Hyperion/Trivia

• Dan Simmons' novel Hyperion ends with the main characters walking hand-in-hand towards the monstrous Shrike's lair — singing "We're Off To See The Wizard."
• Some of his other books are even weirder: The premise of Ilium/Olympus involves quantum-powered Greek gods re-enacting the Trojan War. Their main adversaries include a crab-shaped robot from Io who is obsessed with Proust. Also, Odysseus fights time-displaced Jew-killing robots, and the Big Bad turns out to be Caliban, from The Tempest, who is living on a space station that orbits the Earth and spending his time eating the corpses left behind when people's bodies get replaced through cloning.
  • One of the storylines feature a resurrected college professor who seduces Helen Of Troy. Also, there's a guy who's eaten by a dinosaur and resurrected afterward, 9000+ last Jews on Earth who are turned to blue neutrino beams, a Shakespeare-loving robot, little green men on Mars with a weird and disturbing method of communication, people flying chariots in space and shooting lightning bolts at a spaceship, and all of that is in just 2/3 of the first book - Ilium.
• The Terror is positively normal compared to those books, featuring only a gay cannibal midget, an immortal polar bear god, more cannibalism, a guy surviving by eating his own shoes, even more cannibalism, a tongueless Inuit women who turns out to be the frickin' love interest. It ends with everybody getting scurvy and dying from starvation, being eaten by each other, or being eaten by the evil polar bear, except the protagonist, who gets his tongue eaten by the polar bear god (who turns out not to be evil - it was all a misunderstanding) and marries the Inuit chick, and they live happily ever after, communicating with strings. Oh, and did I mention it's based on a true story?
  • And it has some heart rending deaths for some crew members. In particular was little John Irving. Don't tell me you did not cry when Irving died. After that, I cried myself, and I am The Stoic IRL
• His Children of the Night can be basically summed up as "vampires who might hold the cure for AIDS kidnap a child who is one of their own but adopted by a normal human." And Dracula.