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LTTP: Hyperion Cantos

Spoilers naturally follow.

the_lord_and_the_colokpj10.jpg


(This image is way cooler than any of the crappy covers the novels have)

Hyperion was a novel I grabbed in audiobook format with free credits like 18 months ago. As of tonight I finished the audiobook of The Rise of Endymion. I will summarize my thoughts below.

Hyperion is something I found a bit hard to get into. Ordering the tales was a tough job for Simmons I imagine, but for me the Priest's tale wasn't especially interesting. Kind of took a while to get through and the pseudohorror religious imagery didn't strike much of a chord with me. Cruciform this, cruciform that, Bikura always up to no good, but I was just waiting for it to be over after a point. The first tale that I thought was really good was Sol Weintraub, which was well over the halfway point of the book. The Consul's tale was also good in its own way. Brawne Lamia's was so so, however it did provide some much needed world building for the story. The Poet's tale was probably not as bad as I remember it being, but I was not fond of Martin Sileenus' voice that the narrator put on - quite obnoxious and if I'd just been reading that on the page it probably would have bothered me much less. As with the Detective's tale, Martin's story told us a lot about the world. By the end of the book, things were just ramping up, and then of course it ends. This is very much just a prologue to the next book.

The Fall of Hyperion was where shit got real. The setup from the first pays off handsomely and we get what I feel is a much more interesting and coherent story - rather than basically a short story collection as the first. The intrigues of the Ousters and Technocore make it feel like shit is actually happening, and the story actually contains an ending rather than a tease. You could comfortably end the story here and not read on - in fact this is the advice I received from multiple people when I asked about the series.

Endymion was a bit of a snooze. In some ways it's like the first book - it's a bit slower, it doesn't really "end" the story, it just saves and quits once the enemies have been cleared from the area. You are left with frustratingly few answers and it's extremely mysterious. In other ways it's nothing like the first - it's a single continuous narrative, outside of the occasional jumps back to the framing story. This one jumps us straight back into full on religious territory, and the inner workings of the new Catholic Church. I did not really like this but I don't have anything more to say about that specifically. The Cruciform is the centerpoint of the new religion, which, while I didn't "love" was something that was cleverly extrapolated on for various things. One thing that kept feeling slightly creepy the whole time was the predestination of the two main characters' love. I know what Dan was "going for" here but ultimately we end up with a 12 year old kid talking to a grown ass adult and saying things like "oh yeah we'll share a bed soon haha you'll see". Or Dan writing passages about how he went skinny dipping with his ward - which again wouldn't be bad except that the narrative is constantly and un-subtly reminding us that these people will hook up before the end of the series. By the end of this one I just wanted to get the series over with. More generally, Raul Endymion is kind of a whiney idiot on a frequent basis. He's not particularly charismatic, and while not incompetent, nothing struck me as likable about him. I wish I didn't get to see hear thoughts half the time.

The Rise of Endymion was an improvement. Not as good as either of the first two really, but it does at least give us final closure. One thing they did a lot of was retconning the details of the first two, and frankly I didn't like that part of it. Or rather, the idea that there was a fallible narrator is not bad, but I think what they replaced it with was fundamentally worse in most cases. The Technocore surviving was not bad - but "oh they were never in the farcasters haha" was. The farcasters, fatline and hawking drive all being connected to "The Void Which Binds" was not bad implicitly, but the extensive discussions about how this void energy plank time thing is actually "love" and "empathy" is real fucking cheesy. They do give us a high note to end on in character terms but I think that fundamentally the unvierse of Hyperion is worse for these two books having been written. One answer that I didn't really find satisfactory, considering how central the creature was to the story overall, is the Shrike. They more or less answer the mystery by throwing their hands up in the air and shouting "oh yeah well somestimes he's a good guy and sometimes he's a bad guy and he's special because... reasons".
 
I read the first book a good while back. The only thing that really stuck with me was the story concerning the priest. That was a pretty cool concept that was entirely new to me.

That being said, the ending just destroyed all interest in carrying on for me unfortunately. That Wizard of Oz thing felt so lame that I moved on after it and never went back.

From your experience, it seems like it kind of picks up a little, but then drops off again, so I'm not really inclined to ever go back again. Besides, I still need to read Revelation Space et al.
 
Read all of them a couple of years ago and my thoughts mirror yours, more or less.

Raul was pretty annoying, after dozens of miraculous predictions/feats/escapes etc. even the most cynical person in the world would start giving Aenea the benefit of the doubt. Felt like the final two books were 50% reading about Raul whinging about one thing or another and that got old pretty quickly.

I actually liked the political chicanery with the Catholic Church though, Dure/Hoyt, Lourdusamy, the Technocore liaison chap and the merchant union etc.

The whole "I am the messiah and the universe is held together by love" stuff though? Fuck all of that. The super duper invincible cyborg soldiers kept popping up so often that they became a little boring as well, and it suffered the same problem that all extended universes have where everything and everyone becomes interconnected.
Moneta turns out to be Rachel, Kassad becomes the Shrike
, nobody can stay dead because they all have to make cameos before the end.

I appreciate how it ties everything together neatly for the main characters but man, I wish it wasn't such a slog to get there. I'll end up reading them again at some point but I'll probably stop after the Fall of Hyperion, or skip through large sections of the 3rd and 4th books.
 
I really loved Hyperion, one of the best modern sci fi books imo. I enjoyed Endymion a little less, but it is still a masterpiece.

The world building is marvelous, there is an incredible sense of poetry in this story.

To those who didn't read it yet, I envy you cause you will get a hell of a ride.
 

sasliquid

Member
Loved the first one

Was fine with the second

Haven't read the rest and I heard Dan Simmons is a bad guy so I don't think I will
 

danthefan

Member
I recently listened to Hyperion and was compelled to move straight onto Fall, which I did. I thought these form a really great story and I enjoyed the hell out of them.

I'm not going to go into Endymion I think. I've read that and advice, I'm happy enough with where the story ended, will just leave it at that.
 
Currently on the second book now, just about finished. Enjoyed the first as well as this one, so far.

Sol & Rachel's story was probably the most poignant arc for me, up to this point, though I haven't really disliked any aspect of the story so far (well, besides being a dunce with poetry :D ).
 

RS4-

Member
I stopped reading somewhere in book 3 or 4. Just got tired of it, ended up reading the wiki a few months ago lol.

Can't bother reading anymore of Simmons. Stopped halfway through uh, the terror?
 
Well there's a SyFy channel series coming out which will be adapting the Cantos so I'm sure that will hold up to the written works for the first two.

ha ha... ha.........

I didn't know that there was an adaptation being made. SyFy channel.... Hmmm. Hopefully I can get this on my minimum sky package. I know that these books sometimes get held up as the best of their genre of all time. I am not sure if I agree with that. However I really loved the story and didn't mind the cheese and "love" theory. I think most grand space opera syfy falls into the trap of being almost too grand. The dune books never quite reached the epic heights of the first and the books after the trilogy are a bit of a slog. Same with hamiltons night dawn trilogy.

Epic ideas which began to tail off. I must admit though I thoroughly enjoyed Neil Asher's agent Cormac series and urge you to investigate. Some cracking stuff in there.
 
Priests Tale is excellent you phillistine

I left it at Hyperion, I do like Sci Fi but I quite liked not having a straightforward story and bailed before it got bogged down in noun-nonsense.
 
So good. who can forget the Shriek ?

It is a unique universe with it´s rewards.

A nice mix of religion/superstition, magic/or it was high level technology?

Unique characters and their motivations.

I still remember the ambassador playing piano while his sentient ship fold space to travel.
 

RS4-

Member
I didn't know that there was an adaptation being made. SyFy channel.... Hmmm. Hopefully I can get this on my minimum sky package. I know that these books sometimes get held up as the best of their genre of all time. I am not sure if I agree with that. However I really loved the story and didn't mind the cheese and "love" theory. I think most grand space opera syfy falls into the trap of being almost too grand. The dune books never quite reached the epic heights of the first and the books after the trilogy are a bit of a slog. Same with hamiltons night dawn trilogy.

Epic ideas which began to tail off. I must admit though I thoroughly enjoyed Neil Asher's agent Cormac series and urge you to investigate. Some cracking stuff in there.

Bradley Cooper is or was involved with the show, haven't heard news about it in like a year though.
 

Hesemonni

Banned
Like others have said the first book is awesome, the second good, third .. best be forgotten and the end of fourth pretty much reaches second book levels. I should re-read it for, I guess, sixth time.

And yeah, zero hope for SyFy series being any good and quite honestly I doubt it'll even get made. Hopefully Netflix or HBO somehow snags the rights for the books.
 
I grew to like Silenus over the course of the first two volumes. My arc with Sol is the reverse, because after asking some pertinent questions about the legend of Abraham and Isaac throughout most of the story, he eventually cobbles together some kind of muddled justification that lets God off the hook. I'd have preferred to see him retain his integrity, even if Rachel's free choice caused him immense pain. To capitulate as he does, with _that_ nonsensical rationale, felt to me like a betrayal of his identity.

Het Masteen is so incompletely written compared to the other characters that his temporary disappearance and ultimate death in the first volume carry little weight. The Templars in general are so vaguely written that I feel the author felt they needed to exist for some purpose but never felt like giving them any real effort.

The various avatars of Keats are well written and serve to give the stories a focal point.
 
Het Masteen is so incompletely written compared to the other characters that his temporary disappearance and ultimate death in the first volume carry little weight. The Templars in general are so vaguely written that I feel the author felt they needed to exist for some purpose but never felt like giving them any real effort.

Totally agree with this. "Hmm...he went missing...didn't really know much at all about him so meh".
 
The ideas of time debt and the worldweb were just super neat to me.

Especially in fall of Hyperion when they
find out the worldweb was how AI was getting it's all encompassing power

I still need to finish the Endymion books.
 
The Poet's story was the best to me. Such a weird sense of dread pervading the end of that story.
The whole sense that if he had died then the Shrike would never exist, on top of him being a huge jerkbag, made him a great villain.
I want to read Fall but haven't yet.

That picture is the best one I've seen of the series OP.
 
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