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Comment by echelon_musk | Hacker News Reader

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"

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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.

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

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.

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