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A review by matthewcpeck
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
4.0
'Hyperion' is sort of a luxury gift basket of science fiction. Its 'Decameron'-style stories within a story contain a little cyberpunk, nail-biting survival stories, satire, grisly horror, space opera, hallucinogens, etc. And beneath it all, a genuinely haunting meditation on the arrow of time.
It's around this time of year, trudging through the last and dreariest leg of a New England winter, that I find myself seeking an escape from reality in my fiction. There's part of me that wants to re-experience the wonder and delight of the science fiction/fantasy/horror that I consumed in my childhood and adolescence. And that part of me is usually disappointed by the prose. Dan Simmons does ameliorate this completely - he incessantly inserts hyphenated phrases like this - and he succumbs to occasional clumsiness and portentousness. That's why I knock off a star, but these tropes are very difficult to avoid in a novel that builds a detailed world set over 700 years in our future, in which the human race has mastered interstellar travel and colonized hundreds of other planets after 'Old Earth' has been destroyed in a 'Big Mistake' (not environmental, but scientific, apparently). Simmons' tale-spinning ability is marvelous, while the exposition is seamlessly incorporated. And his prose can be quite lyrical at times.
As other reviewers have likely pointed out, it's a good idea to have 'The Fall Of Hyperion' at the ready when you've finished this novel, as 'Hyperion' comes to more of a stop than an end. With his exceptional genre novels 'The Terror' and 'Hyperion', Mr. Dan Simmons has proved that he can bring a little of that old wonder and inspiration back to this disillusioned nerd.
It's around this time of year, trudging through the last and dreariest leg of a New England winter, that I find myself seeking an escape from reality in my fiction. There's part of me that wants to re-experience the wonder and delight of the science fiction/fantasy/horror that I consumed in my childhood and adolescence. And that part of me is usually disappointed by the prose. Dan Simmons does ameliorate this completely - he incessantly inserts hyphenated phrases like this - and he succumbs to occasional clumsiness and portentousness. That's why I knock off a star, but these tropes are very difficult to avoid in a novel that builds a detailed world set over 700 years in our future, in which the human race has mastered interstellar travel and colonized hundreds of other planets after 'Old Earth' has been destroyed in a 'Big Mistake' (not environmental, but scientific, apparently). Simmons' tale-spinning ability is marvelous, while the exposition is seamlessly incorporated. And his prose can be quite lyrical at times.
As other reviewers have likely pointed out, it's a good idea to have 'The Fall Of Hyperion' at the ready when you've finished this novel, as 'Hyperion' comes to more of a stop than an end. With his exceptional genre novels 'The Terror' and 'Hyperion', Mr. Dan Simmons has proved that he can bring a little of that old wonder and inspiration back to this disillusioned nerd.