oracle86 wrote:Apparently, Bradley Cooper is a fan too - and he's written a script and wants to direct!
http://collider.com/bradley-cooper-hyperion/93406/
I don't think it's realistic; since Dan Simmons specialises in making stuff so incredibly complex and massive.
Flying Rodent, what else have you read of Dan Simmons? I've read
Song of Kali [frakking awesome horror novel set in Calcutta, India and involving Kali worship and cannibalism!],
The Terror [a thriller about the lost expedition of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to the Arctic to force the Northwest Passage in the 19th century] ,
Drood [a mystery about the last 5 years of Charles Dicken's life] and
Ilium/Olympos [a futuristic retelling of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, combined with Shakespeare's The Tempest and some Proust and Browning, too!]. And all of them are brilliant. My favourite among these is the
Ilium/Olympos duology - he has utilised some incredibly clever ideas there, IMHO. Do you have any other recommendations?
Well, hem... I know I'll look like a rookie to you, but... I haven't read a lot of Simmon's books. Actually, I read The Cantos twice, and Ilium/Olympos once only. And even if I've heard of the other ones, I have never read them (actually, it's f*cking complicated to find some good books where I live and the translations are awful).
I genuinely loved The Cantos, especially Hyperion and The Rise of Endymion. Brawne Lamia, Martin Silenus (favorite book character of all time along with Leto II in Dune) and Radamante Némès really impressed me, by their mental complexity and also by the influence they have on the story, even if Nemes is finally just an "executioner" under the orders of Albedo. I really like the way Simmons dealed with his characters (actually, it really inspired me for my own stories).
About Ilium/Olympos... Well, I found the story too... slow. I didn't expect an action-packed thriller, of course, but I was hoping for impressive descriptions and straightforward dialogues, and regrettably the book wasn't really written the way I had expected it. I must admit I was kind of... disappointed. Manmut and Io are very interesting characters though, I really like the way Simmons invented them, even if they're robots he did something very different from Asimov's robots and this is pretty impressive. He created them finally even more human than the human characters.
What I didn't like in Ilium was that the story was too disorganized. Too much flashbacks for my taste. But, well, I read it about four years ago, I was pretty young, so I don't remember everything. Maybe I was too young to understand the books entirely.
So this is it, yeah...
As a sci-fi fan, I'm also fond of Herbert's Dune. One of the most wonderful sagas of all time, even if the original idea (the drug producted on one only planet which gave people the power to travel into space) was Cordwainer Smith's, and the fact Herbert didn't ever mention it is sort of unfair. Anyway, "The Children of Dune" and "The God Emperor of Dune" are hugely impressive.
I'm also a fan of Cordwainer Smith (The Quest of The Three Worlds and The Man who bought Earth are my favorite books of his Spacelords series). His style is very poetic, ethereal. Not many peole know him and I don't know if you do but I assure you he's one of the greatest sci-fi writers of all time.
I'm also a big fan of Philip K.Dick. His novel Ubik is really impressive (and, yeah, I think it would look great adapted on the screen), and so are his short stories. His ideas are very original, very meaningful, even if I still prefer Herbert.
What else? Asimov, of course (I read "Nemesis" a few months ago, it's really good). George Orwell's 1984 is also one of my favorite books and I am actually reading Walter Tevis' "Mockingbird" (a bit old-fashioned, but I like it).
There's also a very good french sci-fi book by Stefan Wul that I like, yet I don't know how you call it in english or he has ever been translated... The french title is "Oms en série" (the word "Oms" is a deformation of the french word "Hommes" which means "Men".) The story takes place on the foreign planet Igam inhabited by the Draags, a 10-to-20 meters tall extraterrestrial specie. The Draags' civilisation is very evoluted and in Wul's future, we Men have totally forgotten our technology, so the Draags think we're their pets, like dogs or cats. The story talks about one of those pet-humans who escapes his owner's house and starts a revolution against the Draags... It's the first sci-fi book I've ever read (I was 7) and it's really good.
Hmm... Well, I think it's pretty much like it.
:mrgreen: 
)
) who don't know the book, READ IT. It's one of the coolest I've ever read.
], we realise that eventhough each pilgrim is totally different from the rest, their lives are connected by a certain something, and that is why they have been chosen to go on this quest.
