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