Hacker Cinema
Hyperion
1975 · Film · 82 min
Directed by Mircea Veroiu
Thea, a researcher from an institute for nuclear studies, leaves for a vacation but ends up on an adventure at the boundary between fantasy and reality. On the TV screen the image of a man appears who disappeared 20 years ago after a nuclear explosion. She falls in love with this picture and convinces a colleague and close friend that they can bring back the man who disappeared through a strange reverse process. Her only way to communicate with this picture however is via the TV screen, and her love can only be communicated through dreaming.
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15 comments on Hacker News
It would make a perfect mini-series. Each episode or two could cover each pilgrim's story, with a finale two-parter to wrap up Fall of Hyperion. A lot from Fall could be trimmed down.
Yeah, I never got pulled into Hyperion but The Terror was.. something else. Just a masterpiece, and the TV series came nowhere near.
Hyperion cries out for a good film adaptation.
See also: Yggdrasill the tree-ship from Hyperion, and a similar idea from the movie The Fountain.
Oh man, I would've loved an anthology version of Foundation. Each episode covering one of Asimov's airtight Foundation vignettes. Or, maybe, just don't try to adapt things that don't work for TV? There's plenty of other incredible stuff waiting to be written. Someone needs to hurry up and film Hyperion, it would be hard but more doable than Foundation.
Surely that much data has value somewhere, and a marketplace can be formed where decaying film on one side is auctioned to AI training data stores on the other. Older material is more valuable since it starts human measurement earlier, and so can predict longer-term shifts.
(Imagination in service to neoliberal capitalism - it's a real world _Hyperion_ novel, forums like this mind-jack you with arcane symbols into miniscule wiggles in the GHz range, roughly 1500*8 bytes of them at a time, pushed through a radio, into the kernel, into a program, and spat out into an array of glowing quantum effects... But still, even here, Buster Keaton is funny.)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion
Read them (if you haven't already) before any HBO serialization or movie can forever ruin them for you.
Peter Watts: Blindsight, Echopraxia
Strong concept and incredibly fleshed-out world building, reminds me of Lem.
Stanislav Lem: Fiasco
An inverted first-contact scenario.
Well, Dune has been a success, after 40 years, on about the fifth try. So we should expect the _good_ Hyperion adaptation around 2060, then :)
(Though, I think Hyperion is actually a _much_ harder one to adapt than Dune, certainly into a movie. There's far too much in it.)
This has been in the works for years.
I had high hopes for a limited series. A feature film sounds simply awful for the structured narrative style in Hyperion. Warner Bros will not make a Pasolini style Cantebury Tales. This movie will probably be lifeless.
I don't know if it is common, certainly the reviews for the following three did not seem as warm as for the first, which was also the only one to win a Hugo. This is why I prefaced it with "if you like literature", because I think it depends on how much fiction you've read before and what you think is still fresh. Hyperion is most definitely fresh, a wild, tightly written run of imagination mixing Chaucer, Dune and Asimov with Heart of Darkness.
The problem with the way he wraps up the story [SPOILERS-ish] is that you feel that he was up against a wall and couldn't find a satisfactory way to connect the dots and picked the easy way out (similar to a deus ex machina - and yes, the Shrike sort of is one, but it limits itself predictably for your enjoyment). There is a certain suspension of disbelief, rules of the story you are willing to accept as it is woven, and through which you pick a direction and a pace, and he breaks them out of desperation.
A less major gripe I had was the stupidity of the "enemy". A worthy opponent would find it easier to manipulate humanity; in other words, a supposedly phenomenal antagonist is weakened to fill plot gaps. For an example of the opposite, watch the chess game between the two sides in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People (the BBC miniseries, not the modern remake which does not come close to Alec Guinness' performance). Karla is ferocious, intelligent, unstoppable, it is life's randomness that in a believable way opens the weakness (very well defended, throughout, but ultimately indefensible) that allows Smiley to get him.
And of course [spoiler!] the Dune series was heading to a similar conclusion as is reached about the crucibles within a couple of books; but the Dune meta-antagonist is much better written at least until the son takes over the writing to wrap up the series, and it is technically more of a very subtle Chekhov's Gun than a deus ex machina, which is why it feels so good as it clicks together (or might have).
Finally, I felt the last books were not as well edited. I think a parallel might be House of Cards where the first season (and perhaps the second) was the frantic work of a fresh team trying something bold and new, and the remaining episodes were the risk-free work of a team with the spotlight of the world on them, unwilling to risk their freshly acquired laurels. Frank and Claire Underwood become another token politician in another token political show with Zeitgeist-dependent in-jokes that will age badly, and the occasional flash of brilliance merely emphasising how much was lost. And perhaps I'm missing the point with House of Cards, perhaps the writers are saying that this is what happens when a narcissist wins the biggest prize and has nowhere else to go, existing only to keep it, but if so it is not said well.
There's no information out about the Hyperion series yet. There aren't even any casting announcements that I've heard of, so it's way too early to decide it won't even be worth watching.
I didn't even know that there was an adaptation of Dan Simmons' Hyperion, and now I find out that it apparently isn't worth watching.
Kinda sad, but one can still hope. As another comment said, it's nice to see more series that don't use the Star[...] IP that we are used to, but instead focuses on incredible books like Ringworld (or, to a lesser extent, Snow Crash).
I'd also love to see more Heinlein and Ursula K Le Guin, but I understand that not everything that makes a great book also makes a great movie / series.
They should change the battery reference to be compute nodes, a la Hyperion cantos.
That makes a lot more sense. Hell, just make the Hyperion movie instead.
It's worth remembering that in addition to all their famous kids films Disney has also produced all of these films: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Touchstone_Pictures_films.
Hyperion wouldn't be that much out of character for them, even if personally "Hyperion, from the producers behind Pearl Harbor and The Avengers" isn't at tag line I'd particularly look forward to.
If I could up-vote you a dozen times, I would. Dead freakin on! I'll add, that I read books BECAUSE I spent so much time on the computer. Books are the cheapest, most engaging form of entertainment that you can do alone. And they last longer ... Running a start-up and on a tight budget? There is no greater deal out there in our world of over-priced, poorly written, 60fps elecrtonic based "entertainment" than books. Books fit in your pocket, in your bag, pretty much anywhere. And when you're done, they can do just as much, or more entertaining for someone else. The are like infinite entertainment and knowledge. They are amazing.
Funny (short) story. I used to not read much at all other than what's been described above and computer books. Well, I was out with some friends and brought up a recent episode of a horrid reality show. A very close friend of mine stopped dead, looked me in the eyes and said with just a touch of concern in his voice: "do you know how many good books there are?!" Yeah, I had an idea, but I just didn't read any of them ... Well, the next week, he gave me a copy of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've been a voracious reader ever since.