Having once been terraformed, thus receiving a breathable atmosphere, it has now relapsed (over a few centuries) into a chilly state where its atmosphere has frozen solid, collapsed onto the surface and formed glaciers. He tells us that a couple of fabulous things happen and offers neither technobabble nor believable scientific explanations. And Simmons uses the technobabble technique with poetic flair: "torch ship", "lance the ground troops from orbit", "spin down into the system", "hyper-entropic field".īut in the third of the Hyperion novels, Endymion (1996), he does something that jarred me awake to the fact that Simmons apparently does not know basic science at all. There are two ways to do this: either you offer an explanation that is actually in line with what we know now and sort of makes sense, or you use technobabble to cover the fact that you, the writer, do not actually have any idea of how for instance space ships move instantaneously from one star to another. Science fiction is of course stories where fabulous things happen and are explained by science and technology rather than magic. They're OK, but not as good as the first book. Then he followed it up with three more novels of which I have read two. Dan Simmons published a wonderful, galaxy-spanning, mind-blowing sf novel in 1989: Hyperion.
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