The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read, but I would like to recommend a lesser known title of Simmons for readers who have read at least some works of Charles Dickens (self-explanatory) and Wilkie Collins (such as The Woman in White or The Moonstone).
Simmons wrote Drood (2009), which takes these two classical authors and places them in a mystery novel. What struck me as particularly masterful is that Simmons managed to write his prose in such a way that as a reader you soon forget that this book was not written in the 1800s — his tone and style match that of Dickens and Collins so convincingly.
Great writer. For people who want to get a taste of Simmons without committing to an entire book, I would recommend this (very) short story: The River Styx Runs Upstream[1].
Despite being a huge fan of Simmons I had originally passed on this one because I didn't care for the Dickens novels I had read in school. At a family gathering I was surprised to learn that my Grandma was a big Simmons fan. She convinced me to give Drood a shot and sure enough I really enjoyed it! So I'd say it's worth checking out even if you're not a big Dickens reader.
I read Hyperion and I found it... alright, just not my thing. Maybe it is indeed a masterpiece but "that every fan of sci-fi ought to have read" oversells it. I honestly can't conscion the time to read the rest of the Cantos versus other things on my reading list. Quality does not alone compel consumption! :)
You have to read it all the way through. It’s a pretty hefty investment, but the series is truly a masterpiece. I had to read the whole series twice to feel like I was actually starting to understand some of the symbolism. I don’t blame people for not being able to get into it; it’s dense. But it’s so epic and there is so much symbolism and philosophy packed in.
Hyperion is the better novel but Carrion Comfort is just really exciting and creepy. And the way the mind controllers treated regular humans like toys hits far too close to home now.
Oh absolutely, I don't want to spoil anything but (to sound like a nutcase for a second) if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion.
I’m not saying that you have to be religious. But if you find those topics and related symbolisms rather uninteresting in your sci-fi, then the books may not be for you.
People are interesting, and religion is a thing people do.
In this case there is quasi-religious imagery but you as the reader aren't actually supposed to be mystical about the god/devil in the story the way the characters themselves are. It's not C. S. Lewis
I mean, it's not my fandom, but Catholics do have a wicked sense of symbolism and decoration. Hyperion wouldn't be as colourful if Simmons used a bunch of Evangelicals instead.
So the fact that "decoration" would be present is unsurprisingly, as Beauty in this reality can help to lead to greater reality of Truth and Goodness as well. It's why there have long been traditions with art, music, architecture, etc, in Catholic culture.
† God is Truth, God is Goodness (itself), and God is Beauty. (God is Love as well.)
There really is a huge stockpile of stuff there to build into fiction.
There's a whole crazy universe of occult-like lore within Catholicism that a subculture of Catholics really get into, it's pretty wild, often quite macabre.
I have a couple of those types in my family. The way they talk about praying to specific saints is like they're paladins in an RPG using divine magic.
Then there's the whole thing where the church has bones of long dead saints encased in ornate reliquaries that supposedly dispense miracles.
To be fair, the first novel Hyperion is quite literally a survey of major world religions, not just Christianity. It does settle onto Christian symbolism in the second book onward, but the first two novels alone are still worth reading for their ideas. No affinity required, it's just the default Western canon at work.
It’s particular topics of that canon, and you have to fancy their treatment in a science-fiction setting. Some people like science-fiction because/when it proposes fresh perspectives that aren’t rooted in, by lack of a better description, non-enlightenment parts of that canon.
The clean slate of banks - where we discarded culture to embrace the "culture" and look where this "winging" it got us. Turns out the operating system of a society is important- and the atheist distilled synthetic one is not really working - same goes for alot of others.
The utopist urge for cultural tabula rasa is a retardation, a attempt of the brain to shirk embracing and discovering complexity. One has to look at the "backwards" parts to start to understand what works in a society and with the actual human beeings lifing in a actual society, not the wingless Star Trek Angels in PJs.
Embrace complexity, embrace analysis, build something without defining the endstate first. Make small things that work, combine them into bigger things that work. Way less calling for cullings of the "sabotaging traitors" as they are usual with utopists on the march.
There's a footnote in Consider Phlebas at the end...
> “The following three passages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text AD 2110, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja’andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.”
The implication is that Earth is contacted eventually, maybe we developed to the point where we were able to make independent contact and keeping Earth ignorant of The Culture no longer served a purpose. That is only speculation though. Maybe some Free Company showed up and tried to set themselves up as a king, or a disenfranchised non-aligned Special Circumstances operative infiltrated governments and tried doing the "right" thing in guiding it and spilled the beans (future thesis topic: compare Special Circumstances in The Use of Weapons and Rediscovery and Reeducation from The Godmakers).
Within the in universe timeline, it is set by that date and relative dates are based on it. Other books then mention an offset from the Idiran-Culture War and an overall in universe chronology can be roughed out. Much of it takes place about 500 years after the Idiran-Culture War in what would be Earth's timeline of the late 1800s (prior to The State of the Art which was another 100 years later).
And then, even if the appendix of Consider Phlebas was Apocryphal with the 2110 "Earth got the history of The Culture", part of the thing with the scope of the universe is that it is enormous and one rather young (even The Culture is mentioned as not being one of the elder races) it is a footnote of an experiment that one of the Minds did in not contacting Sol-III humanity in the scope of things.
I don't want to dogpile on the other comments (atheist, loved the book) but I think there's something interesting here.
Most science fiction tends to assume that religiosity will fade as humanity matures, and in a few thousand years we'll all have a good laugh at those silly ancient humans. This feels generally right to me. But it's not the only possible future, and Hyperion explores a far future in which religiosity becomes more ingrained.
I thought it was one of the more interesting aspects of the book, and contributed to the feeling of "not just another space opera". You don't have to appreciate religion to like the story.
It's interesting how different stories have different underlying religious underpinnings in different parts of the world. It's important to consider that these themes are precisely because the stories are born from the surrounding culture.
Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental, given the expected familiarity of the intended audience (american white male young men). eg The Matrix trilogy started with the obvious messianic hero's journey, then attempted to expand it in the following films (karma, cycles of death and rebirth, etc).
For some, these religious messages can be a turn off, I agree. I happened to be raised in a culture that allowed me to ignore it more or less and I can recognize that.
Not sure if I agree with the christian references being incidental ... the first book is literally a retelling of the The Canterbury Tales, all the characters are on a pilgrimage. there are a bunch of religious groups with at least one being central to the story, there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life.
I still think you can enjoy it without caring much about religion.
>there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life
Without giving away any spoilers to the books, the parasites are only that on the surface. If anything, the books present a wary picture of religion, especially the last two Endymion books, but also a wary picture of technology.
>Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental,
They're not at all incidental. The themes and the literal Catholic Church don't just make it into the books by osmosis, they're central to it and deliberate.
Like Gene Wolfe he's part of a pretty small group of US authors who wrote Catholic speculative fiction. Like Wolfe his writing is also fairly un-American. If Heinlein or Asimov are examples of archetypal US science fiction, Simmons is about as far as the other end as you can be, with the post-modern structure, the Canterbury Tales as a template for the story and so on.
Small but significant. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller comes immediately to mind. (And readers of this thread who did appreciate the religious themes of Hyperion may be interested.)
I had recommended Hyperion to a friend, and they loved it. I recommended Canticle as a follow-up and they hated it. I never figured out how that can be.
It's up to anybody to not have a particular taste for religious topics, however, spirituality (or the lack thereof) is an important part of human culture and psychology. Therefore a science fiction novel in a sufficiently different setting from Earth's early 21st century really ought to cover these topics as well, lest the worldbuilding would be very shallow and the resulting work would likely lack depth.
I tried reading it but I couldn't get into it. Maybe it the heavy religious themes or just the science fiction being so far into the future? I really should give it a shot again
It starts very slowly and the worldbuilding is exquisite and you will likely uncover many facets only upon rereading it. However, it is well worth persisting.
Works with considerably more action are Olympus and Ilium.
Simmons opened new frontiers of thought for me with his Hyperion Cantos. A house with each room on a different planet. A heartbreaking tale of a daughter aging in reverse. A romance playing out over space and time. A grand piano on the pop-out balcony of a starship. The cruciform parasite. The Shrike.
Branches of humanity torn between decadent stagnation and radical evolution. The artificial intelligence civilization with its own agenda. The All Thing (Internet) as the third branch of government.
Oh, boy. The Shrike. That thing still haunts me in a way that no other monster or alien across all of Sci-fi or fantasy really does. It's something about the inscrutability of it, especially in the first novel (still my favorite) where its purpose and backstory haven't been revealed. Sure, it's scary, but I think the mystery of its motives - and its ability to unpredictably act apparently benevolently sometimes - is where the real terror lies.
The TechnoCore using human minds as unwitting processing nodes — to solve a problem humans couldn't even be told about — reads differently every few years. 2026 is a particularly strange time to reread it.
Probably the idea is broad enough to get away with borrowing it or putting their own spin on the general idea (I mean, it is expected that stores will influence each other and ideas will spread). I’d rather guess that a studio executive thought the battery idea would be more understandable to people (if that is the case though, I think they were dramatically wrong, the computing idea makes much more sense and I think all of us in the audience would have been fine with it).
Remember that all critiques of Hollywood require you to think like you’ve just consumed a massive line of cocaine. Because that is how they think and live. So, empathy reduced to zero, all your ideas are great, everything else is dumb, etc. Making decisions under the influence of strong narcotics is a recipe for idiocy.
Source: me, I had a huge cocaine problem and worked many years in the tech side of music and movies
I saw a YouTube video where they said this was more-or-less the original backstory but then they changed it. I think it said that the People In Charge thought the 'living power source' would be easier for the audience to understand?
I don't have the link handy, and don't trust everything I read on the Internet, etc, etc.
But yeah - this makes so much more sense than breeding, raising, and feeding humans just to harvest their body heat.
I think we the urban legend really sticks around because the compute explanation just makes much more sense and we all want this beloved movies not to have a sill (albeit inconsequential) plot hole.
I like to think the machines actually were using them for processing power, and the humans themselves just misunderstood (or oversimplified for Neo) what was actually going on.
Processing power is my second favorite explanation.
My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
There is backstory that the films could have gone into, though I don't know if it was written before or after the first film. The humans in the matrix were allied with the machines and they put them in the matrix to protect them from the war. They were being benevolent.
I'm sure that one Star trek episode had the same premise, together with something from Lem. The connection human/machine brain is rather old and human brains being used for computation is so reused, it is practically public domain.
Hitchhiker's Guide had a slightly deeper philosophical implication though, in that the premise is that powerful computers already existed to solve complex problems. Earth was created to pose powerful questions.
Wow. I picked up a copy of Hyperion this morning while taking a random stroll through town - something I rarely do during a work day anymore. I popped into a book shop on a complete whim, and picked it up as it had been on my list for a while. The coincidence feels deeply uncanny.
Totally agree with this, too! The books are great and I’ve read all four a few times over, but the audiobooks are something else. The guy who reads them manages to strike a near perfect balance between “reading” and “acting” that is just such a pleasure to listen to. I think we must have listened to it beginning to end about another three or four times as a family during long car trips!
That's the thing. It is acting. All the characters are played by actors. And they just simply nail their parts. You're right that it's an equal and almost perfect mix of acting while not changing the tone or impacting the content via the same acting process.
It legitimately is the best audio book I've ever heard. I think it's because their voices and tone and cadence matches what I hear in my head when reading the book.
I started reading it for the first time this week. It’s just a statistical anomaly… but humans are wired to notice and feel coincidence; it connects us to space and time in a way that must have helped make religion more believable.
I've had this internet handle since the last century. Most people in here are talking about Hyperion but Simmons was a fantastic cross-genre author. My favorites were his historical fiction that contained a fantastical bent:
Drood: Has Wilkie Collins as an unreliable narrator, depicting the last five or so years of Charles Dickens' life.
Crook Factory: An FBI agent is sent to Cuba to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway, hijinks ensue.
The Fifth Heart: Henry James and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery.
The Terror: Tells the story of what happened to the HMS Terror that attempted to make the northwest passage. The Arctic is a character in itself in this amazing story. I thought the TV mini-series was fine.
Abominable and Black Hills: I haven't read these yet but look forward to doing so.
Honestly, I think Dan Simmons is my favorite author. I know his politics became unpalatable but I could never find it in myself to care. My heart sank when I saw this post.
I have never read an ending that was as sad, happy, clever and beautiful as the ending to Rise of Endymion. To this day it's one of the very few books that made me shed a tear.
Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.
Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.
A girl I was infatuated with told me to read Hyperion when I was in my early 20s. Never read a book to try to win someone's affections. It won't work, but what's worse is you won't even enjoy the book.
I read a lot of SF and just last year I thought it was about time I gave it another go. I couldn't put it down. Almost couldn't believe what I was reading, it was so good. Continued to read the other three and it was just a good all the way through. Was quite sad when I finished and it was all over.
It now has a permanent place in my library. I expect I'll enjoy it even more on my next reading. I can only dream of giving people as much joy as an author like Simmons.
I had a copy of Hyperion but didn't read it for years because the scary knife robot on the cover seemed intimidating. I finally read it, and all the sequels, and they were great books, and hell YEAH that was an intimidating knife robot! Sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
I didn't know there was a type of bird called a shrike until long after I read Hyperion. The birds look and sound like cute little songbirds, kind of like a smaller mockingbird. But the way they hunt is hardcore. They capture small prey (lizards, grasshoppers, etc) and impale them on a spike from cactus or a broken branch. Then they return to eat them at their leisure.
It's rare to see their caches but a few times I've been out hiking in the desert and seen the remains of a little critter on a cactus thorn.
I read the Hyperion books during a particularly intense period of my life and found them quite powerful. I didn’t know anything about Simmons at the time, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that like Tolkein these stories started with an oral format for children.
My "intense time of life" story re: Hyperion. I was finishing "The Rise of Endymion" and was stricken with a kidney stone. It was absolutely eerie, and has cemented my memory of that book in a strange way.
Very much agreed. I haven't read all of Dan's work to comment how it ranks among his output, but Carrion Comfort is a book that I still think back on years after I read it.
Currently finishing up The Terror. I've never read a horror story until I got this. There are times I struggle to put it down, incredible book. Simmons painted quite a colorful picture of what it's like to die from scurvy so now I bring an emergency orange wherever I go.
THANK YOU!!! The Terror—the book—absolutely blew me away. I still am in awe of that book. Just everything about it.
And yeah the adaptation was so, so weak. But it faced the same problem many horror movies do, which is that if you're forced to show the Thing™ it loses all its power.
Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.
Same here. It's a fading memory, but the decade following 9/11 really did feature a lot of big brains turning THE COMING CALIPHATE into an existential threat to humanity. Which seems quaint, now.
I think it's a poisonous and reductive mindset to have. You can separate art from the character of the artist. If you cared about everything everyone has ever said or done in various stages of their lives, you wouldn't have much left to enjoy or appreciate.
On the other hand, there is so so much art out there, I could never hope to consume it all. It’s simple for me to use the character of the artist as a filter. I can break that rule whenever I want, but by default, other things being equal, I would prefer to consume art for pleasure from artists I respect as people.
I do consume art from outside this bubble but more to satisfy academic curiosity than pleasure.
Did you read the thing I linked? It's on the same level as the Turner Diaries or Fu Manchu or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I'm only on this earth for so many years, and the number of words I can shove in my eye holes is finite. Dan Simmons thought it was a good idea to write that, and publish it on his own blog. SF is the kind of genre where you run the risk of getting hit with a big bolus of the author's politics at any time, and why would I drink from a well somebody's already pooped in?
The tale of the priest in Hyperion Cantos is the scariest thing I have ever read. Just this one story is a masterpiece. But the books contain dozens and dozens of stories, worlds, characters like that. The scope of the universe Simmons had built is immense. Truly a great writer.
Although it's quite a flawed novel compared to brilliant space opera like Hyperion, I have a bit of a soft spot for Carrion Comfort. I think it'd make a great movie!
It obviously owes a lot to Stephen King’s IT. But it stands on its own merits…and I give it extra credit because it was set in my home town. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Night)
I would also rate this above hyperion, like hyperion book 1 it crossed into the horror genre quite well, the rest of the hyperion books were a little bit too preachy but a good series never the less. RIP Dan.
Simmons wrote one of my favourite short stories of all time Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and living in Hell.
While I'm definitely not willing to put myself through any of his books after 9/11, I haven't stopped recommending Vanni Fucci as an introduction to Dan Simmons.
Enjoyed the first Hyperion, but Fall of Hyperion was a bit of a slog for me. If Fall of Hyperion were compressed into the conclusion of Hyperion and other stories left as novellas (in the way James S.A. Corey has done), I think I would have enjoyed the story more.
In contrast, getting through Hyperion was hard for me (some of the character stories I LOVED and some felt like a slog), but I really loved Fall of Hyperion.
I did find the transition from Hyperion to Fall a little jarring. It has a completely different narrative structure for a start, but more importantly the scope goes from a single group of people doing a pilgrimage to a huge interstellar conspiracy. I think it works best if you read each book slightly separately rather than as one huge work.
His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.
PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.
Yeah, the Islamophobia in Ilium/Olympos made me really tempted to put the books down several times. It's such a strange about-face from when he wrote the character Kassad in the Hyperion Cantos.
Like Frank Miller, it seems like 9/11 just broke him.
Things most people don’t know about Illinois is that while the Mason Dixon line officially goes around the bottom of the state, philosophically it cuts through the middle. Peoria is maybe thirty miles north of the rednecks.
Add that he was a boomer and I was disappointed but not surprised when people started complaining about him.
Ilium was my first Simmons & I was glued to it. The mem/meme "brane" portals to other realities still anchors so much of my thought, frames my perception signficiantly.
It also featured giant space crustaceans! Or at least one, the moravec Orpho. Along with his more human Mahnmut moravec friend. This feels low key resonant with our days filled with OpenClaw.
Accelerando hit 2 years latter (2005), with much more alien space lobsters. Where-as Orpho was a moravec that picked a crustacean shape.
Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barnes and Noble beyond the SF&F and horror aisles and discovered he had been writing crime novels. And they were good.
I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.
I liked all of the Hyperion/Shrike novels, except when Raul Endymion persistently refers to the heroine/love-interest as "my young friend", or similar phrasing - slightly creepy/boring.
I didn't know that Summer of Night was a series - really liked the original book - will have to investigate.
I texted a RIP message to a friend-chat with the comment, "easily one of the top five space opera novels of all time"
One of the friends asked Claude-AI "what are the top five space opera novels of all time," and it ranked Hyperion as #2, only behind Dune.
I personally think LLM "knowledge" is… kind of stupid… but I have to admit it speaks to Simmons legacy that even the word swamp recognizes Hyperion as an all-time classic.
(it ranked Stars Are Legion by K. Hurley as #5, which I unconditionally agree with, but am also kind of shocked, I've never heard of this book so much as referenced in any kind of article or conversation. But yeah, read it. Star Wars meets Alien — the Death Star is the alien)
It’s all about the Hyperion Cantos which is fair but - the one Dan Simmons book we still talk about, years later, is his first novel: Song of Kali. Short and raw, one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read.
To me, the Hyperion Cantos present a vision of the future that is incredibly hopeful. The path along the way may at times be bleak, and I find the handling of the TechnoCore to reveal echos of the great chain in a work that otherwise seems to totally reject it. Despite those and a few other shortcomings the Cantos are essential guides for charting our way toward a distant future that is filled with warmth, love, and compassion rather than the cold empty void of hate. To receive such a vision is a rare gift. Thank you Dan. Choose again.
The Hollow Man - a telepathic widower goes on the run. Story inspired by Dante's Inferno, I believe. The only book I've read in one sitting overnight. Prayers to Broken Stones - a book of short stories, contains the original novella of 'Carrion Comfort' (which works rather better, I believe, than the full novel), and some other classics, including Metastasis. A really interesting author; I'm glad he was writing.
Thank you for the wonderful stories. Hyperion was such a trip. It managed to move me, an aging hardcore sci-fi fan, with its silly, chaotic, poetic universe.
Oh no! I just finished reading Hyperion this week and it has become one of my favorite books of all time. I will treasure my signed copy more so now, RIP.
I am sad to know about this, Dan Simmons had a mind blowing amount of imagination and the ability to turn that into interesting and imaginative books that expanded my imagination when I read them.
I loved Hyperion cantos, Illium and then non sci-fi books like A Winter Haunting and Summer of night (which I read in the wrong order lol).
I am also happy to read that he was a great person overall and a great teacher.
May he rest in peace.
I read Hyperion in hs; and so much of what I read afterward (Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Keats, Eliot, Valéry) was influenced by Dan Simmons writing about it/quoting it. At this point, I doubt I could tell you where his influence on my taste & opinions on fiction begins or ends. Gone too soon.
Hyperion Cantos is the most influential scifi story I've ever read personally. The first book is a masterpiece, while the rest remains one of the greats.
The books were incredibly influential on me as a teenager, twenty years later on re-reading the cantos I found some of the specific language around intergenerational romance to be troubling and the focus on it to be a major distraction from the rest of the excellent story.
Imagine Lolita with a future seer twist. The adolescent girl knows she will be lovers with the adult male main character in a future time and teases him by bathing with him among other interactions while she is still an adolescent. It's teased at in the third book and fourth book until finally it's revealed to be a love story with a power ala The Stars My Destination.
I sincerely hope they don't make any adaptation... after the slaughterhouse they've made with 3 Body Problem, Foundation, Altered Carbon, et al Not to mention all the damage done to other more traditional works of fiction.
But, the Expanse is not that bad really. Books were much more immersive with regards to the micro-G and low-G environments, but that is something almost impossible to film (at least until we learn how to control gravity).
I loved the Hyperion books, but I moved on to other authors over time. Apparently, this is for the best, given what I've heard about his attitudes and his writing in his later decades.
As a general rule, if an announcement about a movie project is over a year old and nothing else has been mentioned since, you can safely assume it's no longer a thing.
I rather hope it doesn't. It's not so much about action; it's subtle worldbuilding and a certain vibe that is easily distorted on screen. Also, it would destroy everybody's personal vision of the Shrike...
...does it though? I mean we don't have to argue about personal desires and opinions. But Hyperion simply doesn't seem adaptable. You would lose everything that makes it great.
It would make a perfect mini-series. Each episode or two could cover each pilgrim's story, with a finale two-parter to wrap up Fall of Hyperion. A lot from Fall could be trimmed down.
I have to admit that I found the Hyperion Cantos to be a bit of a disappointment. There were some decent bits and pieces scattered throughout, but overall the story never seemed to resolve into something I could find engaging.
Pro: Interesting world building, Canterbury Tales in space, Huckleberry Finn in space, strong female characters.
Con: Pro Judaism and Christianity (albeit with much criticism to both) and anti Islam, awkward sex scenes, awkward Lolita-esque vibes in the latter books.
Read Hyperion some years ago. I was totally trhrilled to read it because of the good reviews...
But I was very fast disappointed about the overwhelming focus on boring religion.
The interessting stuff like TechnoCore was so sparse that I never came into a flow reading the book. After 2/3 I just wanted to finish it fast.
That was probably a mistake. The religion is great (and I say that as a staunch materialist atheist) and _Fall of Hyperion_ had a lot more TechnoCore and filling out the background than _Hyperion_.
Every now and then I will google "books like Hyperion", read something, and conclude that it was nothing like Hyperion. Wonderful books, wonderful writer. A loss.
9/11 kinda broke his brain, as I recall. (The book Flashback is… ooof. Hyperion includes a major Muslim character and it’s just a wild shift between the two.)
his updated view of the world involved global warming being a hoax and that obama (literally obama, not even a fake obama parallel) caused the end of the west.
The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read, but I would like to recommend a lesser known title of Simmons for readers who have read at least some works of Charles Dickens (self-explanatory) and Wilkie Collins (such as The Woman in White or The Moonstone).
Simmons wrote Drood (2009), which takes these two classical authors and places them in a mystery novel. What struck me as particularly masterful is that Simmons managed to write his prose in such a way that as a reader you soon forget that this book was not written in the 1800s — his tone and style match that of Dickens and Collins so convincingly.
Great writer. For people who want to get a taste of Simmons without committing to an entire book, I would recommend this (very) short story: The River Styx Runs Upstream[1].
[1]: https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/02/dan-simmons-river...
Has a Strugatsky Brothers “Roadside Picnic” feel.
Despite being a huge fan of Simmons I had originally passed on this one because I didn't care for the Dickens novels I had read in school. At a family gathering I was surprised to learn that my Grandma was a big Simmons fan. She convinced me to give Drood a shot and sure enough I really enjoyed it! So I'd say it's worth checking out even if you're not a big Dickens reader.
I read Hyperion and I found it... alright, just not my thing. Maybe it is indeed a masterpiece but "that every fan of sci-fi ought to have read" oversells it. I honestly can't conscion the time to read the rest of the Cantos versus other things on my reading list. Quality does not alone compel consumption! :)
You have to read it all the way through. It’s a pretty hefty investment, but the series is truly a masterpiece. I had to read the whole series twice to feel like I was actually starting to understand some of the symbolism. I don’t blame people for not being able to get into it; it’s dense. But it’s so epic and there is so much symbolism and philosophy packed in.
Carrion Comfort is a ridiculously entertaining novel.
I favor Carrion over Hyperion and find myself repeating Sheriff Bobby Joe Gentry's line "I like junk" quite often.
Hyperion is the better novel but Carrion Comfort is just really exciting and creepy. And the way the mind controllers treated regular humans like toys hits far too close to home now.
Oh absolutely, I don't want to spoil anything but (to sound like a nutcase for a second) if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion.
Apropos given your username XD
> if there is an Illuminati then I think they were avid readers of Carrion
lol, I never really thought about that but given recent revelations it does almost seem like they were using it as a template.
I still think about it relatively often. It took me almost a year to finish it between breaks to recover.
Yeah, one of the bad guys even had a private island where he invited all his rich psychopathic friends.
> The Hyperion Cantos is a masterpiece which every scifi fan ought to have read
You have to have some affinity to religious/Christianity/church topics, otherwise it’s quite a turn-off.
Atheist here: Not true, there is much more in Hyperion (and even Endymion)
I’m not saying that you have to be religious. But if you find those topics and related symbolisms rather uninteresting in your sci-fi, then the books may not be for you.
People are interesting, and religion is a thing people do.
In this case there is quasi-religious imagery but you as the reader aren't actually supposed to be mystical about the god/devil in the story the way the characters themselves are. It's not C. S. Lewis
Do you also find LeGuin uninteresting?
I mean, it's not my fandom, but Catholics do have a wicked sense of symbolism and decoration. Hyperion wouldn't be as colourful if Simmons used a bunch of Evangelicals instead.
> I mean, it's not my fandom, but Catholics do have a wicked sense of symbolism and decoration.
Catholics (and other denominations too) consider the three transcendentals to be Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, which are all natures of God†:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals
This philosophical/theological thinking goes back to (at least) the Middle Ages:
* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentals-medieval/
So the fact that "decoration" would be present is unsurprisingly, as Beauty in this reality can help to lead to greater reality of Truth and Goodness as well. It's why there have long been traditions with art, music, architecture, etc, in Catholic culture.
† God is Truth, God is Goodness (itself), and God is Beauty. (God is Love as well.)
There really is a huge stockpile of stuff there to build into fiction.
There's a whole crazy universe of occult-like lore within Catholicism that a subculture of Catholics really get into, it's pretty wild, often quite macabre.
I have a couple of those types in my family. The way they talk about praying to specific saints is like they're paladins in an RPG using divine magic.
Then there's the whole thing where the church has bones of long dead saints encased in ornate reliquaries that supposedly dispense miracles.
Well, i detest jihadism, but still could enjoy dune
To be fair, the first novel Hyperion is quite literally a survey of major world religions, not just Christianity. It does settle onto Christian symbolism in the second book onward, but the first two novels alone are still worth reading for their ideas. No affinity required, it's just the default Western canon at work.
> just the default Western canon
It’s particular topics of that canon, and you have to fancy their treatment in a science-fiction setting. Some people like science-fiction because/when it proposes fresh perspectives that aren’t rooted in, by lack of a better description, non-enlightenment parts of that canon.
The clean slate of banks - where we discarded culture to embrace the "culture" and look where this "winging" it got us. Turns out the operating system of a society is important- and the atheist distilled synthetic one is not really working - same goes for alot of others.
The utopist urge for cultural tabula rasa is a retardation, a attempt of the brain to shirk embracing and discovering complexity. One has to look at the "backwards" parts to start to understand what works in a society and with the actual human beeings lifing in a actual society, not the wingless Star Trek Angels in PJs.
Embrace complexity, embrace analysis, build something without defining the endstate first. Make small things that work, combine them into bigger things that work. Way less calling for cullings of the "sabotaging traitors" as they are usual with utopists on the march.
Who is "we"? In Banks' culture universe, humanity (us) were explicitly rejected and never became part of the Culture.
(The State of the Art)
There's a footnote in Consider Phlebas at the end...
> “The following three passages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text AD 2110, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja’andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.”
The implication is that Earth is contacted eventually, maybe we developed to the point where we were able to make independent contact and keeping Earth ignorant of The Culture no longer served a purpose. That is only speculation though. Maybe some Free Company showed up and tried to set themselves up as a king, or a disenfranchised non-aligned Special Circumstances operative infiltrated governments and tried doing the "right" thing in guiding it and spilled the beans (future thesis topic: compare Special Circumstances in The Use of Weapons and Rediscovery and Reeducation from The Godmakers).
Within the in universe timeline, it is set by that date and relative dates are based on it. Other books then mention an offset from the Idiran-Culture War and an overall in universe chronology can be roughed out. Much of it takes place about 500 years after the Idiran-Culture War in what would be Earth's timeline of the late 1800s (prior to The State of the Art which was another 100 years later).
And then, even if the appendix of Consider Phlebas was Apocryphal with the 2110 "Earth got the history of The Culture", part of the thing with the scope of the universe is that it is enormous and one rather young (even The Culture is mentioned as not being one of the elder races) it is a footnote of an experiment that one of the Minds did in not contacting Sol-III humanity in the scope of things.
I don't want to dogpile on the other comments (atheist, loved the book) but I think there's something interesting here.
Most science fiction tends to assume that religiosity will fade as humanity matures, and in a few thousand years we'll all have a good laugh at those silly ancient humans. This feels generally right to me. But it's not the only possible future, and Hyperion explores a far future in which religiosity becomes more ingrained.
I thought it was one of the more interesting aspects of the book, and contributed to the feeling of "not just another space opera". You don't have to appreciate religion to like the story.
The religious themes are a thin veil in Hyperion, looking behind them opens another dimension to ponder about.
I’m not a Christian, BTW.
I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.
It's interesting how different stories have different underlying religious underpinnings in different parts of the world. It's important to consider that these themes are precisely because the stories are born from the surrounding culture.
Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental, given the expected familiarity of the intended audience (american white male young men). eg The Matrix trilogy started with the obvious messianic hero's journey, then attempted to expand it in the following films (karma, cycles of death and rebirth, etc).
For some, these religious messages can be a turn off, I agree. I happened to be raised in a culture that allowed me to ignore it more or less and I can recognize that.
Not sure if I agree with the christian references being incidental ... the first book is literally a retelling of the The Canterbury Tales, all the characters are on a pilgrimage. there are a bunch of religious groups with at least one being central to the story, there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life.
I still think you can enjoy it without caring much about religion.
>there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life
Without giving away any spoilers to the books, the parasites are only that on the surface. If anything, the books present a wary picture of religion, especially the last two Endymion books, but also a wary picture of technology.
> the first book is literally a retelling of the The Canterbury Tales, all the characters are on a pilgrimage.
As we have both read the books, it's notable that you associate pilgrimage with Christianity. This illustrates the point.
>Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental,
They're not at all incidental. The themes and the literal Catholic Church don't just make it into the books by osmosis, they're central to it and deliberate.
Like Gene Wolfe he's part of a pretty small group of US authors who wrote Catholic speculative fiction. Like Wolfe his writing is also fairly un-American. If Heinlein or Asimov are examples of archetypal US science fiction, Simmons is about as far as the other end as you can be, with the post-modern structure, the Canterbury Tales as a template for the story and so on.
Small but significant. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller comes immediately to mind. (And readers of this thread who did appreciate the religious themes of Hyperion may be interested.)
I adore Canticle. It is one of my favorite books.
I had recommended Hyperion to a friend, and they loved it. I recommended Canticle as a follow-up and they hated it. I never figured out how that can be.
To be fair, Canticle is soul-crushingly bleak in a way that Hyperion only dances around.
It's up to anybody to not have a particular taste for religious topics, however, spirituality (or the lack thereof) is an important part of human culture and psychology. Therefore a science fiction novel in a sufficiently different setting from Earth's early 21st century really ought to cover these topics as well, lest the worldbuilding would be very shallow and the resulting work would likely lack depth.
Atheist/agnostic here, completely untrue statement
I don’t, and this stands as one of the best reading experiences of my life.
I disagree strongly. I'm not religious at all, and have a strong aversion to Christianity, and I loved those books.
Atheist. Loved it.
Did you like Dune?
Entirely untrue.
You hate mythological subjects in mythological stories. Or, rather, you selectively detest them. Whatever you need to feel superior, I guess.
:shrug: I'm an Atheist, I loved the series.
I tried reading it but I couldn't get into it. Maybe it the heavy religious themes or just the science fiction being so far into the future? I really should give it a shot again
It starts very slowly and the worldbuilding is exquisite and you will likely uncover many facets only upon rereading it. However, it is well worth persisting.
Works with considerably more action are Olympus and Ilium.
It's ok, at best. I can tell you really like it, so for other people that should be a great indicator!
It's Canterbury Tales structure put me off and the reveals didn't do anything for me. I think I stopped after the second book.
Try Flashback, it's darker but genius as well, maybe more approachable.
100%. One of the genuine great writers.
Simmons opened new frontiers of thought for me with his Hyperion Cantos. A house with each room on a different planet. A heartbreaking tale of a daughter aging in reverse. A romance playing out over space and time. A grand piano on the pop-out balcony of a starship. The cruciform parasite. The Shrike.
Branches of humanity torn between decadent stagnation and radical evolution. The artificial intelligence civilization with its own agenda. The All Thing (Internet) as the third branch of government.
So much good stuff, published in 1989 no less.
Rest in Peace to a true legend.
Oh, boy. The Shrike. That thing still haunts me in a way that no other monster or alien across all of Sci-fi or fantasy really does. It's something about the inscrutability of it, especially in the first novel (still my favorite) where its purpose and backstory haven't been revealed. Sure, it's scary, but I think the mystery of its motives - and its ability to unpredictably act apparently benevolently sometimes - is where the real terror lies.
He predicted social media as well. So many themes in this work only mentioned in passing, too many to develop in full...
> A house with each room on a different planet.
My favourite part of that is the design of the house included a joke (I can't remember what the joke was, but that's not the point).
The bathroom was on a raft floating on the surface of an ocean planet.
The TechnoCore using human minds as unwitting processing nodes — to solve a problem humans couldn't even be told about — reads differently every few years. 2026 is a particularly strange time to reread it.
Also, that should have been the backstory of the Matrix, and not the whole “living power source” nonsense.
I'm convinced that the studio forced the change to 'human batteries' out of concern over a conflict with Hyperion.
Probably the idea is broad enough to get away with borrowing it or putting their own spin on the general idea (I mean, it is expected that stores will influence each other and ideas will spread). I’d rather guess that a studio executive thought the battery idea would be more understandable to people (if that is the case though, I think they were dramatically wrong, the computing idea makes much more sense and I think all of us in the audience would have been fine with it).
Remember that all critiques of Hollywood require you to think like you’ve just consumed a massive line of cocaine. Because that is how they think and live. So, empathy reduced to zero, all your ideas are great, everything else is dumb, etc. Making decisions under the influence of strong narcotics is a recipe for idiocy.
Source: me, I had a huge cocaine problem and worked many years in the tech side of music and movies
I saw a YouTube video where they said this was more-or-less the original backstory but then they changed it. I think it said that the People In Charge thought the 'living power source' would be easier for the audience to understand?
I don't have the link handy, and don't trust everything I read on the Internet, etc, etc.
But yeah - this makes so much more sense than breeding, raising, and feeding humans just to harvest their body heat.
According to Reddit…so, grain of salt…that is an urban legend, related to a Neil Gaiman short story that appeared on the Matrix promo website.
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1amree7/theres_a_wi...
I think we the urban legend really sticks around because the compute explanation just makes much more sense and we all want this beloved movies not to have a sill (albeit inconsequential) plot hole.
Oh, totally, it’s my head canon as well.
Mine is either that, or, the idea I mentioned in this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185076
Machines trying to be benevolent, but overly controlling.
That's very good.
It exists and is a great read – https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Goliath
Check the archive.org link at the bottom!
I like to think the machines actually were using them for processing power, and the humans themselves just misunderstood (or oversimplified for Neo) what was actually going on.
Processing power is my second favorite explanation.
My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
There is backstory that the films could have gone into, though I don't know if it was written before or after the first film. The humans in the matrix were allied with the machines and they put them in the matrix to protect them from the war. They were being benevolent.
They benevolently feed the dead to the living
What the humans thought they knew came from the Zion archives mostly. And guess where the Zion archives came from…
I'm sure that one Star trek episode had the same premise, together with something from Lem. The connection human/machine brain is rather old and human brains being used for computation is so reused, it is practically public domain.
I like how the other story that has this premise is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Hitchhiker's Guide had a slightly deeper philosophical implication though, in that the premise is that powerful computers already existed to solve complex problems. Earth was created to pose powerful questions.
don't forget Sirens of Titan!
Sounds like Severance
Wow. I picked up a copy of Hyperion this morning while taking a random stroll through town - something I rarely do during a work day anymore. I popped into a book shop on a complete whim, and picked it up as it had been on my list for a while. The coincidence feels deeply uncanny.
Do yourself a favor and get the audiobook after you read the physical book. It is, hands down, the best audiobook ever made. By far and away.
Totally agree with this, too! The books are great and I’ve read all four a few times over, but the audiobooks are something else. The guy who reads them manages to strike a near perfect balance between “reading” and “acting” that is just such a pleasure to listen to. I think we must have listened to it beginning to end about another three or four times as a family during long car trips!
That's the thing. It is acting. All the characters are played by actors. And they just simply nail their parts. You're right that it's an equal and almost perfect mix of acting while not changing the tone or impacting the content via the same acting process.
It legitimately is the best audio book I've ever heard. I think it's because their voices and tone and cadence matches what I hear in my head when reading the book.
I started reading it for the first time this week. It’s just a statistical anomaly… but humans are wired to notice and feel coincidence; it connects us to space and time in a way that must have helped make religion more believable.
"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."
I read that many years ago, forgot the source.
It would be interesting if it were Dan Simmons…
Hope you come back to this memory when they discuss the void that binds.
And I just finished The Rise of Endymion a few days ago. Uncanny indeed.
I've had this internet handle since the last century. Most people in here are talking about Hyperion but Simmons was a fantastic cross-genre author. My favorites were his historical fiction that contained a fantastical bent:
Drood: Has Wilkie Collins as an unreliable narrator, depicting the last five or so years of Charles Dickens' life.
Crook Factory: An FBI agent is sent to Cuba to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway, hijinks ensue.
The Fifth Heart: Henry James and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery.
The Terror: Tells the story of what happened to the HMS Terror that attempted to make the northwest passage. The Arctic is a character in itself in this amazing story. I thought the TV mini-series was fine.
Abominable and Black Hills: I haven't read these yet but look forward to doing so.
Honestly, I think Dan Simmons is my favorite author. I know his politics became unpalatable but I could never find it in myself to care. My heart sank when I saw this post.
I've only read the first Hyperion novel, none of his other works. Thanks for recommending them!
I have never read an ending that was as sad, happy, clever and beautiful as the ending to Rise of Endymion. To this day it's one of the very few books that made me shed a tear.
Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.
Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.
A girl I was infatuated with told me to read Hyperion when I was in my early 20s. Never read a book to try to win someone's affections. It won't work, but what's worse is you won't even enjoy the book.
I read a lot of SF and just last year I thought it was about time I gave it another go. I couldn't put it down. Almost couldn't believe what I was reading, it was so good. Continued to read the other three and it was just a good all the way through. Was quite sad when I finished and it was all over.
It now has a permanent place in my library. I expect I'll enjoy it even more on my next reading. I can only dream of giving people as much joy as an author like Simmons.
I had a copy of Hyperion but didn't read it for years because the scary knife robot on the cover seemed intimidating. I finally read it, and all the sequels, and they were great books, and hell YEAH that was an intimidating knife robot! Sometimes you CAN tell a book by its cover.
I didn't know there was a type of bird called a shrike until long after I read Hyperion. The birds look and sound like cute little songbirds, kind of like a smaller mockingbird. But the way they hunt is hardcore. They capture small prey (lizards, grasshoppers, etc) and impale them on a spike from cactus or a broken branch. Then they return to eat them at their leisure.
It's rare to see their caches but a few times I've been out hiking in the desert and seen the remains of a little critter on a cactus thorn.
The scary knife robot is way, way more intimidating in person.
I still remember the first time I met a scary knife robot. Working fast food night shift was crazy times.
I find it awesome that the true nature and mission of the Shrike remains a secret.
I read the Hyperion books during a particularly intense period of my life and found them quite powerful. I didn’t know anything about Simmons at the time, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that like Tolkein these stories started with an oral format for children.
My "intense time of life" story re: Hyperion. I was finishing "The Rise of Endymion" and was stricken with a kidney stone. It was absolutely eerie, and has cemented my memory of that book in a strange way.
Ohhhh yeah, same exact deal with me. Read the series during a wild moment in my life decades ago. Still my favorite sci-fi series to date
Carrion Comfort is still one of the most creepy horror books I've ever read and is seldom mentioned when we talk about Dan Simmons.
Very much agreed. I haven't read all of Dan's work to comment how it ranks among his output, but Carrion Comfort is a book that I still think back on years after I read it.
The first person perspective of the old lady at the beginning of the book was so creepy.
I see everyone talking about Hyperion, so I will play up The Terror as one of my favorites. The TV series did NOT do it justice.
Yeah, I never got pulled into Hyperion but The Terror was.. something else. Just a masterpiece, and the TV series came nowhere near.
Currently finishing up The Terror. I've never read a horror story until I got this. There are times I struggle to put it down, incredible book. Simmons painted quite a colorful picture of what it's like to die from scurvy so now I bring an emergency orange wherever I go.
THANK YOU!!! The Terror—the book—absolutely blew me away. I still am in awe of that book. Just everything about it.
And yeah the adaptation was so, so weak. But it faced the same problem many horror movies do, which is that if you're forced to show the Thing™ it loses all its power.
Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.
I enjoyed the Hyperion books but this got him put on my "never read anything from ever again" list: https://web.archive.org/web/20060424105133/http://www.dansim...
Same here. It's a fading memory, but the decade following 9/11 really did feature a lot of big brains turning THE COMING CALIPHATE into an existential threat to humanity. Which seems quaint, now.
So he had a pretty good (not perfect) run up until the final 1/3, then had a staggering turn that only the author thought was profound or earned?
That's a man who lived his craft right there.
Bizarrely, Reply is one of my favorite scifi books. One of the only books I’ve read more than once.
Can you perhaps explain what is objectionable so I don’t have to read the objectionable thing?
I skimmed it. It's a story about a time traveler warning his ancestor about the horrors of Islam taking over the world. It's pretty yikes.
>never read anything from ever again
I think it's a poisonous and reductive mindset to have. You can separate art from the character of the artist. If you cared about everything everyone has ever said or done in various stages of their lives, you wouldn't have much left to enjoy or appreciate.
On the other hand, there is so so much art out there, I could never hope to consume it all. It’s simple for me to use the character of the artist as a filter. I can break that rule whenever I want, but by default, other things being equal, I would prefer to consume art for pleasure from artists I respect as people.
I do consume art from outside this bubble but more to satisfy academic curiosity than pleasure.
He's referring ... to his "art". Thats what the piece he linked to was a part of.
Its not poisonous nor reductive to decide not to follow an "artist" because his "art" is repulsive.
"I will never read anything by [AUTHOR] because some things [AUTHOR] wrote are now in my no no list."
Sorry, that just doesn't make sense to me.
With the amount of fiction available to read, why give your money to authors who are bad people?
Did you read the thing I linked? It's on the same level as the Turner Diaries or Fu Manchu or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I'm only on this earth for so many years, and the number of words I can shove in my eye holes is finite. Dan Simmons thought it was a good idea to write that, and publish it on his own blog. SF is the kind of genre where you run the risk of getting hit with a big bolus of the author's politics at any time, and why would I drink from a well somebody's already pooped in?
Sure, but at the same time it's debatable whether even an artist themselves gets to retroactively reinterpret their own art that way.
Interesting.
I don’t think he was particularly kind to any proselytizing religion.
Did you read the Cantos?
You might have missed this part of my post: > I enjoyed the Hyperion books
[dead]
The tale of the priest in Hyperion Cantos is the scariest thing I have ever read. Just this one story is a masterpiece. But the books contain dozens and dozens of stories, worlds, characters like that. The scope of the universe Simmons had built is immense. Truly a great writer.
See you later, alligator…
Although it's quite a flawed novel compared to brilliant space opera like Hyperion, I have a bit of a soft spot for Carrion Comfort. I think it'd make a great movie!
I have a real soft spot for Summer of Night.
It obviously owes a lot to Stephen King’s IT. But it stands on its own merits…and I give it extra credit because it was set in my home town. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Night)
I would also rate this above hyperion, like hyperion book 1 it crossed into the horror genre quite well, the rest of the hyperion books were a little bit too preachy but a good series never the less. RIP Dan.
Carrion Comfort was my introduction to Dan Simmons, I loved it. Not as good as some of his later stuff but it's really inventive, and never boring.
The library wait list for Hyperion was months. I'm in the middle of Fall of Hyperion right now. Great writing.
See you later, alligator...
Simmons wrote one of my favourite short stories of all time Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and living in Hell.
While I'm definitely not willing to put myself through any of his books after 9/11, I haven't stopped recommending Vanni Fucci as an introduction to Dan Simmons.
Rest in peace.
Enjoyed the first Hyperion, but Fall of Hyperion was a bit of a slog for me. If Fall of Hyperion were compressed into the conclusion of Hyperion and other stories left as novellas (in the way James S.A. Corey has done), I think I would have enjoyed the story more.
In contrast, getting through Hyperion was hard for me (some of the character stories I LOVED and some felt like a slog), but I really loved Fall of Hyperion.
Yeah, Hyperion had an interesting structure, but the second book was quite basic compared to that.
If The Fall of Hyperion were 1/3 of the length and part of the first book it would be perfect.
I did find the transition from Hyperion to Fall a little jarring. It has a completely different narrative structure for a start, but more importantly the scope goes from a single group of people doing a pilgrimage to a huge interstellar conspiracy. I think it works best if you read each book slightly separately rather than as one huge work.
RIP, truly one of the greats.
His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.
PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.
Hyperion was a wonderful sci-novel. Thank you Dan, for your amazing writing; may you rest in peace.
RIP. I really liked the Hyperion books and Ilium/Olympos. He seemed to become a bit of a chud after 9/11 but the books are still well worth reading.
Yeah, the Islamophobia in Ilium/Olympos made me really tempted to put the books down several times. It's such a strange about-face from when he wrote the character Kassad in the Hyperion Cantos.
Like Frank Miller, it seems like 9/11 just broke him.
Loved Ilium, and Olympos a little less so. Inspired me to read the Iliad.
Things most people don’t know about Illinois is that while the Mason Dixon line officially goes around the bottom of the state, philosophically it cuts through the middle. Peoria is maybe thirty miles north of the rednecks.
Add that he was a boomer and I was disappointed but not surprised when people started complaining about him.
Ha, I’d argue it starts right at Pekin.
That puts several university towns below the line. But little towns outside big towns in the Midwest have their own vibe.
Ilium was my first Simmons & I was glued to it. The mem/meme "brane" portals to other realities still anchors so much of my thought, frames my perception signficiantly.
It also featured giant space crustaceans! Or at least one, the moravec Orpho. Along with his more human Mahnmut moravec friend. This feels low key resonant with our days filled with OpenClaw.
Accelerando hit 2 years latter (2005), with much more alien space lobsters. Where-as Orpho was a moravec that picked a crustacean shape.
Some random fan art, https://www.deviantart.com/microcosmicecology/art/Mahnmut-an... https://www.deviantart.com/vengethenian/art/Mahnmut-and-Orph...
Someone mentioned lobsters in Schismatrix (1985) reminding me that I haven't read it!!
> He seemed to become a bit of a chud
I will now read Ilium/Olympos
Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barnes and Noble beyond the SF&F and horror aisles and discovered he had been writing crime novels. And they were good.
I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.
I recommend everyone read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The messages about AI and human stagnation are highly relevant to our current world.
I liked all of the Hyperion/Shrike novels, except when Raul Endymion persistently refers to the heroine/love-interest as "my young friend", or similar phrasing - slightly creepy/boring.
I didn't know that Summer of Night was a series - really liked the original book - will have to investigate.
And, of course, I'm sad he's died.
I texted a RIP message to a friend-chat with the comment, "easily one of the top five space opera novels of all time"
One of the friends asked Claude-AI "what are the top five space opera novels of all time," and it ranked Hyperion as #2, only behind Dune.
I personally think LLM "knowledge" is… kind of stupid… but I have to admit it speaks to Simmons legacy that even the word swamp recognizes Hyperion as an all-time classic.
(it ranked Stars Are Legion by K. Hurley as #5, which I unconditionally agree with, but am also kind of shocked, I've never heard of this book so much as referenced in any kind of article or conversation. But yeah, read it. Star Wars meets Alien — the Death Star is the alien)
It’s all about the Hyperion Cantos which is fair but - the one Dan Simmons book we still talk about, years later, is his first novel: Song of Kali. Short and raw, one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read.
Here lies one whose name was writ in Eternity.
To me, the Hyperion Cantos present a vision of the future that is incredibly hopeful. The path along the way may at times be bleak, and I find the handling of the TechnoCore to reveal echos of the great chain in a work that otherwise seems to totally reject it. Despite those and a few other shortcomings the Cantos are essential guides for charting our way toward a distant future that is filled with warmth, love, and compassion rather than the cold empty void of hate. To receive such a vision is a rare gift. Thank you Dan. Choose again.
The Hollow Man - a telepathic widower goes on the run. Story inspired by Dante's Inferno, I believe. The only book I've read in one sitting overnight. Prayers to Broken Stones - a book of short stories, contains the original novella of 'Carrion Comfort' (which works rather better, I believe, than the full novel), and some other classics, including Metastasis. A really interesting author; I'm glad he was writing.
Thank you for the wonderful stories. Hyperion was such a trip. It managed to move me, an aging hardcore sci-fi fan, with its silly, chaotic, poetic universe.
Oh no! I just finished reading Hyperion this week and it has become one of my favorite books of all time. I will treasure my signed copy more so now, RIP.
I am sad to know about this, Dan Simmons had a mind blowing amount of imagination and the ability to turn that into interesting and imaginative books that expanded my imagination when I read them.
I loved Hyperion cantos, Illium and then non sci-fi books like A Winter Haunting and Summer of night (which I read in the wrong order lol).
I am also happy to read that he was a great person overall and a great teacher. May he rest in peace.
I read Hyperion in hs; and so much of what I read afterward (Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Keats, Eliot, Valéry) was influenced by Dan Simmons writing about it/quoting it. At this point, I doubt I could tell you where his influence on my taste & opinions on fiction begins or ends. Gone too soon.
RIP
Hyperion Cantos is the most influential scifi story I've ever read personally. The first book is a masterpiece, while the rest remains one of the greats.
:(
Hyperion is the first sci-fi series I have ever described as beautiful. I just heard about and read all four in the past year.
The books were incredibly influential on me as a teenager, twenty years later on re-reading the cantos I found some of the specific language around intergenerational romance to be troubling and the focus on it to be a major distraction from the rest of the excellent story.
Praying for his friends and family. RIP
I read the book years ago so might have forgotten - what intergenerational romance ?
Imagine Lolita with a future seer twist. The adolescent girl knows she will be lovers with the adult male main character in a future time and teases him by bathing with him among other interactions while she is still an adolescent. It's teased at in the third book and fourth book until finally it's revealed to be a love story with a power ala The Stars My Destination.
If one enjoys the Hyperion books, then it is highly likely one would also enjoy the Ilium books.
It's nice that he ruminated on these old stories these books riff on without being smug about it.
It's sad that he didn't manage to resist the fear based, fiercely reactionary politics of the last quarter of a century or so.
I'd enjoy an entire book series with Martin Silenus as the central character. He's hilarious. Any suggestions?
Hyperion Cantos might be my favorite sci-fi series ever. What a great writer.
Hyperion was the first science fiction book that made me cry.
I love all four books in the series.
I never really engaged in any of his other writing. I have a signed copy of Ilium but never read it.
'Hyperion' is a brilliant name of a book in 1989.
I picked up Hyperion on a whim on Kindle because it was on sale for 2$.
Amazing book, I bought and loved the other 3, I still hope they do a good miniseries with the books.
I sincerely hope they don't make any adaptation... after the slaughterhouse they've made with 3 Body Problem, Foundation, Altered Carbon, et al Not to mention all the damage done to other more traditional works of fiction.
Sometimes it's done right, like with The Expanse. Although the writers also wrote some of the episode scripts, so that probably helped...
To each their own I guess. I never found the Expanse television series to be very good when compared to the books.
Hm altered carbon season 1 was pretty good?
the books are still on my to read list.
You can add the Wheel of Time to the list :(((
But, the Expanse is not that bad really. Books were much more immersive with regards to the micro-G and low-G environments, but that is something almost impossible to film (at least until we learn how to control gravity).
You don’t have to watch them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons
Vale Dan Simmons. You brought the world a _lot_ of joy.
I enjoyed his sci-fi so much. Rest in peace brother.
I'm sorry to read this, I was just thinking about rereading the entire saga the other day. His words and ideas will forever life in my mind.
I read Hyperion last year. It's an ode to the English letters and a phenomenal exercise in world-building. RIP.
Hyperion is a beautiful book, and prophetic in many ways. RIP to Dan Simmons.
I loved the Hyperion books, but I moved on to other authors over time. Apparently, this is for the best, given what I've heard about his attitudes and his writing in his later decades.
I wonder if the adaptation is still in the works?
https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
As a general rule, if an announcement about a movie project is over a year old and nothing else has been mentioned since, you can safely assume it's no longer a thing.
Hyperion cries out for a good film adaptation.
I rather hope it doesn't. It's not so much about action; it's subtle worldbuilding and a certain vibe that is easily distorted on screen. Also, it would destroy everybody's personal vision of the Shrike...
...does it though? I mean we don't have to argue about personal desires and opinions. But Hyperion simply doesn't seem adaptable. You would lose everything that makes it great.
Not sure about a film, but maybe TV series? I thought Game of Thrones was not adaptable but then HBO did it.
It would make a perfect mini-series. Each episode or two could cover each pilgrim's story, with a finale two-parter to wrap up Fall of Hyperion. A lot from Fall could be trimmed down.
I have to admit that I found the Hyperion Cantos to be a bit of a disappointment. There were some decent bits and pieces scattered throughout, but overall the story never seemed to resolve into something I could find engaging.
Can someone who liked it share why?
Pro: Interesting world building, Canterbury Tales in space, Huckleberry Finn in space, strong female characters.
Con: Pro Judaism and Christianity (albeit with much criticism to both) and anti Islam, awkward sex scenes, awkward Lolita-esque vibes in the latter books.
Rest In Peace Dan Simmons.
R.I.P.
I really liked Children of the Night.
RIP. Absolutely loved his writings
Read Hyperion some years ago. I was totally trhrilled to read it because of the good reviews... But I was very fast disappointed about the overwhelming focus on boring religion. The interessting stuff like TechnoCore was so sparse that I never came into a flow reading the book. After 2/3 I just wanted to finish it fast.
That was probably a mistake. The religion is great (and I say that as a staunch materialist atheist) and _Fall of Hyperion_ had a lot more TechnoCore and filling out the background than _Hyperion_.
Does this book date well, or is it cheest/unreadable like Neuromancer?
The first too books aged well.
... and also "The Hollow Man". Loved that one too.
Every now and then I will google "books like Hyperion", read something, and conclude that it was nothing like Hyperion. Wonderful books, wonderful writer. A loss.
you mean, author of Song of Kali.
I remember I was in a hotel in detroit years ago and read the whole book, in pdf form on my laptop, it was that fun!
RIP Dan
Fuck
Obituary:
* https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/longmont-co/danie...
Thanks for posting this. It should be the link in the OP frankly.
Done.
[dead]
The type of person the concept 'death of the author' was invented for, because whoo were some of his other books ideological garbage.
9/11 kinda broke his brain, as I recall. (The book Flashback is… ooof. Hyperion includes a major Muslim character and it’s just a wild shift between the two.)
Almost like he updated his view of the world, which isn't a bad thing.
his updated view of the world involved global warming being a hoax and that obama (literally obama, not even a fake obama parallel) caused the end of the west.
When you are that spectacularly wrong, it is. If you can't update correctly, you probably shouldn't.