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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Loved it. Part space opera, part love story, part Chaucer, part intrigue; all awesome.
Seven pilgrims journey to the world of Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, and the mysterious Time Tombs and the godlike, murderous creature called the Shrike. These are their stories. Each story on its own is beautiful, heart breaking and thrilling; together they are a feast. Full of great characters, poignant moments and wild ideas. And the Shrike, of course, always the Shrike.
Seven pilgrims journey to the world of Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, and the mysterious Time Tombs and the godlike, murderous creature called the Shrike. These are their stories. Each story on its own is beautiful, heart breaking and thrilling; together they are a feast. Full of great characters, poignant moments and wild ideas. And the Shrike, of course, always the Shrike.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
challenging
dark
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loving a highly-acclaimed book and weting a review about it can be a bit boring. A bad book is easier to write about. So here comes a lot of praise:
The writing is the best part. It is very descriptive and the prose is beautiful.
The characters are very distinct and because you know everyone's backstory, everyone is very relatable.
My favourite stories are the Scholar's, the Soldier's and the Detective's. Especially the Scholar's is a gutpunch.
I like the fact that every story is their own genre and even had their own writing style.
The world-building is cool and intricate. The Shrike is menacing.
The only two downsides are the cringy sexscenes and the abrupt ending.
I hope part two can stick the landing!
The writing is the best part. It is very descriptive and the prose is beautiful.
The characters are very distinct and because you know everyone's backstory, everyone is very relatable.
My favourite stories are the Scholar's, the Soldier's and the Detective's. Especially the Scholar's is a gutpunch.
I like the fact that every story is their own genre and even had their own writing style.
The world-building is cool and intricate. The Shrike is menacing.
The only two downsides are the cringy sexscenes and the abrupt ending.
I hope part two can stick the landing!
This book was a victim of both my own false expectations, and the mind-boggling amount of hype it has among SF enthusiasts. Based on what I'd heard of the premise, I was expecting something weird and off the wall, more Annihilation than Star Wars. I've hardly ever heard a bad word said about the book. In the end, I found Hyperion merely pedestrian, both in quality and inclination.
Things got off on the wrong foot just a couple pages in, when the Consul longs for some steak and beer. Is there anything more mundane than steak and beer? Perhaps a bowl of mashed potatoes? In the far flung future, this is what our spaceman's mind turns to? This may sound like an overblown reaction to a single line, but I found it echoed disappointingly throughout the whole of Hyperion.
The planet Hyperion is the repository of the all the weirdness in the book, which would be fine, except that hardly any of the novel is actually spent there. Little interstitial bits in between stories, and bits of each story take place there, but the bulk of the novel occurs in the WorldWeb, hundreds of colonized planets linked by faster than light portals. Unfortunately, none of these worlds are interesting in their own sake, with all of the ones surveyed in the book being filled with things that could be found easily enough on 20th century Earth. There are occasional hints of things like treeships, living islands, and other wonders in the background, but the vast bulk of Hyperion could be as easily transplanted to 20th century America as Star Wars could be turned into a story of knights and wizards. There is a marginally interesting addition of the concept of "time-debt" - if one travels out of the web, even at FTL speed, time is lost, and one will find oneself younger than one's peers upon return, sometimes by months, sometimes by decades. Unfortunately, this idea is only briefly explored by two story, and only in the sense that people will age at different rates - nothing is made of the kinds of cultural changes that could occur over dozens or hundreds of years spent in transit. This is largely because Simmons has written his human society to be extremely stagnant, having no major cultural change, technological advancement, or seemingly any interesting events at all even after 700 years of existence. If you're going to write such a stagnant society, fine, but at least make the society different from what I can see looking out my bedroom window, like Dune. Simmons adds hints of more interesting and vibrant societies like the spacegoing Ousters or the AI TechnoCore, but he studiously keeps us away from them.
The stories themselves are mostly fine on their own. I found they peaked early with the Priest's tale, which has lots of good SF elements to it, and contains the vast bulk of the novel's weirdness. There's a retelling of Benjamin Button, a chapter ripped out of Neuromancer with a love story, and the story of a man from before the destruction of Earth going from rags to riches to rags again. The others left very little impression on me. While they were all told in slightly different methods, I found only the Priest's and Poet's tale had any real individual voice to them, and even then still sometimes felt indistinguishable from the rest of the novel. Simmons withholds one story, the story of the Templar, which I assume is because he couldn't think of a way to make the story of a man who lives on tree spaceship both boring and barely SF related.
The book is overloaded with literary references, many of which I assume I didn't catch, but the book itself has very little poetry to it. There were a few good jokes and some well done lines, but the prose was mostly functional. People constantly compare Hyperion to Canterbury Tales because of the storytelling pilgrims device, but what it really reminded me of was a mid-level Stephen King novel. The Shrike is exactly the sort of thing King would write about, King also loves long digressive backstories for characters, even the 20th century Americana fits. Stephen King may pass in one eye and out the other, but he at least has the yarnteller's ability to keep one's attention even for what should be abjectly boring material. Simmons doesn't have quite that ability, and there were points where the sheer nothing of what he was writing about threatened to have me quit. They were at least quite infrequent, and mostly limited to the interstitial segments.
Finally, the book has a non-ending. Apparently it was supposed to be published as one novel at some point, which would've been an absolute doorstopper. Unfortunately, the nearly 500 pages of Hyperion failed to convince me Simmons would ever get back to something interesting even with another 500, and I'd rather keep what mystery Hyperion has, mysterious. I ask of SF that it present me with something new, unusual, be it technologies, social organizations, environments, etc. Barring that, at least keep it short and to the point. Hyperion occasionally gave short glimpses of the first but too little too late, and failed miserably at the second.
Things got off on the wrong foot just a couple pages in, when the Consul longs for some steak and beer. Is there anything more mundane than steak and beer? Perhaps a bowl of mashed potatoes? In the far flung future, this is what our spaceman's mind turns to? This may sound like an overblown reaction to a single line, but I found it echoed disappointingly throughout the whole of Hyperion.
The planet Hyperion is the repository of the all the weirdness in the book, which would be fine, except that hardly any of the novel is actually spent there. Little interstitial bits in between stories, and bits of each story take place there, but the bulk of the novel occurs in the WorldWeb, hundreds of colonized planets linked by faster than light portals. Unfortunately, none of these worlds are interesting in their own sake, with all of the ones surveyed in the book being filled with things that could be found easily enough on 20th century Earth. There are occasional hints of things like treeships, living islands, and other wonders in the background, but the vast bulk of Hyperion could be as easily transplanted to 20th century America as Star Wars could be turned into a story of knights and wizards. There is a marginally interesting addition of the concept of "time-debt" - if one travels out of the web, even at FTL speed, time is lost, and one will find oneself younger than one's peers upon return, sometimes by months, sometimes by decades. Unfortunately, this idea is only briefly explored by two story, and only in the sense that people will age at different rates - nothing is made of the kinds of cultural changes that could occur over dozens or hundreds of years spent in transit. This is largely because Simmons has written his human society to be extremely stagnant, having no major cultural change, technological advancement, or seemingly any interesting events at all even after 700 years of existence. If you're going to write such a stagnant society, fine, but at least make the society different from what I can see looking out my bedroom window, like Dune. Simmons adds hints of more interesting and vibrant societies like the spacegoing Ousters or the AI TechnoCore, but he studiously keeps us away from them.
The stories themselves are mostly fine on their own. I found they peaked early with the Priest's tale, which has lots of good SF elements to it, and contains the vast bulk of the novel's weirdness. There's a retelling of Benjamin Button, a chapter ripped out of Neuromancer with a love story, and the story of a man from before the destruction of Earth going from rags to riches to rags again. The others left very little impression on me. While they were all told in slightly different methods, I found only the Priest's and Poet's tale had any real individual voice to them, and even then still sometimes felt indistinguishable from the rest of the novel. Simmons withholds one story, the story of the Templar, which I assume is because he couldn't think of a way to make the story of a man who lives on tree spaceship both boring and barely SF related.
The book is overloaded with literary references, many of which I assume I didn't catch, but the book itself has very little poetry to it. There were a few good jokes and some well done lines, but the prose was mostly functional. People constantly compare Hyperion to Canterbury Tales because of the storytelling pilgrims device, but what it really reminded me of was a mid-level Stephen King novel. The Shrike is exactly the sort of thing King would write about, King also loves long digressive backstories for characters, even the 20th century Americana fits. Stephen King may pass in one eye and out the other, but he at least has the yarnteller's ability to keep one's attention even for what should be abjectly boring material. Simmons doesn't have quite that ability, and there were points where the sheer nothing of what he was writing about threatened to have me quit. They were at least quite infrequent, and mostly limited to the interstitial segments.
Finally, the book has a non-ending. Apparently it was supposed to be published as one novel at some point, which would've been an absolute doorstopper. Unfortunately, the nearly 500 pages of Hyperion failed to convince me Simmons would ever get back to something interesting even with another 500, and I'd rather keep what mystery Hyperion has, mysterious. I ask of SF that it present me with something new, unusual, be it technologies, social organizations, environments, etc. Barring that, at least keep it short and to the point. Hyperion occasionally gave short glimpses of the first but too little too late, and failed miserably at the second.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes