181–190 of 218 posts
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...
Can you perhaps explain what is objectionable so I don’t have to read the objectionable thing?
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.
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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.
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,…
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...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.
See you later, alligator…
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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.
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.
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 partic…
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...
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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…
>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 archety…