Unputdownable. I'm hooked enough to go on to Endymion. Well written, not easy to guess the outcome, and NOT 800 pages. Yay.
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Incredible journey but will not continue. I was more interested in Dan Simmons creative and writing pros/variety rather than the narrative. More nuanced in horror and mystery rather than sci-fi. In some aspects expecting this to be a sci-fi that actively involves the world in its characters was a notion I should've been less strict about. Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion is a horror book with incredible sci-fi elements that can be quite aimless at times. Some strong characters and a lot of mediocre ones. Predictable climax, the ones that weren't an ass pull that leads to Endymion lol, but nonetheless an enjoyable read.

*Without this followup Hyperion would've been 5/10. ( )

Quite an interesting book, but I think it would have been better if it had been a little less involved. ( )

Continuation of this mind boggling epic. There's a lot to keep in mind in these books and I found some aspects of the denoument rather unconvincing. ( )

Uneven, but a tour de force. I have a million questions, but mostly one: does it stand up to scrutiny now that the mysteries are revealed? ( )

The first book promised so much, and the second book didn't really deliver. I wanted this book to be so much more. (SPOILERS AHEAD)
The first half of FoH was amazing. I could see all the piezes moving together, and i was trying hard to figure out where they were going. We get some closure on some stuff from the first book, but then we get a lot more questions that remain unresolved. I thought the first two books went together, so I was expecting to have a proper closure.
I didn't like the deus ex machina at the end. I like it when books are puzzles that the reader is able to put together, not when piezes just come up from nowhere.
For example, John Keats uses an erg to snatch the baby of the Shriek at the end. I don't think we are ever explained what an erg does or how it works exactly, and it plays such an important role in the plot that I wish we had been told from the beginning of its potential so that when this happened I could have said " aaah smart! well played!" Instead it just feels like it came from nowhere. I felt the same way with Shriek turning into glass, which is just so random and so convenient.
A lot of the characters seem pretty irrelevant to the story ie Het Masteen, Silenus... even Kassad! His fighting scenes were entertaining but nothing else came out of them. I thought their roles would be a lot more important and instead they were just... meh. :(


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I feel like I could even give this 2 stars and I admit that one reason I don't is that it is so highly rated I almost feel like I just missed something. The first book was verbose but in a... "good" way. This one just feels bloated. One reason is that the philosophizing/theologizing/moralizing is just too thick, too obvious, and too... ridiculous. So e.g. (spoiler alert) "god", or what will be/is god, is "love", by which is (mostly? actually?) meant people's relations/empathy/"empathy-as-woo", becoming self-aware at the quantum level. I mean, Jesus (no pun intended), one star right there. But the book gets a bump because the first book, [b:Hyperion|77566|Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)|Dan Simmons|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1405546838s/77566.jpg|1383900], is really the first half of a story to which this is the latter half. Together I'd give them 3 or 3.5 stars. ( )

I am glad that I read this 'sequel' -- it really is more like the second half of a very long book than a true sequel. However, Simmons' vision of a possible future for mankind is bleak and the Shrike verges on horror (which is not my cup of tea at all!). I did like the ending and found the Ousters intriguing.

This book had a more straightforward storyline (even though it did switch narrators & points of view frequently) and so it was easier to follow than the first book. Despite that, I think that the first book would be the better novel if it had had a more conclusive ending. As I said above, these two read like two volumes of a single book.
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Loved it. ( )

Man, I am blown way by the richness of Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. Glad there is a Wiki to delve into. Will be reading this again in a year. Just incredible.
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A substantial feast of science fiction! The story boggles the mind and yet provides a satisfying and logical conclusion. There were times I wanted to quit and move on but I hung in till the end and it was worth it. How someone could write something so convoluted but somehow finds a way to bring the story back down to earth by the end amazes me. ( )

A satisfying ending to the Hyperion duology. I will proceed to the Endymions. ( )

After reading the previous book, Hyperion, it's impossible not to be let down by its continuation, The Fall of Hyperion. There are multiple reasons, mainly:

1) the changing of the structure from the "telling of tales" from each character, in the manner of the Canterbury Tales, which worked so well in the first book, for an awkwardly explained omniscient narrator in the form of Joseph Severn, a new persona created from the John Keats identity.

2) The plot focuses too much on characters that are not really interesting (Severn, the Hegemony CEO Meina Gladstone, among others), at the detriment of the main characters which we've invested on so much since the previous book. In spite of it being a necessity to bridge the micro (what's happening at the Time Tombs) with the macro (the war with the Ousters and Technocore), it brings down the whole book, losing momentum.

3) Not a lot happens at the Time Tombs, which is anticlimactic. There is of course a resolution to Sol Weintraub's plight, and every other character gets his moment, but most of the book consists of the Pilgrims walking around the non-descript tombs, waiting around for the Shrike to kill them or whatever.

Now, to the good points!

a) The plot grows increasingly complex and the world is deeper-thought-out than it seemed from the conjoined stories in Hyperion.
b) The metasphere, the void that binds, and the two opposing Ultimate Intelligences (or Gods) arising from AI and human consciousness are really cool ideas.
c) There's a coming-together of the cruciforms, the labyrinthine worlds, the weird overimportance of the ghost (literal and literary) of John Keats and the role of pain in art and human endeavor and the Abraham dilemma in a somewhat satisfying form.
d) There's a very interesting switch in the metaphorical relationship between the Titans of Myth (Hyperion being at the front of it) representing humanity and the AIs representing the "new gods" of Olympus. In this book, that's turned on its head and we realize there is a duality of metaphors: the AIs as Titans overtaken by its Ultimate Intelligence's Olympic gods, and Humanity (or the Hegemony) being overtaken or falling to give way to the Ousters as a Higher, more evolved form of Humanity (not necessarily defined as human anymore).
e) There's a lot of promise on what could happen in the next two books (Endymion and Rise of Endymion), in terms of concepts.

Overall, it was an enjoyable book with some annoying flaws (mainly a problem with pacing and the awkward narrator mechanism), which could have been a perfect book without sacrificing the big ideas, with just some tweaks. Which is a little heartbreaking, as it leaves the first book as the better book in most people's minds, which is certainly not what a saga should do. Maybe the story would have been better served if the two books had been melded into one, which would have solved the pacing issues and evened out the quality.





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I can picture the valley of the Time Tombs: the desert and the sand dunes that lead to the Chronos Keep. I picture the City of Poets and the face of Sad King Billy carved into the mountain. Simmons' creation is a rich universe that kept me entertained for the days I spent reading it. I find analogy in the way our society is plugged into their cellphones and the farcasting portals of Simmons' Hyperion culture. We are asleep as our freedom and self-autocracy is stolen away just as the humans' synapses fueled the AI controlling the Web in Simmons' trilogy. ( )

It's a different style to the first book but I still enjoyed it a lot. It brings together the threads from the first book's stories and develops into a wider story about war and invasion and time travel. Who is the real enemy?
I am going to take a short break before reading Endymion but will do so. ( )

As with most of Simmons's Novels The Fall of Hyperion takes stamina. Yes this is common with his style...but you will be well rewarded in the end. Simmons is a master weaver. The second novel in the Hyperion series paints a picture that might just be our future and considering when this was written he might be trying to tell us something. Well written, layered and no filler Simmons takes on an adventure through a time and space that is as accessible as our own backyard. Keats is an amazing character. Like most Simmons books he blends a fictional character into a mindset of a real character in a way only he can. ( )

I always approach the sequel to a novel I truly loved with some trepidation - I never want my delight in the first novel to the dampened by a less-than-stellar second. Luckily, Dan Simmons came through with a mind-bending, wide-reaching, glorious follow up to Hyperion.

All our favorite travelers are back, and the new characters we meet deepen the world and the relationships already established. The structure is more traditional, and while I missed the characters each revealing their stories in turn, it made much more sense for this novel to follow a linear timeline. As we journey with our characters, and all is revealed, it becomes a truly full circle tale.

One of the things I love most about this series is the way I can already tell it will stand up to a re-read. I am so looking forward to revisiting these characters in a few years, and falling in love all over again. Highest of recommendations. ( )

This is the sequel to the author’s Hyperion, and is essentially part II of the continuing story. Under no circumstances can you read this book without having read Hyperion.

At the conclusion of Hyperion, a species of humans named the Ousters are in the process of invading Hegemony space, targeting the colony world of Hyperion. On the planet Hyperion, there are anomalous “time tombs” associated with a near mythological creature named the Shrike. The Shrike has spawned a cultish religion throughout the Hegemony and seven “pilgrims” have been selected to visit the Shrike in an attempt to stem the Ouster tide.

While Hyperion was relatively straight forward and easily followed, The Fall of Hyperion ventures pretty deeply into philosophy, sometimes in stream of consciousness form, to the extent that it, at times, presents as gobbledygook. The author has made his distaste for editors widely known and not surprisingly, time and time again, has shown himself to be badly in need of one. Not only is this novel no exception, it is the most glaring example.

This is a heavy piece of work. Artificial intelligence, supreme beings, temporal distortion, religion, dataverse all make an appearance in some form or fashion throughout the story. I must admit that I felt lost at times. I’ve got to think that this could have been more clearly presented in a far better form than what eventually made its way into print. ( )

I finished it! I thought it would never end.

This could have been a much shorter book. There was way too much explaining things that really didn't need to be explained such detail or ruminated over so many times. That's our [a:Dan Simmons|2687|Dan Simmons|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1427999015p2/2687.jpg]! So many times I thought, Okay, I get it. I GET IT. STOP. Please stop.

OTOH, there was just enough action and world building to take every little thing in the book to the next level of wow. The use of classical structure in both Hyperion books worked well. Although, in the second book, the use of dreams seemed like a bit of a cheat, even though it was necessary for the actions. It also worked.

I found that I forgave the sins of the book readily as the details spilled out.

I couldn't help picturing a middle-aged John Cleese as Martin Silenus. It was just too perfect. I'm not sure why all of that kept running around in my brain. It just did. I rarely find myself placing celebrities as characters in books, but I couldn't help myself with Silenus and Cleese. I think it had a lot to do with the tenor and pacing of his character.

I need a bit of a break. I'll start the [b:Endymion|3977|Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)|Dan Simmons|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329611385l/3977._SY75_.jpg|1882574] books later. ( )

Not quite as good as its predecessor Hyperion, but still a pretty spectacular read. A little top heavy with excessive and unnecessary theo-babble. There is also still an over-reliance among the characters on what would have been long forgotten 20th century cultural references. ( )

A mostly satisfying follow up to [b:Hyperion|77566|Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)|Dan Simmons|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1405546838s/77566.jpg|1383900]. I liked the story itself quite a bit, and was pleasantly surprised by the various twists presented throughout. I thought that the change in narrative structure from the previous Canterbury Tales method was a bit... contrived, but I found that it worked best when I just didn't dwell on it too much.
While there was quite a bit of resolution to most of the story elements from this and the previous book, there was still a couple of outstanding questions that I'd have liked to have answers to:
- What is the Shrike? What exactly is it's purpose? Who made it? Is it really gone (considering the cover art for the next books, I'm going to guess NO)? What was it planning on doing with the infant Rachel?
- How was Brawne able to kill/shatter the Shrike with just a touch?
- What happened to the Thorn Tree and all of the victims?
- The labrythnine tunnels - uhhh... everything about them: origin, purpose, etc.

Hopefully the next books will answer these for me!

A note on the audiobook reading: Overall, the narrator did a great job, giving the different characters just enough difference to tell them apart but not taking on any ludicrous accents to do so. The only criticism I had was that halfway through the book he started pronouncing Lusus and Lusian differently than he did in the first half or was pronounced in the first book. ( )

This book was a slog to read. The first in the series was a series of short stories told by characters on a journey, like Canterbury Tales. Each story was seemingly independent and self contained and at the same time giving us an overview of the universe it was set in. The planet it was set on was the home of the Time Tombs and the Shrike. These seemed to behave outside the laws of physics and allowed some of the more magical events in the stories to come true. I enjoyed the first book immensely.

This second book takes the characters from the first book and jumps around among them giving their points of view. It also jumps to new characters in the larger universe. If the jumps were between two or even three characters it would have been tolerable but there are more than a half dozen. It gets tedious very quickly. Each cutaway tries to leave a little mini cliffhanger, I guess to build suspense but they fail to do so. However, I have to hand it to the author. All the stories from the previous book are pieces of the greater picture. All are relevant and the two books must have been planned and plotted in advance. The way the previous book seemed like a collection of short stories I thought the author had written one story at a time and then reworked them to share a setting and a framing device. Then I thought, after the first book sold he whipped up a sequel. That could not have happened. The second book takes each element in each story and relates it to a single larger story. All questions are answered and all lose ends are tied up. The author had all this worked out before he published the first book, if not before he composed the first story. The two books tell a larger story that is skillfully told and well written. I just think he could have wrapped things up in 100 pages instead of 517. Or he could have kept the jumping viewpoints to a minimum and it would not have seemed as long. ( )

Epic! Complex! Not quite as well-formed structurally! Mind-expanding! Emotionally engrossing!

The book began a bit slowly, shedding Hyperion's enjoyable Canterbury Tales format and arranging itself around the new(ish) character Severn, who I initially found not quite as compelling as the pilgrims. However, by the second half of the book, and certainly by the last third, the story lost its aimlessness and regained all of its momentum and then some. The book was impossible to put down near the end, and I thought it resolved everything in a satisfying way, which is quite impressive given the story's massive scale.

Could have done with a few more female characters especially since Rachel and Moneta turned out to be the same person, but Meina Gladstone and Brawne Lamia were pretty great for 1990 sci-fi. ( )

I thought Hyperion was grand, but having read the sequel, it feels more like a short story with tunnel vision. Fall of Hyperion is a truly epic space opera, filled to the brim with grand ideas and an execution that just leaves you breathless.

Simmons fleshes out the Web in the book, critiquing how humanity has become a slave to technology. People simply cannot live without the datasphere, and it shocks me how the author had come up with this idea in 1989, long predating the Internet we know today. Everything and everyone is hooked up to the datasphere, making it unimaginable to live daily lives without it. People are also hooked on farcasters - like the portals in Rick & Morty - traveling lightyears in seconds. This has, unsurprisingly, led to a stagnation in science and culture, resulting in humanity losing what made it human.

On top of all this, there's the Ultimate Intelligence and its human counterpart. While these ideas were rather abstract and vague, especially in how they were portrayed with time travel in the mix, they worked pretty well. I do wish it wasn't as wishy-washy as it was, but hey, you can't win everything. The human empathy thing wasn't too clear either, especially in the context of the absurdly confusing time travel in the series.

The action was done well, though, and the Shrike was as terrifying as ever. There are some moments of deus ex machina that are never explained, making the story feel slightly wobbly as a result. But overall, I had a grand time, especially with the ever-so-condescending Ummon, the philosopherly John Keats, and our pilgrims, each of whom was great in their own ways. ( )

Not a sequel, but the second half of the first book. More conventional storytelling than Hyperion, but in the same tone. ( )