Let me begin by saying I know I’m supposed to like the book.
The Fall of Hyperion is the the sequel to the Hugo Award winning novel, Hyperion.
Hyperion brought the reader into a rich world. Following a group of characters on a pilgrimage to the infamous home of the Shrike during an interstellar war, the book introduces the reader to a group of people seeking to rectify or find their way forward from tragedies or poor choices in their past. The evil Shrike and Time Tombs offer the promise of redemption for one of those on the journey, for the rest, death. Rich in character development and world building, Hyperion leaves the reader immersed in a story, but waiting for resolution.
The Fall of Hyperion is supposed to be the book that provides that satisfaction. It does not.
Structurally, the novel is flawed in many ways. The plot is almost laughingly simplistic, drags, and is held together through explanation rather than a rich story. Simmons’s descriptions are overly indulgent. Characters development is brought to a screeching halt with a story that seems stuck, and the ending, oh god, the ending.
By the time one gets to the end of the novel, having invested time reading over a thousand pages, a loosely held plot is explained, not lived, in barely twenty pages. Characters that have suffered and desired for hundreds of pages are dismissed. Underdeveloped subplots suddenly become key to understanding the novel.
Simmons created a world, and for better or worse, couldn’t find his way out of it, or maybe it was just poor writing.
At the end of the novel, with barely ten pages left, I almost put it down and stopped reading. That’s the level of disappoint we are dealing with.
The idea is fantastic. If this was a first draft, I’d say the novel has promise, but as it is, Dan Simmon’s novel is more of a distraction from novels you should be reading rather than a world and experience you would like to dedicate time to.