I agree, and you made elsewhere the good point that Dune has one foot in the fantasy realm, without much hard science fiction backing it up.
The Hyperion cantos (Simmons) is sadly not taken seriously by very many authors of top-100 lists. It's usually Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or Ender's Game or Forever War. And heaven forbid they include Neuromancer or Snow Crash or Altered Carbon, or an eco-scifi book like Stand on Zanzibar or Zodiac.
Dune could be a nod to the classic science fiction aficionados who don't care for any of the newer stuff, who love Asimov, Niven, Clarke, PKD, Bester. Is Heinlein too politically charged, perhaps?
Agree with The Hyperion Cantos (commented it as an answer to my post above,) it's been one of the books I've re-read most times. It's a very good book, but somehow a lot of people ignore it, probably due to the fact it's part of a tetralogy (and seems like the last 2 are rubbish... I stopped with the first two: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, which is what I consider "Hyperion Cantos", though.) I'd rank Altered Carbon higher than Neuromancer. Neuromancer is great and all, but the plot of Altered Carbon was more inspired, almost a nod to classic "noir" writers I like. And I love Stranger in a Strange Land, as pointed above :) Historical note: when the first Spanish translation was commissioned, the publishing firm that did it went bankrupt. Back then (dictatorship) there was a strong censure of books... But editors had to print the books, whole edition and only then the censor would check them. It was deemed as objectionable material.
I think the Hyperion cantos would be a single book rather than 4, or a closely joined 2-part novel/sequel, if not for market forces demanding books in the <700-800 page range for popular consumption. There are series that are loosely connected, and then there are series that are practically a single work, like the LotR trilogy. The Hyperion cantos is similar to LotR that way.
It sounds like you heard the Endymion pair are rubbish and avoided reading them. Wherever you heard that, they're not. Look at the ratings on goodreads[1], for instance. You're talking about them as if the Endymion volumes fell off a cliff like Vinge did with Children of the Sky[2]. Not so. The amazon ratings distribution for Endymion is a bit lackluster compared to the other volumes, but still nothing that could be called "rubbish".
The Hyperion cantos (Simmons) is sadly not taken seriously by very many authors of top-100 lists. It's usually Dune or Stranger in a Strange Land or Ender's Game or Forever War. And heaven forbid they include Neuromancer or Snow Crash or Altered Carbon, or an eco-scifi book like Stand on Zanzibar or Zodiac.
Dune could be a nod to the classic science fiction aficionados who don't care for any of the newer stuff, who love Asimov, Niven, Clarke, PKD, Bester. Is Heinlein too politically charged, perhaps?