The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books.

sometime in a future so distant that yellow suns are red and bloated with age/ swallowing their children Saturn-like

“Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other?

In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain.

Dying should become easier with practice.

[We enslaved you with power/ technology/ beads and trinkets of devices you could neither build nor understand

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?