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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
I still think you can enjoy it without caring much about religion.
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.
As we have both read the books, it's notable that you associate pilgrimage with Christianity. This illustrates the point.
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.
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 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 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.
> “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.
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.
[1]: https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/02/dan-simmons-river...
Source: me, I had a huge cocaine problem and worked many years in the tech side of music and movies
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1amree7/theres_a_wi...
Check the archive.org link at the bottom!
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.
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.
Add that he was a boomer and I was disappointed but not surprised when people started complaining about him.
Like Frank Miller, it seems like 9/11 just broke him.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
Sorry, that just doesn't make sense to me.
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?
I do consume art from outside this bubble but more to satisfy academic curiosity than pleasure.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
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.
I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.
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.
Praying for his friends and family. RIP
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
See you later, alligator…
* https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/longmont-co/danie...