The Hyperion Cantos is still one of my favorite book series. Too bad he turned into such a nutjob douchebag in later years.
I really enjoyed his Hyperion series, the Ilium books, and several more stand alones (Song of Kali was horrifying and stuck with me for a long time). I don’t know how such smart and creative people can turn into such weirdos.
He was one of the all-time Science Fiction greats - up there with anyone.
I think they are among the most likely to turn into weirdos (as distinct from learning the basics of it at their parents’ knees). Creative thinking doesn’t always have a good check valve.
I was also a fan. Fortunately, I didn’t experience any of his nutjobbery for myself.
He was one of a number of writers that turned into right wing extremists after 9/11 happened, unfortunately.
His early work was great, but after Hyperion, he had a vast decline. I remember one of his novels as just an excuse to describe guns in loving detail. I had hopes for Drood – Willke Collins is a favorite of mine – but the ending was one of the worst I’ve ever come across, a deus ex machina to set up “it was all a dream.”
I only vaguely know of his politics. Looking back, I can see the racist subtext and the homophobia (though the villain’s homophobia is what leads him to be destroyed).
His early career made him look like one of the greats. His later work did not.
This is the fist I heard of this. I loved the Hyperion series. Didn’t care much for Song of Kali, but liked Carrion Comfort and Children of the Night. I read Ilium, but not the sequel.
I hadn’t heard about his decline in recent years.
?
The Mystery of Edwin Drood was Dickens, not Collins.
I just added Hyperion to my cart on Amazon last week.
I admit the only book of his I have read is The Hollow Man.
It was great though and he will be missed
Just the first one? You can arguably skip 3 and 4 and have a complete story, but you need 2 if you have 1.
I loved the first two Hyperion books. I read them both a few times, and they inspired in me a brief but deep interest in Keats. I enjoyed the second two, but never revisited them.
The first two novels are on my shelf of “favorite books of all time”.
+1.
I read the first one in the late 90’s and couldn’t get my hands on the second one for about five or six years (In the dark ages before easily accessible epub/kindle books it was occasionally impossible to get a given book here in the global deep south), talk about cliffhanger agonies.
I wasn’t aware he went down the same road as Orson Scott Card. He certainly didn’t have a good regard for religion, at least not the Evangelical kind. I prefer to remember his works over his political leanings.
I agree that the first two Hyperion books were great and the last two… I don’t think I could even finish the series.
As for Scott Card, he didn’t change at all from what I know of him. I was in a writer’s workshop with him in 1983. All the others there I knew were liberal to progressive locals who saw him regularly, and they already were uncomfortable with Scott’s politics and personality. He was brilliant, to be sure. He hadn’t had time to write a story to pass around, a commandment at a workshop like that, so he borrowed a machine and set down a story he had composed in his head. It later won an award.
The field is full of people like that. The storyteller and the person often come across wildly differently.
Yes, just the first, good to know it’s not a complete story.
Read them all. The whole series is great, and should stand as a benchmark for other authors to aspire to in telling a complete story, with a satisfying ending that wraps up loose ends and explains the mysteries.
If I’m remembering right, there are tonal, stylistic, and character shifts across the books, and that may be why some people react negatively to the later ones.
Books 3&4 take place a few hundred years after 1&2, with mostly all new characters. There was one loose end after the second book, which got expanded into 3&4. I didn’t dislike them but they weren’t nearly as good as 1&2.
I couldn’t get into books 3&4, the ready, to me, more like a typical SF adventure story without the greatness of the first two (specially the first one).
He did write some great sci-fi and some excellent horror, though the latter borrowed a bit from Stephen King (homage I guess, not theft). And I read and recommended most of those early works.
I think where he started to slide for me was Darwin’s Blade, a one-note joke on the Darwin Awards, and then he went off the edge completely in his Dennis Miller-like rightward lunge in Flashback. I stopped reading him then, but can unequivocally recommend most of his early books.
Yes, but Collins is the protagonist of Drood.