Suggest a space opera for a person who doesn't read science fiction

Cafe Society
79

And the winner is…

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I chose Hyperion for a number of reasons:

  1. I already had it

  2. It’s more accessible than many of the space operas which followed, like Ian Banks and KSR. You don’t need to know advanced scientific principles to fully appreciate the work behind the work, the society involved is largely like our own (for reasons explained in the book) and doesn’t require a lot of explanation (for example, Dune and its appendices and glossary).

  3. A lot of space operas… and here I’m writing for m’ lady mostly… are structured so they have wildly differing stories which weave together at the end. Pulling an example made up right now, one story will follow a janitor, another an astronomer, another a reporter, another the President of a large company, another the Secretary of Defense… and at the end of the book, the author brings all these various strands together so that all the different characters you’re following end up being instrumental in the conflict resolution phase of the story. Hyperion is a fantastic entry into this form of storytelling because the author wrote it in the model of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with the characters on a journey and each of them telling their tales of how they came to be on this journey. (He also wrote each story in the voice of different science fiction writers (the Poets Tale is so Harlan Ellison it’s almost ass-kissy) which is cool but not at all necessary to know in order to enjoy it.)

Had I gone with, say, Pandora’s Star you would have been confused by why there’s a murder trial in the first 200 pages and that would have been that. Hyperion is far less confusing.

  1. It’s one of the highest-regarded science fiction works of our lifetimes and even those who didn’t like it cannot deny its influence. It truly informed a generation of writers that science fiction could be literature and not just genre, and any one working in the field afterwards had no choice but up their writing game. All of written science fiction is in better shape because of Hyperion, which is a rare achievement for any work in any field.

Hope you enjoy!