The Terror - Dan Simmons > Reviews (2)

The Terror is a novel by American author Dan Simmons and is set in and around the famous search for the North West passage by Sir John Franklin in 1846-1849. The real Franklin mission became legendary because the full facts of the mission are still unknown but the Royal Navy funded mission to find a path over the top of Canada to the Pacific ocean became a story of mystery and loss. Franklin sailed in 1846 and nothing was ever heard of again until his wife forced the Navy to send out a ship to search for her husband in 1850 but they failed to find Franklin or his ships.

Franklin sailed with two ships, the flag ship Erebus and the Terror, both were reinforced to cope with the ice and harsh conditions of the Arctic circle, after wintering at Baffin Island they set sail to find the North West passage but in reality they sailed into myth and legend.

So that's the back story, Dan Simmons takes this legendary mission and wraps a wonderful story about the travails aboard Erebus' sister ship The Terror. The tale is told through three shipmen's eyes, there is the voice of John Franklin, the tale of the Terrors captain Crozier and the ship's Doctor Mizer. Through their eyes, the tale is told not in normal terms of just deprivation, ice, freezing conditions, cramped conditions but this being Dan Simmons there is far more going on under the radar.

The ship picks up a local Inuit called Silence who has had her tongue removed in a mysterious accident. Silence seems to be able to commune with the large white bears and slowly but surely the able seamen of the ships are picked off one by one by something mysterious in the ice.

The use of the strange enigmatic force rather than a simple tale of men stuck in a boat which is stuck in the ice take it into the supernatural. The strange creature which is taking the men appears to be intelligent and has a consciousness which wants to punish the men for being in the beasts lands.

Dan Simmons is fast becoming my favourite author, I loved his Black Hills novel, his old science fiction classics Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion but he seems to be able to put his hand to any genre of works so here we have a historical account of the ill-fated Franklin mission.

He brings alive the stories about the great adventures of the Royal Navy and the way Naval ships were run at the time. The greatest praise you can give any author is that the reader feels as though he's actually sat on board the Terror as they are stuck in ice and beset by some strange beast. The skill of an author to bring the panic and fear of men in abnormal conditions is a skill few possess but Dan Simmons manages with such skill that he as I've said is fast becoming my most eagerly looked forward to author and a new book is to be celebrated.