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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
...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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I have zero affinity for those and found it a fascinating read.
Atheist/agnostic here, completely untrue statement
I disagree strongly. I'm not religious at all, and have a strong aversion to Christianity, and I loved those books.
:shrug: I'm an Atheist, I loved the series.
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...
100%. One of the genuine great writers.
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.
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...
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.
"Coincidence is a glimpse of the scaffolding of reality."
I read that many years ago, forgot the source.
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).
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.
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.
I like how the other story that has this premise is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
don't forget Sirens of Titan!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rest In Peace Dan Simmons.
R.I.P.
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.
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...
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.
Hyperion was a wonderful sci-novel. Thank you Dan, for your amazing writing; may you rest in peace.
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.
Does this book date well, or is it cheest/unreadable like Neuromancer?
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?
I read Hyperion last year. It's an ode to the English letters and a phenomenal exercise in world-building. RIP.
Hyperion Cantos might be my favorite sci-fi series ever. What a great writer.
Vale Dan Simmons. You brought the world a _lot_ of joy.
Here lies one whose name was writ in Eternity.
you mean, author of Song of Kali.
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.
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.
Hyperion cries out for a good film adaptation.
...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.
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.
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.
RIP Dan
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.
'Hyperion' is a brilliant name of a book in 1989.
I recommend everyone read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The messages about AI and human stagnation are highly relevant to our current world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons
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.
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...
Fuck
Obituary:
* https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/longmont-co/danie...
Thanks for posting this. It should be the link in the OP frankly.
Done.
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.
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.