Ron Peters's Reviews > The Fall of Hyperion

I approached The Fall of Hyperion with trepidation because of my frustration with the fact that Hyperion, the first book in the series, is just a 500-page prologue to the second book, which promises to give you the real meat of the story.

As I approached the 500-page mark in The Fall of Hyperion, I wanted to bang my head against my desk when I realized this book also has no resolution and the series just continues in two more volumes, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion.

However, even this is a cheat. I looked up the Hyperion Cantos series on Wikipedia and found that the last two books have only a tenuous plot connection with the first two books, and they really involve a completely new story line.

So, all of Simmons’ weird ideas about the Cult of the Shrike, the war between the god of humans and the god of the AI’s, the fate of Brawne Lamia’s son, and what the heck happened to Rachel Weintraub/Moneta, that are bafflingly introduced in the Hyperion books never get clearly explained or brought to a coherent conclusion.

A large part of my frustration stems from the fact that Simmons is an amazingly good writer, even if he cannot bring his stories to a decent conclusion. But his action sequences are of stellar quality. He can hold complex action sequences in his mind and describe them in a manner that is exciting and fully immersive for the reader. For example, the scenes of hand-to-hand combat between Fehdmann Kassad and the Shrike rank up there with Melville’s whaling scenes and Tolstoy’s battle depictions.

But the downside is bad enough for me that I will not go on to read the Endymion novels. Maybe one day I’ll try a completely different work by Simmons. For instance, I enjoyed the television version of his historical horror fiction work, The Terror, so I may give that one a shot.