Friday Fiction: The Terror by Dan Simmons

I recently had the fortunate experience of taking a trip through the Arctic along the Northwest Passage…not really, but by way of The Terror by Dan Simmons. Though his novel introduces some speculative imaginings, The Terror is based on the real-life expedition of John Franklin and Francis Crozier as they search to shorten the time and cost to sail and trade between Europe and Asia.

HMS Terror, along with her sister ship HMS Erebus, were the first steam-powered vessels to ever attempt such a feat. But this Northern journey wasn’t their first dealings with icy adventure. Having sailed the Antarctic in a prior expedition, these unusually strong warships turned exploration vessels were refitted with additional timber planking, iron sheeting, new heating systems, steam engines, and propellers. Captained by Francis Crozier and James Ross, they were able to confirm the existence of the Southern Continent. A few years later, the two ships, led by Sir John Franklin, attempted another adventure North. This time, Erebus was captained by James Fitzjames.

Before I get into the speculative brilliance of Simmons, I’ll cover what we know from the notes left behind in the cairns, missives home, and later forensic study of what remained.

In April of 1845, Stephen Goldner won the contract to supply the ships’ tinned food, at a price much lower than all other bidders. This would be the first of many mistakes for the doomed crew.

In May, the ships, operated by 129 men, set sail. The expedition began as I’m sure they all do—with anticipation and exhilaration and lots of fanfare—but once the cold and ice set in, everything deteriorated. Within two months, five sailors were discharged either due to illness or disciplinary issues.

In July of the same year, the ships were seen by whalers in Baffin Bay. This was the last time they were ever seen again. By fall, they were anchored at Beechey Island, located in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. The first death came in January of 1846. John Torrington, Terror’s lead stoker, died of tuberculosis and was quickly preceded by Erebus’s John Hartnell the same week and William Braine the following April. Their bodies, exhumed from the gravelly ground of Beechey in 1984, showed that Hartnell also died of consumption, but Braine is believed to have succumbed to pneumonia and lead poisoning. With the summer thaw and heavy iron chisels, the ships set sail once more. This time, they attempted to sail around King William Land, where they were frozen in for two full years.

In May of 1847, Lt. Graham Gore and six sailors left the ships on foot to deposit a note in a five-foot cairn used for storing messages to be found later should something go awry. The note stated recent events, their coordinates, and that all was well. The note was later amended with handwriting scrawled all along the edges. Written in April of ’48, it stated that both ships were deserted on the 22nd of April and the crew was headed for Back’s Fish River. By this time, there were only 105 souls traveling on foot and pulling several 30-foot cutters and whaleboats stocked with at least a thousand pounds of supplies.

In June of ’47, Sir John Franklin had died of unknown causes, leaving Crozier to lead the expedition and the remaining men across the frozen water and land.

Inuit testimony tells that Erebus was occupied again in the spring of ’49 and was released from the ice sometime in 1850. She sailed south, where she was discovered by Inuit in ’52 and again by researchers led by Inuit in 2014. Other than these accounts from the Indigenous peoples, the crew was never heard from or seen again.

While there are few nominal differences between Simmons’s reimagined story and what is believed by researchers, the author spent an extensive amount of time researching and remained true to the evidence, or what was known at the time of his publishing.

Simmons not only upholds what horrors the crew likely experienced in the everyday, but he also added a few supernatural elements. These run secondary to the gruesome downfall of the sailors, and instead he employs the dread of starvation, unsafe provisions, and an inhospitable environment to create horror.

“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”

The book opens beneath the spectacular display of the Aurora Borealis in October 1847. The temperature is -50˚ and dropping. Touching metal could leave a man skinned and bleeding, and ice hung from the masts like dangling knives.

The ships had been beset for over a year and had taken on a young Inuit woman despite the trepidation of the crew. With her lack of tongue and strange habits, she earned the name Lady Silence. She came and went from the ship as she pleased, somehow surviving the cold and lack of wild game for hours and sometimes days at a time.

It was endlessly cold and endlessly dark throughout most of the novel. Jagged ice fields surrounded the ships and made traveling by foot from one to the next difficult and dangerous. Over the course of the expedition, men lost fingers, toes, feet, and legs. Every minute of every day, the ice cracked and boomed as it squeezed the ships’ hulls and rolled them slowly onto their sides. Keeping the ships warm became an ongoing torture as the coal supplies dwindled until it was clear there wouldn’t be enough to power their way to safety even if the ice ever released them from their frozen graves.

“Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars. The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.”

The provisions that should have easily lasted the crew three years without rationing were not only diminishing but were also toxic. Over half their stock was either ruined from poor seals, tainted with lead, or contaminated with bacteria, most likely botulism, which, when left untreated, led to descending paralysis, respiratory failure, and death. Further complicating matters, the lemon juice couldn’t retain its antiscorbutic efficacy, and the lack of fresh game had the men suffering the gruesome effects of scurvy. A great many, if not all, experienced bleeding gums, loss of teeth, frail bodies, poor healing, and extreme pain before they finally succumbed to death.

And through all of this—the hypothermia, the frostbite, the bleeding bodies, the uncertainty—there was the terror on the ice stalking the men at all hours—a massive white beast somehow sentient and incoherent with bloodlust.

“The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self.”

This book is easily one of the best I’ve ever read and is now tucked back onto my overflowing bookcase for another read. If you're going to give it a try, be sure to also check out the mini-series on AMC!

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Based on the true story of two ice ships that disappeared in the Arctic Circle during the Sir John Franklin Expedition in 1845, The Terror is a meticulously researched and fascinating account of 19th-century seafaring life. The men on board the HMS Terror―part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage―are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in.

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A.S. Hardin is a fantasy and science fiction author. Her writing focuses on dark speculative fiction and character-driven stories set in worlds shaped by history, folklore, and science. Her work often explores flawed characters, difficult choices, strange discoveries, and the consequences that follow.

Hardin has taught creative writing since 2020, and when she isn't writing or teaching, she reads, crafts, thrifts, and you can often catch her on weekends getting in some much-needed wind therapy.