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.
Sounds like Severance
Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
201–210 of 218 posts
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#202Wow. 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!
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#203I 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.
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#204Simmons 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 civilizatio…
> 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).
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#205Hyperion is a beautiful book, and prophetic in many ways. RIP to Dan Simmons.
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#206Every 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.
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#207I 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...
Bizarrely, Reply is one of my favorite scifi books. One of the only books I’ve read more than once.
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#208I 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.
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).
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#209I 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.
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
Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
#210The 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…
> 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.
I don’t, and this stands as one of the best reading experiences of my life.