When I did my Top 5 Current Author list a while back I had Dan Simmons as number three. I said that he might not be the most acclaimed author on the list, but for my money he was the most talented. Please keep that in mind as you read the rest of this post, because his latest novel, Flashback, falls well short of the standard Simmons has established with the rest of his catalogue. It gives me great pain to write bad things about a piece of work from an author I hold in such high regard, but, for me, this novel just didn't work. Everything about it felt cliche and hackney (AHHH, again, it kills me to describe anything by Simmons as hackney, but there I wrote it). I guess every artist has to have a slip up at some point, this one is Simmons'.
Flashback is Simmons attempt at the great American dystopia. After writing powerful tomes in seemingly every genre known to man, it looks like Simmons finally found one his talents couldn't live up to. Most of the plot and characters felt too familiar to be as interesting as one has come to expect from a Simmons novel. Either consciously or unconsciously, he painted a world that could easily be realized by watching Strange Days and Blade Runner back to back. Just because Simmons made flashback a drug, and not an apparatus that you put over your head, doesn't make it feel any less of an idea stolen right from the movies. He is able to modernize the plot enough to give commentary on the issues that grace the front of newspapers and websites today, but even that comes off as forced and trite (Did I mention that I REALLY love Dan Simmons as an author?). What bothered me even more was Simmons obviously tried to cram a hard-boiled noir story into a dystopian world and couldn't pull it off even though he has three awesome hard-boiled PI novels on his resume. He's traveled this literary road before and did so with style, yet this effort came off as flat, heavily relying on cliche and stale dialogue. It wasn't a matter of trying to write in yet another new genre and coming up short, it was more putting out a story that belied his capabilities.
But like I said at the on-set, let's not forget that this is the work of a man I named my third favorite working author. Even a substandard piece of work is going to be more readable most of what's out in bookstores. I may have groaned a few to many times, and I may have felt that I had visited the story before, but it was far from a struggle to pour through Flashback's 554 pages. The plot kept moving enough keep me turning pages. And if there was one masterful stroke in the story, it was Simmons' slightly ambiguous ending, which, even though it felt like The Matrix, was as good a gut punch as you could expect from the novel.
This wasn't a great novel, it probably wasn't even a good novel. I really wouldn't suggest it to anyone other then the most diehard of Simmons' readers or those who have no problem with the volumes of slop that finds it's way to bookshelves. This would have been a solid effort for a John Grisham or a Dean Koontz but for Dan Simmons the only hope I have for this not being a wasted effort is that he intended it to be a campy cliche fest.
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