Hyperion

I think I picked up Hyperion at the cat bookstore simply because I'd had a good experience with the SF Masterworks series. But this was even better than The Forever War.  Dan Simmons doesn't break any new conceptual ground, but the craft of his writing is excellent by sci-fi standards, and he tells a great, page-turning story.  I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the novel revolves around the effect of various manipulations of time.  With this theme in mind, Simmon's structures it as a series of Canterbury Tales.  Each of the main characters tells their own backstory, each line of which begins at a different point in the past and converges onto the novelistic present.  This reaches a climax at the end the book, when all the characters have spoken and we are finally oriented to the mystery that has lurked throughout.  The situation is far from resolved at that point however, and it would be almost impossible not to read the second half of the novel, published in a separate volume as The Fall of Hyperion.  Stay tuned!