Hyperion

I finished Dan Simmons' Hyperion last night. The book's pegged as a sci-fi Canterbury Tales, which it sort of is, but without any time piece value. If fits into that Sci-fi/Fantasy niche populated by Star Wars outer Rim adventures and later Magic: The Gathering artwork.

One of my common complaints about sci-fi, and a mistake Dan makes in the Cantos, is the movement away from reality as a reference point. This is where ordinary objects are given a new name so as to create a feeling of being in a totally new world. It's annoying because you have to juggle a whole new set of terms and language, which makes it harder to visualize the environment and breaks the flow of the story, at least initially. A reasonable reference can go beyond just reality too, to popular sci-fi conventions. Everyone knows the concept of a teleportation device; why use an elaborate new term? This is one reason I like magical realism as a genre - it has fantastic elements, but is still grounded in the world that we know. It's a small complaint, but if you've had a long day or put away the book for a week or so, the last thing you want to do is struggle through language.

The love scenes are dreadful. In general, I'm not sure if love scenes are better or worse in book form versus a movie. In a book you can just skip over the scene and skim to find out where you need to pick up. But you can do this with a DVD too, and usually the scene selections are spaced so that you can skip right to the next segment. I think what makes books more painful is that you get to see exactly what the creator was thinking and trying to achieve with the scene. In a movie you can pass off the heavy petting as an attempt at drama, but in a book you get to see that his stroking was "passionate and wistful"; it tells you EXACTLY what to think. There's also the awkwardness of steering clear of slang while making sure it doesn't sound like a biology lesson or Napoleonic poetry. You know what I'm talking about.

I wonder why authors think romance strengthens a book. Do they think romance is more meaningful than brotherly love? I remember reading in a Morrissey interview that "There is a Light" wasn't a love song in the traditional sense, but meant more broadly. It's like when you switch the radio onto a Christian music station and it takes a minute to realize that they're singing about God, not a girlfriend. And why couldn't adventure be a motivator? Is adventure any less selfish?