I’m not saying that you have to be religious. But if you find those topics and related symbolisms rather uninteresting in your sci-fi, then the books may not be for you.
People are interesting, and religion is a thing people do.
In this case there is quasi-religious imagery but you as the reader aren't actually supposed to be mystical about the god/devil in the story the way the characters themselves are. It's not C. S. Lewis
I mean, it's not my fandom, but Catholics do have a wicked sense of symbolism and decoration. Hyperion wouldn't be as colourful if Simmons used a bunch of Evangelicals instead.
So the fact that "decoration" would be present is unsurprisingly, as Beauty in this reality can help to lead to greater reality of Truth and Goodness as well. It's why there have long been traditions with art, music, architecture, etc, in Catholic culture.
† God is Truth, God is Goodness (itself), and God is Beauty. (God is Love as well.)
There really is a huge stockpile of stuff there to build into fiction.
There's a whole crazy universe of occult-like lore within Catholicism that a subculture of Catholics really get into, it's pretty wild, often quite macabre.
I have a couple of those types in my family. The way they talk about praying to specific saints is like they're paladins in an RPG using divine magic.
Then there's the whole thing where the church has bones of long dead saints encased in ornate reliquaries that supposedly dispense miracles.
To be fair, the first novel Hyperion is quite literally a survey of major world religions, not just Christianity. It does settle onto Christian symbolism in the second book onward, but the first two novels alone are still worth reading for their ideas. No affinity required, it's just the default Western canon at work.
It’s particular topics of that canon, and you have to fancy their treatment in a science-fiction setting. Some people like science-fiction because/when it proposes fresh perspectives that aren’t rooted in, by lack of a better description, non-enlightenment parts of that canon.
The clean slate of banks - where we discarded culture to embrace the "culture" and look where this "winging" it got us. Turns out the operating system of a society is important- and the atheist distilled synthetic one is not really working - same goes for alot of others.
The utopist urge for cultural tabula rasa is a retardation, a attempt of the brain to shirk embracing and discovering complexity. One has to look at the "backwards" parts to start to understand what works in a society and with the actual human beeings lifing in a actual society, not the wingless Star Trek Angels in PJs.
Embrace complexity, embrace analysis, build something without defining the endstate first. Make small things that work, combine them into bigger things that work. Way less calling for cullings of the "sabotaging traitors" as they are usual with utopists on the march.
There's a footnote in Consider Phlebas at the end...
> “The following three passages have been extracted from A Short History of the Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text AD 2110, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa Listach Ja’andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack.”
The implication is that Earth is contacted eventually, maybe we developed to the point where we were able to make independent contact and keeping Earth ignorant of The Culture no longer served a purpose. That is only speculation though. Maybe some Free Company showed up and tried to set themselves up as a king, or a disenfranchised non-aligned Special Circumstances operative infiltrated governments and tried doing the "right" thing in guiding it and spilled the beans (future thesis topic: compare Special Circumstances in The Use of Weapons and Rediscovery and Reeducation from The Godmakers).
Within the in universe timeline, it is set by that date and relative dates are based on it. Other books then mention an offset from the Idiran-Culture War and an overall in universe chronology can be roughed out. Much of it takes place about 500 years after the Idiran-Culture War in what would be Earth's timeline of the late 1800s (prior to The State of the Art which was another 100 years later).
And then, even if the appendix of Consider Phlebas was Apocryphal with the 2110 "Earth got the history of The Culture", part of the thing with the scope of the universe is that it is enormous and one rather young (even The Culture is mentioned as not being one of the elder races) it is a footnote of an experiment that one of the Minds did in not contacting Sol-III humanity in the scope of things.
I don't want to dogpile on the other comments (atheist, loved the book) but I think there's something interesting here.
Most science fiction tends to assume that religiosity will fade as humanity matures, and in a few thousand years we'll all have a good laugh at those silly ancient humans. This feels generally right to me. But it's not the only possible future, and Hyperion explores a far future in which religiosity becomes more ingrained.
I thought it was one of the more interesting aspects of the book, and contributed to the feeling of "not just another space opera". You don't have to appreciate religion to like the story.
It's interesting how different stories have different underlying religious underpinnings in different parts of the world. It's important to consider that these themes are precisely because the stories are born from the surrounding culture.
Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental, given the expected familiarity of the intended audience (american white male young men). eg The Matrix trilogy started with the obvious messianic hero's journey, then attempted to expand it in the following films (karma, cycles of death and rebirth, etc).
For some, these religious messages can be a turn off, I agree. I happened to be raised in a culture that allowed me to ignore it more or less and I can recognize that.
Not sure if I agree with the christian references being incidental ... the first book is literally a retelling of the The Canterbury Tales, all the characters are on a pilgrimage. there are a bunch of religious groups with at least one being central to the story, there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life.
I still think you can enjoy it without caring much about religion.
>there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life
Without giving away any spoilers to the books, the parasites are only that on the surface. If anything, the books present a wary picture of religion, especially the last two Endymion books, but also a wary picture of technology.
>Christian references in the Cantos were probably incidental,
They're not at all incidental. The themes and the literal Catholic Church don't just make it into the books by osmosis, they're central to it and deliberate.
Like Gene Wolfe he's part of a pretty small group of US authors who wrote Catholic speculative fiction. Like Wolfe his writing is also fairly un-American. If Heinlein or Asimov are examples of archetypal US science fiction, Simmons is about as far as the other end as you can be, with the post-modern structure, the Canterbury Tales as a template for the story and so on.
Small but significant. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller comes immediately to mind. (And readers of this thread who did appreciate the religious themes of Hyperion may be interested.)
I had recommended Hyperion to a friend, and they loved it. I recommended Canticle as a follow-up and they hated it. I never figured out how that can be.
It's up to anybody to not have a particular taste for religious topics, however, spirituality (or the lack thereof) is an important part of human culture and psychology. Therefore a science fiction novel in a sufficiently different setting from Earth's early 21st century really ought to cover these topics as well, lest the worldbuilding would be very shallow and the resulting work would likely lack depth.
You have to have some affinity to religious/Christianity/church topics, otherwise it’s quite a turn-off.