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see_sadie_read 's review for:
Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
I borrowed the audio version of this from my husband to listen to at the gym. When I asked him for it he responded, "Sure, you can borrow it, but you won't like it." "We'll see," I said. I mean, that's practically a challenge 'init? Then, several times during the weeks it took me to listen to it I commented, "I'm enjoying this. I don't know why you thought I'd hate it." He'd smirk and blithely say, "Just wait."
Well...he was right. And a wife doesn't often like to admit that about her husband. I did enjoy it, really I did, right up until the end, when, after almost 500 pages of 'we're off to see the Shrike, the wonderful wonderful Shrike,' we got nothing, nada, nil. Where is my ending to tie all the disparate narratives (marvellous as most of them were) together? Where is the conclusion that would explain (beyond hypotheses) why the characters had been gathered or what the Shrike and Time Tombs actually were? Where is the nice little bow that would give the whole thing meaning? It's sure not at the end of the book, that's for certain!
Until the ending ruined it for me, I liked a lot of aspects of the book. Some of the stories were really quite moving (Saul and Rachel literally made me cry). But the various tales felt uneven in their presentation. The earlier character narratives felt more tightly tied together than the latter. The last, in fact, was almost unfollowable. Some events were painfully predictable (M. Lamia's story especially). And I felt some of the world building was lacking. I never did get much of a grip on how the Outsters came to be, for example. But no matter how good most of the book was, if it's never tied together it's a fail in my eyes.
Well...he was right. And a wife doesn't often like to admit that about her husband. I did enjoy it, really I did, right up until the end, when, after almost 500 pages of 'we're off to see the Shrike, the wonderful wonderful Shrike,' we got nothing, nada, nil. Where is my ending to tie all the disparate narratives (marvellous as most of them were) together? Where is the conclusion that would explain (beyond hypotheses) why the characters had been gathered or what the Shrike and Time Tombs actually were? Where is the nice little bow that would give the whole thing meaning? It's sure not at the end of the book, that's for certain!
Until the ending ruined it for me, I liked a lot of aspects of the book. Some of the stories were really quite moving (Saul and Rachel literally made me cry). But the various tales felt uneven in their presentation. The earlier character narratives felt more tightly tied together than the latter. The last, in fact, was almost unfollowable. Some events were painfully predictable (M. Lamia's story especially). And I felt some of the world building was lacking. I never did get much of a grip on how the Outsters came to be, for example. But no matter how good most of the book was, if it's never tied together it's a fail in my eyes.