on reality. You can literally take any sailor’s name out of the book and find it on a real list from the actual expedition, with things matching like age and rank. And the major characters bring up a whole lot of results on Google. Even better, you can do a Google image search and find images of some of their mummified bodies. Dan Simmons weaves it all together and fills the seams in creatively. Great read.