I first read Dan Simmons‘s Hyperion in the early 1990s – the Hyperion Cantos is quite famous and I would occasionally see Hyperion listed in Amazon recommendations and ‘top’ lists (see the ISFDB Top 100 Lists and Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books from npr books (note that you may get some amusement out of searching for the npr list since it was very successful in generating commentary…) – but I really never felt any urge to pick it up again… My mistake! I recently read Hyperion (again) and The Fall of Hyperion and these are amazing – interesting format, great universe, interesting issues of faith and god, time travel, sentient AIs, space battles, politics… Classic! I wonder about younger me’s taste in books…
While reading these books I thought a lot about the amount of violence in the science fiction books that I have read… I suppose that there is some amount of violence in nearly every book I have read – but the scale of death that science fiction has imagined for the future seems… excessive? depressing? Certainly at least thought worthy…
Rating: 5 of 5
First Read: Hyperion – Early 1990s; Fall of Hyperion – February, 2012
CM
[...] know if the big ideas “two omnipotent and infinite Gods” (which reminds me a bit of Dan Simmon’s Hyperion series) totally thrilled me… But I certainly did enjoy the mystery/strangeness/discovery, the [...]