[Review] The Terror (Dan Simmons)
july 22 2023
In March, I finally watched AMC's 2018 cult classic The Terror. I'd been meaning to watch the show for a while, as some friends whose taste I trust love it, but I had just never gotten around to it. Well, I'm so glad I finally watched it! I highly recommend the show, it's one of those pieces of media that is going to stay with me for a very long time. I knew vaguely that the show was based on a book ("Based on a novel by Dan Simmons" is prominently displayed at the beginning of every episode), and as I started getting more and more into the show's online fandom, I started to hear very mixed things about the book. The university library had a copy, so I thought I might as well check it out. Wow, there's a reason people online jokingly refer to this book as a "tome"— it's insanely long! Sadly, I didn't enjoy the novel as much as the show, and I think the changes the show made were for the better. Certain characters, particularly the women, are flat caricatures in the book as opposed to the complex characters they are in the show. I also thought the changes the show made to the ending made it thematically stronger, in addition to simply being a better ending for a TV show.
Spoilers ahead, for both the show AND the book!
One of the more distasteful parts of the book is its treatment of women, specifically the exotification and fetishization of indigenous women. Even before Silna (the prominent female lead, who is Netsilik) appears, the men on the expedition think about and fetishize native women in a really uncomfortable way. They're sexual creatures, barely human, who prey on white men and tempt them away from "proper English women." Sure, you could defend this by saying that this is just how these characters from the 1840s would have thought, and that writing otherwise would whitewash history, which is a fair point.
I don't want historical fiction to simply ignore history and insist that the characters have modern sensibilities in order to make them more "relatable" and "likable"— AMC's The Terror also has men with outdated and offensive attitudes towards the Inuit people. But the show's narrative does not support their ideas, and even shows how men like Hickey are able to exploit people's rabid fear of anything different into something that benefits him. I would accept the statement "You're not meant to agree with the men, they're wrong about indigenous women" if the novel itself didn't persistently sexualize Silna and reduce her to an object for the white men around her, thus suggesting that they are right about native women and their presumed sexual availability to white men.
There is a massive shift in perspective during the final episode of the show, where Crozier has to come to terms with the fact that his "heroic" action of killing Tuunbaq was ultimately a bad thing. The Tuunbaq wasn't just an evil polar bear, it was a Netsilik spiritual/cultural tool that kept balance in their land, and Crozier ultimately feels bad about destroying it. We end the show firmly in the perspective of the Inuit, with Crozier refusing to go back to England even when rescue is literally a foot away from him. And in his new daily life, rather than being a leader like he was on the Franklin expedition, he becomes a hunter— a contributing member of their society. His new life will be a hard life, and a thankless one, without any of the power and prestige that comes with being a British naval officer, but it is ultimately a better life for him.
The novel, while it does also end entrenched in Netsilik society, does not have the same punishment for Crozier. He still doesn't return to England, but is rewarded for his actions, becoming a spiritual leader and wielding great power in his new role as a Netsilik shaman after marrying Silna and having children with her. Silna, who in the novel loses her tongue before we even meet her, is relegated throughout to merely a "love interest" for a variety of men, notably Irving. She enters into a sexual relationship with him and much of her page time is dedicated to how "different" she is from Victorian women because of how sexual she is, despite her young age. Silna is literally a voiceless object in this narrative, reduced to being a prize for the men around her. She never really shows interest or even really interacts with Crozier before marrying him. It's hinted that this is because both Silna and Crozier have psychic powers (yes, this is a real thing and yes, it is dumb), and Silna wants her children also to be psychic, but this still relegates Silna to Wife and Mother, not her own person.
The show scrubs away a lot of the distasteful narrative-driven misogyny by giving Silna her tongue back at the start of the narrative, and lets her be more directly involved with the plot. She doesn't have any sexual relationships with the expedition members, but has a friendship with Goodsir that stays ambiguously intimate, and they chose to strip away the Crozier marriage subplot and present them as character parallels instead. Silna and Crozier are both captains of their ships, seconds promoted to firsts, struggling to keep things afloat and losing all their men in the process. I found this arc to be much more thematically impactful, for both characters.
Sophia, Crozier's nominal "love interest," is also heavily fetishized, with much of her page time revolves around her sexual relationship with Crozier. Simmons goes way too into detail about her nipples and pubic hair. But this happens with basically every female character— if a female character is introduced, even if she's an unnamed background character, you can bet your ass Simmons will go into uncomfortable detail about her nipples and/or pubic hair. It never stops being unsettling. Sophia's relationship with Crozier ultimately portrays her as a villain, a devious seducer who flirts and fools around with Crozier while ultimately having no plans to put out or marry him. She gleefully breaks his heart and finds it exciting to fool him and hurt his feelings.
The show affords her a lot more compassion, both in the way she's written and the way she's portrayed by her actress. The audience can tell that Sophia really cares about Crozier, but that she can't see a life with him. She's honest about the fact that if they get married, his status and inability to keep her living up to a standard she's become used to will ultimately lead to her resenting him, and it is better for her to be upfront with this now than to have it come out of nowhere later. In the scene where she turns him down, she's not gleeful— she's sad that it's come to this and is trying to keep it together. Sophia pushes Crozier into going on the expedition to protect Franklin, but again, she's not treated as a villain for this. It was a mistake, and one that she regrets. This decision adds to her character and makes her interesting, but keeps her a sympathetic character.
But don't worry, Dan Simmons is an equal opportunity caricaturist. Hickey is written to be such a hollow stereotype of an evil gay man that it almost loops back around to being iconic camp fun. Book Hickey is less a gay man and more a sexual predator, preying on Manson and using his intellectual disability in order to keep him under his thumb. There are, shockingly, other gay characters in the novel, but it's made clear that Peglar and Bridgens are good gay men because they "control" their physical urges and don't have a sexual relationship while on the ships.
Hickey is an evil gay man because he has evil gay sex, but you can be a good and pure gay man if you just control those pesky urges and never actually have sex with a man. I'm wary of any argument that says that sex is inherently bad/impure/disgusting, but especially when it comes to gay sex, which has been historically so highly stigmatized. Sex is a natural part of human life, and it's a beautiful thing. My earlier issue with Silna having sex in the novel is not the fact that she has sex in and of itself, it's that she is reduced to only a sexual object and that she is constantly sexualized and fetishized in the process.
I also found Hickey to be much less of a compelling villain in the novel. In the novel, he's just kind of... evil? He has no deeper motivations and just exists to sow chaos. In the show, Hickey is such a threatening villain because most of his actions make sense. When he's trying to get Hodgson on his side and soft-launching his cannibalistic enterprise, his practicality almost has you nodding. Why shouldn't they do what they have to do to survive? Why should the officers benefit while the men doing the actual work go underfed? What he's saying does make sense, which makes audiences hate him even more when they see the lengths he's willing to go to in order to keep himself alive. There's a lot of interesting depth to Show Hickey, whereas it feels like Book Hickey was simply designated the villain because he had the funniest name on the ship's roster. And I will be honest, Cornelius Hickey is a pretty silly name.
I can begrudgingly compliment this book by saying it does read quickly, at least for me. Simmons' prose keeps things moving along, and although the book is 600 pages I rarely felt like things were dragging on. The back half of the book is significantly slower paced, and certain sections of the walkout are told through letters and diaries, but I never found it to be so slow that I struggled to get through it. The book goes into a lot more explicit detail about the ships, the men, and the expedition, whereas the show takes a more minimalist approach. I love the show approach and always appreciate it when shows don't treat their audiences like idiots, but I think I did also get a lot out of having some more historical context and background, which the book had time to include on without it feeling super out of place and forced. But your mileage may vary.
Overall, I just think the show was better and continues to have a lot to offer to analytical fans. For the show's fifth anniversary, showrunner/producer/writer Dave K has kindly allowed the scripts to be hosted on The Cold Boys Fandom Hub and it's been so fun to read those too! It's been a really interesting experience to get into something that still has such a small yet extremely active fanbase five years after the fact. Again, I highly recommend the show for everyone, but I don't think I would recommend the book unless you're a really big fan of polar expeditions and/or already a Dan Simmons fan.