ThoseDeafMutes
Member
Spoilers naturally follow.
(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".
(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".