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4.24 AVERAGE
4.24 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
mysterious
tense
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:
Complicated
For something so highly regarded, I was still surprised how good it was. Silenus and Weintraub's tales were standouts, the Consul's maybe not as much. I really loved the structure and how each tale built on the others. The world building was strong, especially in Brawne's tale.
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is one of those books that draws you in like an insect to a fire. It's easy to feel part of this secret circle of huddled figures around the fire, telling their stories one by one, a well-worn tactic but one that works. The prose flows, well suited for being told aloud. And yet...
Perhaps I'm just not made for these sweeping, epic stories anymore, and feeling disappointment upon finding the main questions of the book unresolved at the end would be akin to complaining that Frodo doesn't make it to Mordor by the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. And yet, I can't help feeling that the book divides its time between the stories in a very strange, and often annoying, way. The audiobook form makes this even more obvious: hours upon hours are spent on inconsequential details of our narrators' love lives, while a barrage of important plot points is introduced just minutes before the end of the book, as if the writer had suddenly realised he forgot what story he was telling and rushed to make up for it. A less charitable interpretation would say that the writer had to sweep the details under the rug, forgoing any subtlety, because if we were allowed to inspect it at leasure we would find it all come apart in nonsense, and stop believing the story.
Let me come back to the love lives point again, which relates to how the individual stories are told. We are supposed to buy that our narrators are, in many ways, much like us. Seven centuries appear not to have changed human nature very much; people still have affairs, they still drink themselves into oblivion, they still get irrationally angry with one another. And yet, when it comes to sharing the most intimate moments of their lives, they lay it all on the table and hold nothing back. Now, I have nothing against sex in literature, but what started as potentially believable with Kassad's story turned into an annoying joke as character after character kept describing their sexual adventures in detail, regardless of whether it fit with their character to share such a thing or not. Further, the characters are denied the complexity of human behaviour when it comes to their romantic relationships: they are always head-over-heels passionate, do not do anything else with their lovers other than have sex, the sex is always absolutely amazing, and in the end something tragic happens. It would be a cliché once; here it is a cliché repeated several times.
This brings me to a bigger inconsistency in the writing: the switch of perspective between stories makes no sense. Some are told in first person, which is the most natural one for this setting. The first story exemplifies that our narrators can be unreliable, when the priest withholds information, and this is used as a plot point. Afterwards, the book promptly forgets this device and proceeds to tell the further stories from the 3rd person view, as if portraying what happened rather than what the narrator would have told the other people about what happened.
I wouldn't want to be the person who looks for fault such that they always find some, but the treatment of women also beggars belief. Only one of the 7 narrators is female; this by itself need not be an issue, but becomes ridiculous when this single female is also unbelievably strong, and gets the only scene in the book where a person has to get in a fight while naked. I mean, come on. I also doubt that this book, in its 20 hours or 500 pages, would pass the Bechdel test. The only scene I recall two women speaking together at all is largely a conversation about other men (or, an AI in the shape of a man, if you will).
One last complaint is how predominant 20th century culture (and what 20th century culture considers good in the past) features in the stories. From a point of view of a future person, it seems rather full of ourselves to assume that anybody will care about the same writers. And things like the poet not having heard of Hitler despite an intimate familiarity with the arts of the 20th century read like a bad joke. The book also forgets that you can't have the majority of the people lose the ability to read and at the same time keep language without change for seven centuries. It's an either-or: if most of them are indeed illiterate, then the language of poetry in the 19th or 20th century should be incomprehensible to all but those who have made it their job to study it.
Okay, now that the bad stuff is out of my system I also have some praise for the book. It follows through on the idea of time debts accumulated through travel between planets, and makes it an important part of the stories it tells, rather than decoration; this is what makes good science fiction. It does the same with the so-called farcaster portals, with the fascinating end result of a single house spread across worlds. The world-building itself is very rich, featuring societies developed from human settlers in very different conditions, the incomprehensibility of true AI societies, the evolution of religion and cults, and even talking dolphins that feel a very natural part of this world. A part of me is very curious about how the story goes on, but I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to 60 or more hours of it just yet.
Perhaps I'm just not made for these sweeping, epic stories anymore, and feeling disappointment upon finding the main questions of the book unresolved at the end would be akin to complaining that Frodo doesn't make it to Mordor by the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. And yet, I can't help feeling that the book divides its time between the stories in a very strange, and often annoying, way. The audiobook form makes this even more obvious: hours upon hours are spent on inconsequential details of our narrators' love lives, while a barrage of important plot points is introduced just minutes before the end of the book, as if the writer had suddenly realised he forgot what story he was telling and rushed to make up for it. A less charitable interpretation would say that the writer had to sweep the details under the rug, forgoing any subtlety, because if we were allowed to inspect it at leasure we would find it all come apart in nonsense, and stop believing the story.
Let me come back to the love lives point again, which relates to how the individual stories are told. We are supposed to buy that our narrators are, in many ways, much like us. Seven centuries appear not to have changed human nature very much; people still have affairs, they still drink themselves into oblivion, they still get irrationally angry with one another. And yet, when it comes to sharing the most intimate moments of their lives, they lay it all on the table and hold nothing back. Now, I have nothing against sex in literature, but what started as potentially believable with Kassad's story turned into an annoying joke as character after character kept describing their sexual adventures in detail, regardless of whether it fit with their character to share such a thing or not. Further, the characters are denied the complexity of human behaviour when it comes to their romantic relationships: they are always head-over-heels passionate, do not do anything else with their lovers other than have sex, the sex is always absolutely amazing, and in the end something tragic happens. It would be a cliché once; here it is a cliché repeated several times.
This brings me to a bigger inconsistency in the writing: the switch of perspective between stories makes no sense. Some are told in first person, which is the most natural one for this setting. The first story exemplifies that our narrators can be unreliable, when the priest withholds information, and this is used as a plot point. Afterwards, the book promptly forgets this device and proceeds to tell the further stories from the 3rd person view, as if portraying what happened rather than what the narrator would have told the other people about what happened.
I wouldn't want to be the person who looks for fault such that they always find some, but the treatment of women also beggars belief. Only one of the 7 narrators is female; this by itself need not be an issue, but becomes ridiculous when this single female is also unbelievably strong, and gets the only scene in the book where a person has to get in a fight while naked. I mean, come on. I also doubt that this book, in its 20 hours or 500 pages, would pass the Bechdel test. The only scene I recall two women speaking together at all is largely a conversation about other men (or, an AI in the shape of a man, if you will).
One last complaint is how predominant 20th century culture (and what 20th century culture considers good in the past) features in the stories. From a point of view of a future person, it seems rather full of ourselves to assume that anybody will care about the same writers. And things like the poet not having heard of Hitler despite an intimate familiarity with the arts of the 20th century read like a bad joke. The book also forgets that you can't have the majority of the people lose the ability to read and at the same time keep language without change for seven centuries. It's an either-or: if most of them are indeed illiterate, then the language of poetry in the 19th or 20th century should be incomprehensible to all but those who have made it their job to study it.
Okay, now that the bad stuff is out of my system I also have some praise for the book. It follows through on the idea of time debts accumulated through travel between planets, and makes it an important part of the stories it tells, rather than decoration; this is what makes good science fiction. It does the same with the so-called farcaster portals, with the fascinating end result of a single house spread across worlds. The world-building itself is very rich, featuring societies developed from human settlers in very different conditions, the incomprehensibility of true AI societies, the evolution of religion and cults, and even talking dolphins that feel a very natural part of this world. A part of me is very curious about how the story goes on, but I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to 60 or more hours of it just yet.
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Hyperion is one of those novels that defies explanation when it comes to what I liked about it. I'm going to chalk it up to how different the book is in terms of the narrative style. Not that the narrative style is overwhelmingly unusual, but having six different personal stories described within the framework of one overarching story is reasonably atypical, and not as linear as I'm used to.
Before you say "it's like Canterbury Tales," let me say that I know that and, no, I haven't read Chaucer in its entirety, though I've read excerpts. But of all the things that I wish I had known more about before reading Hyperion, it isn't Chaucer. It's Keats, actually. Or poetry in general, but there are a lot of references to Keats. Despite a general dislike of poetry (with the exception of Yeats, for some reason), I may very well go out and read some of his work just to assimilate some of it, post-Hyperion.
Beyond that, I liked all of the characters, with the exception of Martin Silenius, who was wholly dislikable. I also had a peculiar dislike for Siri--I found her incredibly annoying. The individual stories were compelling and the science fiction concepts were intriguing. If anything, I could have done without the long sexual descriptions because, really, I just didn't care about those and they felt a bit over-the-top. But beyond that, the stories were satisfying.
One other thing of note is that there are scenes in Hyperion that are truly violent and visceral. The kind of scenes that make you stare into space, gaped-mouthed, because holy cats, they really did just describe that. These scenes are extremely well-placed and effective, more so because they're rare.
The ending, of course, is another matter--unresolved, but intentionally, it seems, with an iconic walking down the yellow brick road scene. That just leaves me with a need to purchase The Fall of Hyperion so I can find out what's happening with the Shrike and the Time Tombs.
Before you say "it's like Canterbury Tales," let me say that I know that and, no, I haven't read Chaucer in its entirety, though I've read excerpts. But of all the things that I wish I had known more about before reading Hyperion, it isn't Chaucer. It's Keats, actually. Or poetry in general, but there are a lot of references to Keats. Despite a general dislike of poetry (with the exception of Yeats, for some reason), I may very well go out and read some of his work just to assimilate some of it, post-Hyperion.
Beyond that, I liked all of the characters, with the exception of Martin Silenius, who was wholly dislikable. I also had a peculiar dislike for Siri--I found her incredibly annoying. The individual stories were compelling and the science fiction concepts were intriguing. If anything, I could have done without the long sexual descriptions because, really, I just didn't care about those and they felt a bit over-the-top. But beyond that, the stories were satisfying.
One other thing of note is that there are scenes in Hyperion that are truly violent and visceral. The kind of scenes that make you stare into space, gaped-mouthed, because holy cats, they really did just describe that. These scenes are extremely well-placed and effective, more so because they're rare.
The ending, of course, is another matter--unresolved, but intentionally, it seems, with an iconic walking down the yellow brick road scene. That just leaves me with a need to purchase The Fall of Hyperion so I can find out what's happening with the Shrike and the Time Tombs.
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
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:
No
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes