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Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

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Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#211

Post by clarkmoody »

globular-toast wrote: post #204
clarkmoody wrote: post #81

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 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).

The bathroom was on a raft floating on the surface of an ocean planet.

Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#212

Post by Loughla »

matthewsinclair wrote: post #202
Loughla wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That's the thing. It is acting. All the characters are played by actors. And they just simply nail their parts. You're right that it's an equal and almost perfect mix of acting while not changing the tone or impacting the content via the same acting process.

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.

Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#213

Post by jauntywundrkind »

okasaki wrote: post #19

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.

Ilium was my first Simmons & I was glued to it. The mem/meme "brane" portals to other realities still anchors so much of my thought, frames my perception signficiantly.

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!!

Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#214

Post by shagie »

davedx wrote: post #172
indubioprorubik wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who is "we"? In Banks' culture universe, humanity (us) were explicitly rejected and never became part of the Culture. (The State of the Art)

There's a footnote in Consider Phlebas at the end...

> “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.

Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#215

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

Freak_NL wrote: post #75
layer8 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There really is a huge stockpile of stuff there to build into fiction.

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.

Re: Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died

#218

Post by throw0101a »

Freak_NL wrote: post #75
layer8 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I mean, it's not my fandom, but Catholics do have a wicked sense of symbolism and decoration.

Catholics (and other denominations too) consider the three transcendentals to be Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, which are all natures of God†:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals

This philosophical/theological thinking goes back to (at least) the Middle Ages:

* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentals-medieval/

So the fact that "decoration" would be present is unsurprisingly, as Beauty in this reality can help to lead to greater reality of Truth and Goodness as well. It's why there have long been traditions with art, music, architecture, etc, in Catholic culture.

† God is Truth, God is Goodness (itself), and God is Beauty. (God is Love as well.)

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