Does anybody remember my review of The Terror by Dan Simmons? OK, I didn’t think so. It ran in the Globe and Mail almost six years back. I declared the novel a tour de force, and lauded the way it transformed the fate of the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin into a supernatural, hell-bent narrative. “The most impressive achievement of this brilliant historical novel,” I wrote, “is that the author manages to account plausibly for all the known facts. In recreating the harrowing true story of the final expedition of Sir John Franklin, who disappeared into the Arctic with two ships and 128 men in 1845, Dan Simmons offers imaginative solutions to the thorniest mysteries. After spending a first winter at Beechey Island, why did Franklin leave no note saying where he was sailing? Why did sailors, and especially officers, begin dying in such numbers? When, in 1847, the men abandoned the two ice-locked ships, the Erebus and the Terror, why did they drag sledges towards the continental mainland and not Fury Beach, where food supplies lay waiting?” I went on in this vein. Anyway, others have recognized the possibilities. According to Wired, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/02/amc-terror-tv/
the folks at AMC, makers of The Walking Dead, are turning their hand to the Franklin saga. Purists will soon be raging. But I for one will be happily tuning in.