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On the Road to Canterbury Reading Dan Simmons Sci-Fi Adaptation of Chaucer’s Classic

Adrian McKinty Searches For Fellow Pilgrims, a Copy of Hyperion in His Pack

Adrian McKinty

May 15, 2026

The science fiction writer Dan Simmons passed away on Feb 21, 2026 at the age of 77. When I was living in Denver, working as a school teacher and attempting to break into novel writing, I got to know Dan a little bit. He lived in Longmont, Colorado and he had been an educator for nearly thirty years before retiring to write full time.<br>Article continues after advertisement

I kind of lost contact with Dan after I moved to Australia but I was pleased that his books had found a new readership after the HBO adaptation of The Terror. I’d heard that Dan had moved rightwards in his politics and become grumpy with his publishers, but there was no trace of this in his generous New York Times obituary (although the Guardian mentioned a furor around his novel Flashback which was supposedly and quaintly “pro Tea Party”).

I’d read several of Dan’s books but somehow I’d missed his most famous sci-fi novel of all, Hyperion, a retelling of The Canterbury Tales set in the far future. In late March I found myself in London with a canceled meeting and a day off to do whatever I wanted. I decided that what I wanted to do was to go to Canterbury (I had never been before) and since I’d already plowed through Canterbury Tales in college I thought that maybe I would try to read Dan’s book, Hyperion, along the way.

I’m not a pilgrimage guy and don’t really know how they work but this would, I supposed, be a pilgrimage of a sort thinking about Dan, Chaucer, mortality—all that good stuff, and maybe on the road I’d meet fellow pilgrims who would tell me their stories.

I set off from Hazlitt’s Hotel in Soho which is a book-stuffed literary hideaway in Central London. I walked through Bloomsbury to St. Pancras Station. I had lived in Bloomsbury before when I was a student so I was pretty familiar with the blue plaques everywhere letting you know where Virginia Woolf and the other members of the Bloomsbury set lived, worked and shagged.<br>Article continues after advertisement

I had begun a paperback version of Hyperion over breakfast and continued listening to the audiobook as I walked.

At St Pancras I discovered, with a little pang of disappointment, that the train to Canterbury was an express that only took an hour. If you’ve read Chaucer you’ll recall that the journey from Southwark to Canterbury took three or four days, allowing the pilgrims plenty of time to get to know one another and swap tales. But an hour? Henry Thoreau was not wrong when he said that the gain in speed and time from the locomotive and the telegraph was accompanied by an ineffable loss that we couldn’t quite put our finger on.

Hyperion is a richly layered sci-fi book that deliberately echoes the structure and thematic concerns of Canterbury Tales.

At platform 13 as I waited for the eleven o’clock train I had my first encounter with a fellow pilgrim. A white-bearded, possibly Scottish, man in jeans and a black hoodie lugging an enormous rucksack asked me if this was the platform for the Canterbury train. I told him confidently that it was. We looked at one another for a moment, both of us perhaps on the verge of revealing part of our tumultuous inner narrative. Then the man nodded awkwardly and sidled along the platform.

The train arrived on time and I entered an open plan carriage and found a seat with a table. The few other passengers were engrossed in their phones so I continued with the paperback version of Dan’s novel.

Hyperion is a richly layered sci-fi book that deliberately echoes the structure and thematic concerns of Canterbury Tales while also drawing deep symbolic and emotional resonance from the life and poetry of John Keats. Set in a far-future universe dominated by the Hegemony the novel follows seven pilgrims journeying to the distant world of Hyperion, each tasked with telling their story as they travel toward a mysterious...