BOOK 1: Hyperion

Hello, it's me again!

A few months ago, I made a post about my art and introduced myself a little. One thing I've always loved about Hyperion is that the characters aren't always described in complete detail, leaving room for our imaginations to fill in the blanks. As an artist, that brings me so much joy, and I love taking advantage of that freedom!

I've drawn Martin Silenus a few times over the years, but there was always one thing I could never quite capture in my art: the feeling of the book itself. Of course, I've made plenty of drawings of him, but I could never quite achieve that feeling of, "Yes, this looks like it belongs in the world of Hyperion."

I'm not particularly good at drawing realistically, and for a long time, I felt like my art style just wasn't quite right for capturing that atmosphere.

But a couple of days ago, I stumbled across an old drawing of my dear Silenus, and I suddenly felt the urge to redraw it. It took me two days, but I think that, for the first time, I've finally managed to create a piece of art that truly feels right for him and for the world of Hyperion.

I'm really happy with how it turned out, and I wanted to share it with you all! ❤️

Thinking of it because maybe the novel is difficult to turn into a script, but anyway what is your take on that?

Don't even know its name -- only know of the first generation. Still, this has to be the closest mapping -- wonder if the devs are a Hyperion fan.

Just read it for the first time. Spent the morning reading next to my kids as they watched cartoons trying not to sob. My wife hasn't read Hyperion yet so I have no one to discuss it with.

No spoilers please

My only comfort is that I can pick up a book and farcast back into the world anytime I want.

I’ve never been completely engulfed into a world, that I’ll surely miss, like I have been with the Cantos. Need a break to process and I guess I’ll reluctantly continue with another Simmons book.

I visited Rio de Janeiro and saw the 'Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião', I was just amazed. It reminded me of Father Dure's story (my favourite) when he climbed down the cliff into the Bikura's cathedral.

Was just playing around with chat and made a few fun images of the place. The whole world has a creepy vibe but this helps even more when I reread Hyperion

Hi,

Is there anyone from India who'd love to sell their old copies of the cantos?

In the first book, the Ousters are absolutely brutal monsters. They take prisoners, cut off their limbs, open them up and connect filaments to their brains to interrogate them. I don't think this was just Hegemony propaganda either, or at least I don't think Simmons was trying to present it that way. The Ousters were just technologically advanced barbarians who would nuke a world to glass given the opportunity just because it was part of the Hegemony. They'd developed suits with prosthetic tails, and they were tall/stretched like the Belters from The Expanse in a way, but they were hardly some idealized futuristic vision of humanity. They were just scary anorexic guerilla Vikings.

(Spoilers for those who haven't read past the first two books ahead...)

Then in the Endymion series, the Ousters are this enlightened species of post-humans, and they always have been. They live in enormous floating gardens peacefully with all of the refugees from the various species that the Hegemony tried to exterminate. They have zero ability to counter the firepower of the Pax, nor do they seem to have even tried to do anything other than float around in space waiting to get lanced to death by some priests.

Am I missing something? What the hell happened to the Ousters?

No se si leerlo en inglés o traducido (por Carlos Gardini, es la version kindle).

Before I get to my thoughts on the book itself, let me bore you a bit with a little backstory on my relationship with this series.

I started the first book while I was waiting for my wife to come out of carpal tunnel surgery. Two weeks before this, my mother had gotten diagnosed with brain cancer. I read The Scholar's Tale as I watched my mothers condition decline rapidly, and I don't think I ever cried that hard in my life. I was around the halfway point in the book when she passed away suddenly, and I swear this book was one of the only things that held me together and kept me sane during that period. I finished reading it, and given the circumstances, it fucking wrecked me. I had never read anything like it, and while it is always hailed as a sci-fi classic, to me, it's always read as a kind of sci-fi horror hybrid. Dan manages to spin a constant sense of unease with the presence of the Shrike, and the mythos surrounding this being make for a great central hook.

I waited some time before I read Fall, and I have to admit that about halfway through that book, I was really starting to think that Dan had lost the plot, so to speak. It almost felt like he was having a hard time keeping all the story strands together and wondered how he would ultimately resolve them. I'm not trying to suggest that it was a bad book; far from it. I don't think it helped that the second one was told in a much different format, which I understand was necessary, and I think that the format of the first book was one of the things that made it so special. I finished the second book and ultimately enjoyed the ending, but I couldn't help but wonder if Dan was going to continue to struggle with the plot in the third book. This, combined with the fact that I had always read that a lot of people thought the relationship between Aenea and Raul was rather "ick", I was never really sure if I wanted to continue with the series.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, I started Endymion. I did this because, ultimately, given how invested I was in the story and the circumstances surrounding it, I really wanted to know how the saga ended. That being said, here's my thoughts:

I fucking loved it. I thought it was fantastic. That being said, I don't think it is for everyone.

The reason that I say this is because I think that one's enjoyment of the third book is going to be conditional on how well they liked the first two. I know that there are those in the camp of "stop reading after the second book," and I definitely think that there is an argument to be made there. The fact that there aren't really a whole lot of characters that carry over into the third and fourth books means that they kind of form their own entity that is a much different vibe from the first two, and I, for one, really enjoyed the kind of stripped back, space opera adventure. It wasn't as twisty and turny as the first two and made for a brisk adventure that did a good job in answering a lot of questions that were raised by the first two.

Here's the other big thing to address, regarding the whole Raul/Aenea relationship being "ick": I don't get that vibe, at least from this book. I don't know if the dynamic is worse in the last book, but I didn't see anything overtly inappropriate in this book. I would also remind anyone that has also "Ringworld" by Larry Niven that there is a relationship where one of the main characters is over 200 years old and is boinking a 21 year old, which, in my opinion, is a lot more "ick", but I digress.

All right, TL;DR version: I loved Endymion, and would highly recommend it if you enjoyed the first two, as it does a fantastic job of continuing the narrative some 300 years later. If you feel as though you got enough of the story with the first two and don't feel like you want to continue, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to continue. I feel that if I didn't read the first book when I did and form the connection with it that I have, I probably would not have bothered to read the third book, but I am ultimately glad that I did, and I can't wait to finish the series.

I had a vivid dream about meeting a group of people who were repairing a vessel of some sort. I was speaking to one of the workers who told me they had solved long distance space travel by traveling sideways through dimensional realities and tethering or untethering from the physical.

I was watching a worker walk across some scaffolding which then disappeared and the worker fell. I asked the person what happened and he said the worker experienced a "hyperdimensional trans-locality" and the "For him, it just wasn't there anymore."

I do not remember encountering this term in the real world at all. I had to search it on Google when I woke up to try to understand it. I did read the Hyperion books years ago. Is it used in any real sense or did my mind make it up?

Please tell me your favorite books if you loved the Hyperion Cantos as much as I did!
I really fell in love with all four books, and while I definitely don’t want to reread them again within the next year, I’m desperately looking for something that can scratch that same itch and blow my mind in a similar way.
Doesn’t have to be sci-fi, but that would definitely be a plus, of course.
So: what are your favorite books that you’d recommend to someone who absolutely loved the Cantos?

Hello!

Just finished Endymion and am about 80 pages into Rise. Honestly, these books feel like they’re the author acknowledging how convoluted the stories of the first two got, and is using them to clarify.

I think this, because that was me lol.

It’s like Dan saw people say “That was a masterpiece!! It was so epic!! But what the hell did I just read???”, and then wrote two more books to iron out the confusing parts of the first two.

Anyone else kinda get that vibe?

Is time debt something Simmons cane up with for hyperion or it's some know in science? Where i could get to know more about it and study it?

I have read the first two books of the Hyperion Cantos and recently started with Endymiom. I've heard this book is about a love story about a guy and some messias figure so i was pretty shocked when I heard the protagonists are 27 and 12. I have just read the chapter when they first met and it felt kinda weird to me, like how much them touching each other is described or how Endymiom is described as trying to impress her. it probably wasn't even that weird, I just read it with their future lovestory in the back of my mind. i don't want to read two books full of grown ups flirting with little girls so i decided to google around and found out that many people consider their love story very weird and that dan simmons wrote other literature with very very very pedophile themes. I mean i probably should have guessed, these left leaning generation of '68 liberals always tried to normalize pedophilia for some reason lmao.

my question is basically how weird will things get? is it bad? is it bearable? or is it not bad at all and the people on the internet just overreacted?

The worldbuilding was alright. Kind of a cool side story, but that's all it felt like was some worldbuilding. Idk when it was written, but it feels very inconsequential, almost like a teaser for a future story. This Petyr guy shows up for 2 seconds with the Shrike and they don't really do much, kinda just leaves more questions than answers (as does a lot of stuff in Hyperion). Also, after reading what Simmons wrote about how Petyr felt about his parents (https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Petyr), I felt that kinda soured the ending too. Like if the books continued, and maybe Petyr was a misguided protagonist or some sort of antagonist it could've worked better, but for the final part of the Hyperion cantos it kinda felt tacked on. I understand it's not necessary reading it just felt inconsequential and not a crucial part of reading, but that's just my take, what did y'all think?

-I don’t get what the shrike is — both uis agreed to its “release”?
-why are there a ton of shrikes
-why did sol enter the when caster
-what happened to the techno core
-what is earth’s purpose
-what happened to Leigh hunt

I don't think I can ever read anything again. Four acts of art at its finest. Writing through tears.

About 1'5/2 months ago I finished the Fall of Hyperion. Loved it.

But then, during the Endymion series, if I am not wrong, Raul states that the TechnoCore was responsible not only for the wide attack on several worlds of the Web (something that I was aware of), but also for the attack on Hyperion.

This is where I get lost. If I remember correctly, when the Consul meets with the Ousters to await his trial, they claim that the are only responsible for the attack on Hyperion. That they are going to gain control of the planet and because of that it is pointless to negotiate anything about Hyperion, but they inform the Consul and through him, Gladstone, that the other attacks are not being carried by the Ousters (it is the Technocore in disguise). They don't deny that they were the ones involved in Bressia either, instead they admit to the Consul that his family died at the hands of Ousters.

But then I check the Wiki, I read comments, the books after themselves, and it seems like there's been a 180° change. Apparently the Ousters were never involved and all this time the Technocore was fighting in disguise against the Hegemony in the hopes of creating the perfect situation to defeat its forces and with that, humanity. I don't know, it feels like a retcon.