“Dying in Bangkok” (1993)

There’s a lot to sort out about the provenance of this strange story by Dan Simmons. It’s already on the long side (ca. 25 pages) but word is there’s an even longer version (called “Death in Bangkok”) which was incorporated into his 1989 novel Carrion Comfort. The premise from that novel—people among us who can use mental powers to control others—is not really part of this story, or anyway not in the version in the Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Datlow and Windling used “Dying” in the title whereas ISFDB is adamant it is supposed to be “Death.” Somebody has something wrong. The story is extremely and ridiculously over the top and full of cliches, with Vietnam grunts on R&R during the war encountering depraved and decadent scenes in Bangkok brothels. It’s not erotic but there is a grotesque blowjob scene (actually more than one) involving a prehensile tongue that’s what? two and a half feet long? Guys come so hard they shoot blood, which is then consumed by these monsters. I mean... Simmons just patiently lays it out there deadpan. It’s incredibly repulsive stuff but he never breaks character as narrator, just keeps telling it. It’s basically a revenge story, as the main character’s best friend was killed by these exotic prostitutes. He takes years to find them again and set his own trap, which is tediously timebound by attitudes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. His plan is to get infected with HIV before he has his sexual encounter with them. My first and obvious complaint is how racist, and how boomer, everything is here about Bangkok. Simmons reels off statistics about the sex trade in Bangkok and its high levels of HIV infection. He views it all as a freak show and the biggest freaks tend to be Asian. Then the sex scenes are gross, overly detailed, and go on way too long. What I remember of Carrion Comfort is that Simmons had some sadistic tendencies, by which I mean he doesn’t just traffic in extreme violence but also puts his most likable characters in great peril and makes us watch. I never felt like he was getting off on it himself (unlike, say, John D. MacDonald in his Travis McGee novels) but it does feel mechanical about being extreme. Let me tell you about a prehensile tongue that’s two and a half feet long and makes you come blood. Too much! And the revenge story is weak. So I do not count this story as a good one, but I was happy to be reminded of Carrion Comfort, which is a pretty good horror novel.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.