Dan Simmons

A dolgozat célja egyrészt bizonyítani, hogy a cyberpunk történetek megközelíthetőek a
cybertér, illetve az egyéb alternatív technikai térkonstrukciók narrativizációiként, másrészt meghatározni azt a narratológiai és poétikai interpretációs keretet, amely révén a cyberpunk körébe tartozó alkotások elemezhetőek. A belső technikai terek ábrázolása, narrativizációja,valamint az írásbeliség utáni mozgóképek bemutatása a cyberpunk műfajának szorosanösszefüggő, egymás nélkül elképzelhetetlen jegye. Ez a (társ)mű vészeti egymásrautaltságméltán tart számot kitüntetett figyelemre, továbbá a cyberpunk térhódításának alapjául is szolgál. A munka megkísérli a science fictionből kitermelődő cyberpunk meghatározását, külön figyelmet szentelve az irodalmi és filmtörténeti
előzményeknek, a  Neurománc című,műfajteremtő William Gibson-regénynek, Philip K. Dick és Dan Simmons szövegeinek,illetve ezek filmadaptációinak is a legfrissebb vonatkozó alkotások vizsgálata mellett.

It has been argued that the doubt and religious disbelief of the Victorian era was the catalyst for the development and popularity of the fantasy and speculative genres due to their unique ability to offer authors and readers alike safe spaces to ponder the implications of the doubt in their milieu. Two hundred years after the first publishing of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we find ourselves in a time marked even more deeply by doubt, agnosticism, atheism, and a fragmentation of religious views. Therefore, this paper examines American Gods by Neil Gaiman as an example of twenty first century fantasy and, as an example of twenty first century science fiction, Dan Simmons’ two-book series Ilium and Olympos, in order to examine how contemporary SFF reflects the religio-cultural context of today.

In this article, I seek to present a "metaphorology" of the shipwreck through a literary example. As Hans Blumenberg has noted, the shipwreck has served as a metaphor for the contingency of human existence in Western culture. Building on Blumenberg's ideas, I argue that modernity heightens contingency and destroys the possibility of a coherent, anthropocentric discourse. For Quentin Meillassoux, the modern outlook exposes the contingency and inhumanity of reality. Building on Meillassoux and Blumenberg's work, I address ideas pertaining to contingency and the metaphor of modernity-as-shipwreck by engaging with Dan Simmons' historical novel, The Terror (2007), based on events surrounding the failed Franklin Expedition of 1845-48. The sinister, frozen wastelands of the Arctic figure as the limit of both European humanity and rationality. In Simmons' novel, the traumatic encounter with cultural otherness conjures up visions of an implosion of colonial ambitions, as the crew members are gradually consumed by both the harsh environment and the ancient Inuit ice demon Tuunbaq and must confront the indifferent frozen wastes of a mythological, gothic North. Simmons' gothic North Pole constitutes an example of "extro-science fiction," situated beyond the limits of all knowledge.

The emerging evolutionary approach to literature explores the way that culture and biology interact. As a branch of evolutionary literary criticism, Darwinian horror study sees horror fiction as crucially dependent on evolved properties of the human constitution. This article argues that a Darwinian perspective on Dan Simmons’ 1985 novel Song of Kali best explains the atheist author’s preoccupation with themes of the supernatural, and accounts for the novel’s emotional impact as a result of humanity’s evolutionary history.

My paper explores some characteristics of today's neo-Victorian revivalism, with special attention for our growing cultural interest in the Victorian Gothic. Apart from investigating the meanings attached to Gothicized spaces in nineteenth-century literature as well as postmodern fiction, I will lay the focus on specific questions raised by the latest craze for stories of deviance and psychological dramas set in the Victorian age. Should neo-Victorian Gothic be viewed in metafictionally narcissistic terms as an example of the postmodern cannibalization of the past? Does it retain a potentially radical edge? Is it a fitting vehicle for reflecting on the risks of saturation and commodification of the Gothic mode today? I will try to address some of these questions by focusing on "Drood" (2009), a recent novel by Dan Simmons, who has rewritten the Victorian past by effectively intermingling horror with suspense and parody. Neo-Victorian in its setting and themes, postmodern in its self-awareness, "Drood" not only invites us to reexamine canonical texts and their contexts. It also establishes significant links between then and now, since it dramatizes social and literary problems that started to afflict the Victorians and have nowadays reached highly destabilizing levels.

This article examines the reception of Homeric epic in twentieth- and twenty-first century anglophone literature via a reading of formal opening and closing devices. Works discussed include Christopher Logue’s Homer and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, as well as lesser-known works such as Dan Simmons’s science fiction ‘duology’ Ilium and Olympos, and Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel. I conduct close readings of the beginnings and endings of these and other works, comparing them to each other and to those of the Homeric epics, identifying generic particularities and universal trends. I argue that Homeric receptions pointedly use proems and codas to position themselves with respect to genre, theme, and literary tradition. The inclusion or rejection of a formal proem or coda is a highly charged literary manoeuvre, especially in the sphere of Homeric reception, and such passages are capable of establishing a relationship with, or rejection of, Homeric epic. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate by example that form and genre are useful hermeneutic tools for reading classical reception, and that a neo-formalist approach to literary reception might make a useful contribution to current debates in classical reception studies about the role(s) of aesthetics and cultural history.