03 August 2010

Review: Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons

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The first Dan Simmons works I read were the four big science fiction novels making up his Hyperion Cantos series. This had a lot of background involving the English Romantic poet John Keats. Keats – or a clone of Keats – even appears as a minor character. I had always been a great fan of Keats’ shorter poems, but I had never read his slightly longer attempts at epic poetry in his poems “Hyperion” and “Endymion.” The four novels of this Cantos series are Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. Read them in order.
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The narrative style of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales also figures into to the beginning of this series, as various characters give their backgrounds during a long journey. One is also reminded of Boccaccio’s Decameron, where everyone tells their tales.
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Before I started those four books I did some major homework, finding a volume of Keats’ complete poems with biography, extensive commentaries on the poems, selected letters of his, etc. I read his drafts of the epics “Hyperion” and “Endymion” for the first time, and I immersed myself in the world of Keats, ending with his young death of TB in Rome near the Spanish Steps. With this background I enjoyed the Simmons’ novels more. When the Keats clone is in his room near the Spanish Steps, I already know what it looks like. Reading it, homework and all, was a major project which I really enjoyed.
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