Award-winning author and genre-shifting writer Dan Simmons may be the ultimate travel writer. He has farcasted readers across the universe in his award-winning Hyperion series, taken them to Hemingway’s Cuba in The Crook Factory, and in his dystopian novel, Flashback, introduces them to a drug that allows people to “live” in their own fully realized memories. In his 2007 New York Times bestselling novel The Terror, he transports us to the 1840s to join Captain Francis Crozier and the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the arctic to find the Northwest Passage.
The Opening Scene:
Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ships under attack by celestial ghosts. Above him —above Terror—shimmering folds of light lunge but then quickly withdraw like the colourful arms of aggres-sive but ultimately uncertain spectres. Ectoplasmic skele-tal fingers extend toward the ship, open, prepare to grasp, and pull back.
The temperature is -50 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping fast. Because of the fog that came through earlier, during the single hour of weak twilight now passing for their day, the foreshortened masts—the three topmasts, top gallants, upper rigging, and highest spars have been removed and stored to cut down on the danger of falling ice and to reduce the chances of the ship capsizing because of the weight of the ice on them—stand now like rudely pruned and topless trees reflecting the aurora that dances from one dimly seen horizon to the other. As Crozier watches, the jagged ice fields around the ship turn blue, then bleed violet, then glow as green as the hills of his childhood in northern Ireland. Almost a half-mile off the starboard bow, the gigantic floating ice mountain that hides Terror’s sister ship, Erebus, from view seems for a brief, false moment to radiate colour from within, glowing from its own cold, internal fires.
Pulling up his collar and tilting his head back, out of 40 years’ habit of checking the masts and rigging, Crozier notices that the stars overhead burn cold and steady but those near the horizon not only flicker but shift when stared at, moving in short spurts to the left, then to the right, then jiggling up and down. Crozier has seen this before—in the far south with Ross as well as in these waters on earlier expeditions. A scientist on that south polar trip, a man who spent the first winter in the ice there grinding and polishing lenses for his own telescope, had told Crozier that the perturbation of the stars was probably due to rapidly shifting refraction in the cold air lying heavy but uneasy over the ice-covered seas and unseen frozen landmasses. In other words, over new continents never before seen by the eyes of man. Or at least, Crozier thinks, in this northern arctic, by the eyes of white men.
Crozier and his friend and then-commander James Ross had found just such a previously undiscovered continent—Antarctica—less than five years earlier. They named the sea, inlets, and landmass after Ross. They named mountains after their sponsors and friends. They named the two volcanoes they could see on the horizon after their two ships—these same two ships—calling the smoking mountains Erebus and Terror. Crozier was surprised they hadn’t named some major piece of geography after the ship’s cat.
They named nothing after him.
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