Recommendations
Books Like Hyperion Cantos
Seven pilgrims on a final journey to a world that will kill them — each carrying a story the others need to hear
Dan Simmons' Hyperion opens on a pilgrimage: seven people traveling to the Time Tombs on Hyperion, where the Shrike — an entity of blades and cruelty — has been killing pilgrims for centuries, and where time moves backwards. The novel is structured in the mode of The Canterbury Tales: each pilgrim tells their story on the way, and each story is a completely different literary genre (military thriller, detective story, scholar's tragedy, priest's crisis of faith, poet's epic, romantic mystery, diplomat's confession). The galaxy is on the eve of catastrophic war. The novel ends on a cliffhanger; The Fall of Hyperion is the conclusion of this story. If the scope, the literary ambition, the Shrike, and the sense of a civilization at the end of itself gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
The Fall of Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
The direct conclusion of Hyperion — not a sequel but the second half of the same novel published in two volumes. It must be read immediately after Hyperion; the ending of the first book is the beginning of the second.
- 2Buy
Foundation
by Isaac Asimov
The other great epic of a civilization's planned fall — Asimov's psychohistory and Simmons' TechnoCore are both attempts to model the behavior of civilizations as mathematical systems, and both series are fundamentally about whether anyone can be clever enough to manage historical catastrophe.
- 3Buy
Dune
by Frank Herbert
Epic science fiction as political mythology — Herbert has Simmons' same sense of a civilization defined by a resource (spice vs. the cruciform), the same investment in messianic figures and the institutions around them, and the same willingness to let civilizational stakes be the actual stakes.
- 4Buy
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine
The most literary recent science fiction novel — Martine writes a galactic empire with the same density and the same investment in what empires cost their subjects that Simmons brings to the Hegemony of Man. The prose quality and the political sophistication are directly comparable.
- 5Buy
The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey
Hard science fiction at a civilizational scale, with the same sense of a solar-system humanity in which the political economics of different environments has produced genuinely different cultures — Corey is less literary and more thriller-paced than Simmons, but readers who love the scope of Hyperion consistently love The Expanse.
- 6Buy
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin's most structurally unusual novel — a human envoy to a planet where no one is biologically sexed, told partly through fieldnotes and folktales and official records. The Canterbury Tales structure of Hyperion and Le Guin's multi-modal approach are the two great experiments in using formal structure as a science fiction argument.
- 7Buy
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
A legendary figure narrating his own story at the end of it — Rothfuss' Kvothe and Simmons' pilgrims are both people whose stories are happening inside a frame that tells you how they ended. The sense of stories within stories, and what it means to control your own narrative, is common to both.
- 8Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
A novel that uses footnotes as a literary device to build a parallel history of English magic — Clarke's formal ambition and her sense of a civilization whose relationship to the magical is about to change forever give Hyperion fans the same sense of a story that is aware of its own genre conventions and is doing something unusual with them.
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