alt Hacker NewsDan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
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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.
So much good stuff, published in 1989 no less.
Rest in Peace to a true legend.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
RIP, truly one of the greats.
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.
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.
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.
Rest in peace.
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 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.
Carrion Comfort is still one of the most creepy horror books I've ever read and is seldom mentioned when we talk about Dan Simmons.
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.
I see everyone talking about Hyperion, so I will play up The Terror as one of my favorites. The TV series did NOT do it justice.
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.
Praying for his friends and family. RIP
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.
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.
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!
RIP
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.
:(
See you later, alligator...
The library wait list for Hyperion was months. I'm in the middle of Fall of Hyperion right now. Great writing.
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.
And, of course, I'm sad he's died.
I enjoyed his sci-fi so much. Rest in peace brother.
Hyperion was the first science fiction book that made me cry.
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.
I really liked Children of the Night.
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...
Hyperion was a wonderful sci-novel. Thank you Dan, for your amazing writing; may you rest in peace.
Vale Dan Simmons. You brought the world a _lot_ of joy.
I read Hyperion last year. It's an ode to the English letters and a phenomenal exercise in world-building. RIP.
I'm sorry to read this, I was just thinking about rereading the entire saga the other day. His words and ideas will forever life in my mind.
Here lies one whose name was writ in Eternity.
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.
Hyperion Cantos might be my favorite sci-fi series ever. What a great writer.
I wonder if the adaptation is still in the works?
https://deadline.com/2021/11/bradley-cooper-set-hyperion-at-...
I recommend everyone read Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The messages about AI and human stagnation are highly relevant to our current world.
Rest In Peace Dan Simmons.
R.I.P.
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.
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.
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.
Can someone who liked it share why?
RIP Dan
If one enjoys the Hyperion books, then it is highly likely one would also enjoy the Ilium books.
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.
'Hyperion' is a brilliant name of a book in 1989.
Hyperion is the first sci-fi series I have ever described as beautiful. I just heard about and read all four in the past year.
I 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.
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.
Does this book date well, or is it cheest/unreadable like Neuromancer?
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.