Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Some of best science-fiction literature ever penned.
However, the author, while a superb writer, is an asshole.
A lot of the classic scifi authors were assholes one way or another it seems. Frank Herbert was homophobic.
Herbert was homophobic, Assimov was sexist, Orson Scott Card is homophobic, it’s such a shame.
Orson is so frustrating. Speaker for the Dead is a wonderful book about not judging other cultures, their practices or desires. Things that may seem shocking to you personally, are normal and celebrated by others.
And it’s written by a bigot. Like dude, have you even read your own book?
It works because it is everything he doesn’t believe in that the readers coalesce into a coherent ideology. He was just writing about a world he doesn’t believe can exist because his world was shaped so strongly by LDS/Mormonism.
I couldn’t agree more. Dude writes a book about how the greatest human achievement is empathy and how it can redeem us for the evils we commit in ignorance, and then says that all queer people secretly wish they were “normal”. Just a reminder we all need to examine ourselves for bias I guess.
The Shrike will impale all those who do not read Hyperion on their own tree of thorns!
It rightly won the Hugo award, Hyperion did.
Loved Hyperion, but I bounced off the sequel. The first book was just such a perfect story, told perfectly… Then it just seems to kind of transform into just another space sci-fi affair with book 2. Like the entire structure of the first book was thrown out, and now we’re just telling a space story.
I’m sure it’s good, people have told me it’s good. It just didn’t seem like it fit together as a sequel to such a perfect novel (that maybe never needed a sequel).
It’s a bit wonky in some parts but the ending ties the whole thing together. Definitely give it a read.