Comment by Barrin92
2 days ago
>Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental,
They're not at all incidental. The themes and the literal Catholic Church don't just make it into the books by osmosis, they're central to it and deliberate.
Like Gene Wolfe he's part of a pretty small group of US authors who wrote Catholic speculative fiction. Like Wolfe his writing is also fairly un-American. If Heinlein or Asimov are examples of archetypal US science fiction, Simmons is about as far as the other end as you can be, with the post-modern structure, the Canterbury Tales as a template for the story and so on.
Small but significant. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller comes immediately to mind. (And readers of this thread who did appreciate the religious themes of Hyperion may be interested.)
I adore Canticle. It is one of my favorite books.
I had recommended Hyperion to a friend, and they loved it. I recommended Canticle as a follow-up and they hated it. I never figured out how that can be.
To be fair, Canticle is soul-crushingly bleak in a way that Hyperion only dances around.