Books like Hyperion
What should you read after Dan Simmons’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Dan Simmons
- 1989
- Space opera
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Hyperion
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchDune
Frank Herbert
The other great baroque empire novel: religion, ecology and dynastic scheming on one desert planet, and the same conviction that science fiction can carry myth.
- Poetry taken seriously
- An empire held together by portals
- A monster nobody understands
- One continuous narrative
Great matchFoundation
Isaac Asimov
Asimov also builds a novel out of separate episodes across a falling empire — the structural ancestor, though the prose is a plank next to Simmons.
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- An empire held together by portals
- It ends without ending
- Characters are functional
Best for the nested talesThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin builds her novel out of reports, myths and folk tales as well as scenes — the same trick of letting a world speak in several voices at once.
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- A different genre every chapter
- Poetry taken seriously
- Quiet; there is no monster
Great matchNeuromancer
William Gibson
Gibson's AIs want things and conspire to get them, five years ahead of the TechnoCore. Read it for the machine politics; the plot is almost beside the point.
- AIs with their own plans
- An empire held together by portals
- A different genre every chapter
- Street-level, not galactic
Worth a look — with a warningSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Stephenson also crams linguistics, religion and mythology into a thriller and dares you to keep up. Much funnier, and it collapses in the final hundred pages.
- AIs with their own plans
- A different genre every chapter
- Poetry taken seriously
- Satirical, deliberately silly
Best for the ideasThe Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
If the Consul's tale and its politics were the part that stayed with you, Le Guin's two-worlds novel is the most serious argument the genre has produced.
- An empire held together by portals
- Poetry taken seriously
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- No action to speak of
Worth a look — with a warningEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
The most readable book on this list and the least like Hyperion in ambition: one boy, one problem, and a final turn that made the genre's reputation.
- A monster nobody understands
- AIs with their own plans
- An empire held together by portals
- Simple prose and structure
Best for the time distortionThe Forever War
Joe Haldeman
Haldeman's soldier keeps coming home to a century he does not recognise. The cleanest version of the grief Simmons pours into the Scholar's tale.
- Time running backwards
- A monster nobody understands
- An empire held together by portals
- One narrator, straight chronology
Great matchConsider Phlebas
Iain M. Banks
Banks writes set pieces with the same relish, and the same willingness to be grotesque about them. Start here or with Player of Games, depending on your patience.
- AIs with their own plans
- An empire held together by portals
- A different genre every chapter
- Weakest of the Culture books
Great matchOryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Atwood also tells her disaster backwards and in fragments, through one man who was there. Literary science fiction that shares Simmons's taste for allusion.
- Time running backwards
- Poetry taken seriously
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- Near-future, no space
Worth a look — with a warningRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson rotates viewpoints across a colony the way Simmons rotates pilgrims, but he is interested in soil chemistry where Simmons is interested in Keats.
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- An empire held together by portals
- Poetry taken seriously
- Heavy technical detail
Best for the unknowableGateway
Frederik Pohl
Alien machinery nobody can read, used anyway because the payoff is worth dying for. Pohl frames the whole thing around a man in therapy, guilty about what happened.
- A monster nobody understands
- Time running backwards
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- 1977, and the psychology dates
Best for the literary ambitionThe Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe
The one book here that out-reaches Hyperion: dying-earth science fiction narrated by a torturer who claims perfect recall and lies to you constantly.
- Poetry taken seriously
- Pilgrims telling their tales
- A different genre every chapter
- Genuinely difficult going
What should you read after Hyperion?
Hyperion by Dan Simmons works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Dune by Frank Herbert — the other great baroque empire novel: religion, ecology and dynastic scheming on one desert planet, and the same conviction that science fiction can carry myth.
If what stayed with you was pilgrims telling their tales, read Foundation by Isaac Asimov instead: asimov also builds a novel out of separate episodes across a falling empire — the structural ancestor, though the prose is a plank next to Simmons. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin is the other strong option — le Guin builds her novel out of reports, myths and folk tales as well as scenes — the same trick of letting a world speak in several voices at once.
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