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

[JohnT]

One of the pleasures of Hyperion is trying to figure out which sf author is being imitated in each story, which I think would be far, far more difficult to do in an audio version.

Question about Hyperion (Dan Simmons novel)

As many of us know, the structure of Hyperion, the science fiction novel by Dan Simmons, follows The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer - a group of disparate people joining together on a journey to a common destination, each of them telling a tale of how they came to be on that journey at that time.* However, I have read a couple of times that Simmons used the “writing voices” of specific science fiction authors for each of the stories, but I have never read (a) confirmations that this is tr…