I’ll be looking forward to your thoughts on this.
I reread Hyperion and am halfway through The Fall of Hyperion. It’s been interesting, in several senses. Simmons’ prose is absolutely as good as I remembered, and so are the good parts of these books. The overall cosmology and story, the growing darkness and the eucatastrophe, th complexity of the threads of plot and the elegance of their weave, the ways individual lives connect so intimately to the great movements of history and physics, the astonishing beauties of places like God’s Grove, the marvelous wonders like the River Tethys, and on and on.
But then there’s the stuff I’ve learned to look for since the 1990s. Everyone is straight: there is one possibly gay couple, in Rachel’s story - a guy “and his friend”, who may be living together or may just be buddies in business together - and a couple homophobic jokes from Martin Silenus. That’s it. Everyone is cisgendered. There are people who do radical things with genetic engineering and body sculpting, but no hint of doing anything with gender.
Apart from the Templars, there are no vegetarians. Nearly everyone happily enjoys beef on many occasions; cloned meat is mentioned disparagingly as something for the poorest of the poor.
And that’s before the Islamophobia I noticed even then.
I’m still enjoying this reread, but I think it’ll be my last unless sometime I’m doing specific research. And that won’t be general pleasure reading.
