Hacker News Reader

Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of epic scifi, when are we getting a Hyperion movie? I'm just re-reading it now and it would make for an amazing movie with todays special effects.

Or like a single season mini series.

View on HN

I read Hyperion recently and I think it would suffer from movie treatment. Like McCarthy’s The Road, so much of the horror in Hyperion comes from what is left to the imagination, like the terror of the shrike; and that which is internal to the characters, like the pain of the cross.

I doubt these could be translated effectively to a visual medium.

But other scenes, like the squishing of the literary agent between the floor and ceiling of a building that had been, up until that moment, supported but some kind of energy field, would be spectacular.

But more generally I completely agree with your comment. I also think the religious symbolism, like the cruciform parasite and the tree of pain, were a bit cheesy and overwrought in the writing, and would come across cheesy in a film, too.

Well I guess you'd have to find a really good director and team of writers.

I really enjoyed reading Hyperion. I bought it in a second hand book store before a flight back from NZ to Europe. However, the crude writing of this particular passage stayed with me:

"Sissipriss Harris had been one of my first conquests as a satyr – and one of my most enthusiastic – a beautiful girl, long blond hair too soft to be real, a fresh-picked-peach complexion too virginal to dream of touching, a beauty too perfect to believe: precisely the sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating"

Well, the character speaking was an utterly degenerate asshole, so there's that...

That degenerate asshole was a thin avatar of an author who twice decided it would be wise to introduce a child character & immediately talk about them having sex with another character by way of time-travel-shenanigans

What is crude with that? Are you trying to project some type of moral by suggesting that a woman's features influence her perceived desirability? Or that traditional European features are suddenly no longer considered attractive to people of European descent (as the author was)? Or that people of one sex should not lust for people of the opposite sex? Or that sometimes lust as felt by young and healthy people could never be a purely physical drive?

I found it stark to imply that all men dream of violation. It just felt like a very out of place part of the book to me where perhaps the author's own biases came through instead of as an effort to describe a character.

Equally, of course, I'm aware that my reaction to this passage also says something about my own conditioning.

It is quite in character for Martin Silenus. Especially at that point of the story.

If you had problems with that already, you shouldn't read Endymion and Rise of Endymion.

  > Equally, of course, I'm aware that my reaction to this passage also says something about my own conditioning.

All other issues aside, this sentence reveals a self awareness that I strive to achieve. I am saving this comment for inspiration, thank you.

> precisely the sort that even the most timid male dreams of violating.

It's well understood that to read and enjoy most sci-fi out there you have to accept that women and sex will be written from the perspective of a 14 year old boy.

You can't get stuck on such details. Even the Dune movie removed any references to "jihad", so I'm sure we can storyboard something fitting and modern for Hyperion.

I hope we never get a movie, to be honest.

I love the Hyperion books, but it would hurt me even more to see the depth butchered for a mediocre Hollywood audience in a cinema than it did with Dune.

A mini-series would be nice, but I feel that an animated series would be even better.

I often agree about the animated bit, for example I'd much rather see the Alastair Reynolds novels as an animated series. I just don't think any movie can do them justice.

But personally I thought the new Dune movie was really good, I can't wait for the 2nd part.

Macheneries of Empire is another one I feel would only work as anime, not just animated. A lot of things in that, like the description of Kujen's (literal) shadow as like a canvas of fluttering moths' wings (and a lot of other fashion-related descriptions), remind me a lot of Gankutsuou's visual effects.

Whet your appetite: https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/zcahum/hyperion...

Strange no one commented but apparently Bradley Cooper (of all people) is working on making it. https://movieweb.com/bradley-cooper-hyperion-movie-epic/

No definite timeline on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com