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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.