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.
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].
Despite being a huge fan of Simmons I had originally passed on this one because I didn't care for the Dickens novels I had read in school. At a family gathering I was surprised to learn that my Grandma was a big Simmons fan. She convinced me to give Drood a shot and sure enough I really enjoyed it! So I'd say it's worth checking out even if you're not a big Dickens reader.
I read Hyperion and I found it... alright, just not my thing. Maybe it is indeed a masterpiece but "that every fan of sci-fi ought to have read" oversells it. I honestly can't conscion the time to read the rest of the Cantos versus other things on my reading list. Quality does not alone compel consumption! :)
I tried reading it but I couldn't get into it. Maybe it the heavy religious themes or just the science fiction being so far into the future? I really should give it a shot again
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.
Oh, boy. The Shrike. That thing still haunts me in a way that no other monster or alien across all of Sci-fi or fantasy really does. It's something about the inscrutability of it, especially in the first novel (still my favorite) where its purpose and backstory haven't been revealed. Sure, it's scary, but I think the mystery of its motives - and its ability to unpredictably act apparently benevolently sometimes - is where the real terror lies.
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.
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.
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, hijinks ensue.
The Fifth Heart: Henry James and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery.
The Terror: Tells the story of what happened to the HMS Terror that attempted to make the northwest passage. The Arctic is a character in itself in this amazing story. I thought the TV mini-series was fine.
Abominable and Black Hills: I haven't read these yet but look forward to doing so.
Honestly, I think Dan Simmons is my favorite author. I know his politics became unpalatable but I could never find it in myself to care. My heart sank when I saw this post.
I have never read an ending that was as sad, happy, clever and beautiful as the ending to Rise of Endymion. To this day it's one of the very few books that made me shed a tear.
Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.
Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.
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.
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 didn't know there was a type of bird called a shrike until long after I read Hyperion. The birds look and sound like cute little songbirds, kind of like a smaller mockingbird. But the way they hunt is hardcore. They capture small prey (lizards, grasshoppers, etc) and impale them on a spike from cactus or a broken branch. Then they return to eat them at their leisure.
It's rare to see their caches but a few times I've been out hiking in the desert and seen the remains of a little critter on a cactus thorn.
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.
Currently finishing up The Terror. I've never read a horror story until I got this. There are times I struggle to put it down, incredible book. Simmons painted quite a colorful picture of what it's like to die from scurvy so now I bring an emergency orange wherever I go.
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.
Well there was no way the show would be quite as good as the book. But I was still pleasantly surprised, it was definitely better than the average TV adaptation. The actors were very good.
Same here. It's a fading memory, but the decade following 9/11 really did feature a lot of big brains turning THE COMING CALIPHATE into an existential threat to humanity. Which seems quaint, now.
I think it's a poisonous and reductive mindset to have. You can separate art from the character of the artist. If you cared about everything everyone has ever said or done in various stages of their lives, you wouldn't have much left to enjoy or appreciate.
The tale of the priest in Hyperion Cantos is the scariest thing I have ever read. Just this one story is a masterpiece. But the books contain dozens and dozens of stories, worlds, characters like that. The scope of the universe Simmons had built is immense. Truly a great writer.
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.
Simmons wrote one of my favourite short stories of all time Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and living in Hell.
While I'm definitely not willing to put myself through any of his books after 9/11, I haven't stopped recommending Vanni Fucci as an introduction to Dan Simmons.
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.
His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.
PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the 90s and the early aughts Simmons was on my “automatically buy everything he writes” list. But it seemed like he had stopped writing. But then I happened to browse Barnes and Noble beyond the SF&F and horror aisles and discovered he had been writing crime novels. And they were good.
I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.
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 texted a RIP message to a friend-chat with the comment, "easily one of the top five space opera novels of all time"
One of the friends asked Claude-AI "what are the top five space opera novels of all time," and it ranked Hyperion as #2, only behind Dune.
I personally think LLM "knowledge" is… kind of stupid… but I have to admit it speaks to Simmons legacy that even the word swamp recognizes Hyperion as an all-time classic.
(it ranked Stars Are Legion by K. Hurley as #5, which I unconditionally agree with, but am also kind of shocked, I've never heard of this book so much as referenced in any kind of article or conversation. But yeah, read it. Star Wars meets Alien — the Death Star is the alien)
It’s all about the Hyperion Cantos which is fair but - the one Dan Simmons book we still talk about, years later, is his first novel: Song of Kali. Short and raw, one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read.
To me, the Hyperion Cantos present a vision of the future that is incredibly hopeful. The path along the way may at times be bleak, and I find the handling of the TechnoCore to reveal echos of the great chain in a work that otherwise seems to totally reject it. Despite those and a few other shortcomings the Cantos are essential guides for charting our way toward a distant future that is filled with warmth, love, and compassion rather than the cold empty void of hate. To receive such a vision is a rare gift. Thank you Dan. Choose again.
The Hollow Man - a telepathic widower goes on the run. Story inspired by Dante's Inferno, I believe. The only book I've read in one sitting overnight. Prayers to Broken Stones - a book of short stories, contains the original novella of 'Carrion Comfort' (which works rather better, I believe, than the full novel), and some other classics, including Metastasis. A really interesting author; I'm glad he was writing.
Thank you for the wonderful stories. Hyperion was such a trip. It managed to move me, an aging hardcore sci-fi fan, with its silly, chaotic, poetic universe.
Oh no! I just finished reading Hyperion this week and it has become one of my favorite books of all time. I will treasure my signed copy more so now, RIP.
I am sad to know about this, Dan Simmons had a mind blowing amount of imagination and the ability to turn that into interesting and imaginative books that expanded my imagination when I read them.
I loved Hyperion cantos, Illium and then non sci-fi books like A Winter Haunting and Summer of night (which I read in the wrong order lol).
I am also happy to read that he was a great person overall and a great teacher.
May he rest in peace.
I read Hyperion in hs; and so much of what I read afterward (Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Keats, Eliot, Valéry) was influenced by Dan Simmons writing about it/quoting it. At this point, I doubt I could tell you where his influence on my taste & opinions on fiction begins or ends. Gone too soon.
Hyperion Cantos is the most influential scifi story I've ever read personally. The first book is a masterpiece, while the rest remains one of the greats.
The books were incredibly influential on me as a teenager, twenty years later on re-reading the cantos I found some of the specific language around intergenerational romance to be troubling and the focus on it to be a major distraction from the rest of the excellent story.
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.
I 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.
As a general rule, if an announcement about a movie project is over a year old and nothing else has been mentioned since, you can safely assume it's no longer a thing.
I rather hope it doesn't. It's not so much about action; it's subtle worldbuilding and a certain vibe that is easily distorted on screen. Also, it would destroy everybody's personal vision of the Shrike...
...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 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.
Pro: Interesting world building, Canterbury Tales in space, Huckleberry Finn in space, strong female characters.
Con: Pro Judaism and Christianity (albeit with much criticism to both) and anti Islam, awkward sex scenes, awkward Lolita-esque vibes in the latter books.
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.
That was probably a mistake. The religion is great (and I say that as a staunch materialist atheist) and _Fall of Hyperion_ had a lot more TechnoCore and filling out the background than _Hyperion_.
Every 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.
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.)
Freak_NL|2 days ago
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.
nz|2 days ago
[1]: https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/02/dan-simmons-river...
rurp|2 days ago
jdashg|2 days ago
UltraSane|2 days ago
rdedev|2 days ago
layer8|2 days ago
You have to have some affinity to religious/Christianity/church topics, otherwise it’s quite a turn-off.
matthewsinclair|2 days ago
clarkmoody|2 days ago
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.
libraryofbabel|2 days ago
samus|2 days ago
globular-toast|2 days ago
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).
melecas|2 days ago
perardi|2 days ago
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occz|2 days ago
colkassad|2 days ago
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, hijinks ensue.
The Fifth Heart: Henry James and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery.
The Terror: Tells the story of what happened to the HMS Terror that attempted to make the northwest passage. The Arctic is a character in itself in this amazing story. I thought the TV mini-series was fine.
Abominable and Black Hills: I haven't read these yet but look forward to doing so.
Honestly, I think Dan Simmons is my favorite author. I know his politics became unpalatable but I could never find it in myself to care. My heart sank when I saw this post.
eigencoder|2 days ago
Gazoche|2 days ago
Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.
Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.
globular-toast|2 days ago
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.
DonHopkins|2 days ago
rurp|2 days ago
It's rare to see their caches but a few times I've been out hiking in the desert and seen the remains of a little critter on a cactus thorn.
hinkley|2 days ago
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virgil_disgr4ce|2 days ago
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.
nurbl|2 days ago
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fatbird|2 days ago
petsfed|2 days ago
That's a man who lived his craft right there.
e40|1 day ago
ses1984|2 days ago
ZpJuUuNaQ5|2 days ago
I think it's a poisonous and reductive mindset to have. You can separate art from the character of the artist. If you cared about everything everyone has ever said or done in various stages of their lives, you wouldn't have much left to enjoy or appreciate.
pragmatic|2 days ago
I don’t think he was particularly kind to any proselytizing religion.
Did you read the Cantos?
RemainsOfTheDay|2 days ago
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freetonik|2 days ago
See you later, alligator…
rwmj|2 days ago
perardi|2 days ago
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)
boznz|2 days ago
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elorm|2 days ago
While I'm definitely not willing to put myself through any of his books after 9/11, I haven't stopped recommending Vanni Fucci as an introduction to Dan Simmons.
Rest in peace.
teeray|2 days ago
Trasmatta|2 days ago
k__|2 days ago
If The Fall of Hyperion were 1/3 of the length and part of the first book it would be perfect.
globular-toast|2 days ago
StillBored|2 days ago
His early stuff contains some real masterworks. Hyperion is still to this day, going to show up at the top of my scifi recommended reading list, most of his horror novels were also great in their own ways.
PS: I thought Fall of Hyperion should have been the end, it was just too final. There was plenty of space for some prequels but while the sequels contained some interesting ideas, they just never got to the level I felt justified reversing the finality of Fall. And Olympus/etc was pretty forgettable, but I don't regret the time I spent reading pretty much everything he wrote, sometimes more than once. So again, RIP.
lordleft|2 days ago
okasaki|2 days ago
AdmiralAsshat|2 days ago
Like Frank Miller, it seems like 9/11 just broke him.
JackFr|2 days ago
jauntywundrkind|1 day ago
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!!
hinkley|2 days ago
Add that he was a boomer and I was disappointed but not surprised when people started complaining about him.
poisonarena|2 days ago
I will now read Ilium/Olympos
skipkey|2 days ago
I think if he had ever decided to write romance novels I would have probably enjoyed those as well.
Trasmatta|2 days ago
zabzonk|2 days ago
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.
Eric_WVGG|2 days ago
One of the friends asked Claude-AI "what are the top five space opera novels of all time," and it ranked Hyperion as #2, only behind Dune.
I personally think LLM "knowledge" is… kind of stupid… but I have to admit it speaks to Simmons legacy that even the word swamp recognizes Hyperion as an all-time classic.
(it ranked Stars Are Legion by K. Hurley as #5, which I unconditionally agree with, but am also kind of shocked, I've never heard of this book so much as referenced in any kind of article or conversation. But yeah, read it. Star Wars meets Alien — the Death Star is the alien)
loloquwowndueo|2 days ago
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crorella|2 days ago
I loved Hyperion cantos, Illium and then non sci-fi books like A Winter Haunting and Summer of night (which I read in the wrong order lol).
I am also happy to read that he was a great person overall and a great teacher. May he rest in peace.
linksnapzz|2 days ago
anvuong|2 days ago
Hyperion Cantos is the most influential scifi story I've ever read personally. The first book is a masterpiece, while the rest remains one of the greats.
:(
idontwantthis|2 days ago
funemployed|2 days ago
Praying for his friends and family. RIP
Agingcoder|2 days ago
cess11|2 days ago
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.
davidswalkabout|1 day ago
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ChicagoDave|2 days ago
I love all four books in the series.
I never really engaged in any of his other writing. I have a signed copy of Ilium but never read it.
lysace|2 days ago
Izikiel43|2 days ago
Amazing book, I bought and loved the other 3, I still hope they do a good miniseries with the books.
pelagicAustral|2 days ago
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ortusdux|2 days ago
https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
genjipress|2 days ago
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samus|2 days ago
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dtj1123|2 days ago
Can someone who liked it share why?
k__|2 days ago
Con: Pro Judaism and Christianity (albeit with much criticism to both) and anti Islam, awkward sex scenes, awkward Lolita-esque vibes in the latter books.
takko_the_boss|2 days ago
R.I.P.
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throw0101a|2 days ago
* https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/longmont-co/danie...
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