Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons

This was my final read during the Read-A-Thon, the book I spend the last hour and a half reading. It is novella-sized, just a little over 100 pages, and I wanted something that I could finish during that last stretch. Unfortunately, I forgot that you have to pay attention when you read a book by Dan Simmons, so I found myself re-reading passages that my sleepy brain did not understand the first time through. I did finish it by the end.
Reading Dan Simmons is always interesting - he loves to just drop you into the world that he has created for the story, and you have to read carefully so as to not miss any clues about what is going on. This book is no different. It is narrated by Wilbr, a 20 SEY old man (what is SEY, you ask? not sure, Simmons hardly ever outright explains things like that - if I had been less sleepy, I'm sure I would have figured it out) who is a member of a traveling Shakespeare troupe. They travel the galaxy on their ship, the Muse of Fire, performing for the human slaves on the various worlds that the human race can now be found on. All human are slaves, for the most part. There is no real culture or technology any more. There is religion, and obviously there is Shakespeare, but otherwise the human race exists only as drones working for the higher alien beings. The book begins when the Archons, the race of aliens that supervise the humans, request to see a performance of the troupe. This has never happened before. The group realizes they are being tested somehow, and in some way, the fate of the entire human race now rests in their hands.
One thing that you have to love about Simmons' books is that he loves literature, and so do his characters. Obviously Shakespeare is central to this story, and it is interesting how he juxtaposes the Bard's work with a future culture-less humanity. It makes you wonder how Shakespeare survived for so long in this future as it is. This book is really about the redemptive power of art, or literature, and it was a beautiful, comforting read.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

I have never read one of Dan Simmons horror novels, although I have read most of his science fiction. As you may be able to tell from the title, The Terror is a horror novel. The name itself refers to one of the ships in the story, the HMS Terror, whose crew makes up the main characters. The novel is the story of the true quest of the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus, led by Sir John Franklin, to find the fabled Northwest Passage. It is true that the ships were lost and the crews never heard from again. Simmons gives life to them here, spelling out the crew members final days in the arctic. Only in his version, it is not simply cold and lack of resources that kills them. There is also a monster stalking them on the ice.
The book is a page turner at times, definitely scary at times, and very graphic in the various perils that befall the poor crew. The graphic descriptions are not reserved only for those who are killed by the monsters, but also those who are killed by the various diseases that afflict the crew members. So much of the book is taken up with these descriptions, it seems that he should just kill them all off and be done with it. Reading it, you basically decide that that would be better than continuing to read about their deaths in the innumerable permutations that Simmons comes up with.
When crew member, the captain of the Terror, Francis Crozier, experiences a different fate. But it takes so long to get there, that Simmons leaves only a few chapters to tell about it. It would have been preferable to hear less about the drama and despair and death experienced, and learn more of Crozier's experience. It gives the book life and hope, but maybe in a book titled The Terror, life and hope are less important than death.