I have a rule about finishing books I’m not enjoying. Don’t.
I have another rule about bad reviews, which is that I try to avoid writing them.
So I’m breaking both rules here, largely because I broke the reading rule for Fall of Hyperion and now I feel compelled to write a review to atone for it. Do two wrongs make a right? I don’t know. But looking at the state of world affairs these days, one could be forgiven for believing so. But I digress…
The reading rule essentially goes, if I’m not enjoying a book by fifty pages, ditch it. Sometimes that’s seventy-five pages, or maybe one-hundred if I’m waffling a bit. But generally, fifty pages is more than enough for the author to make the case their book should be read, or for you and the book to make a connection.
Fifty, one-hundred, even one-hundred-and-fifty pages into Fall of Hyperion I knew we weren’t hitting it off, but I swept right past those red flags. Why? Because I got hoodwinked at the end of the previous book, Hyperion, that’s why!
I’ll explain, but first I need to break another rule I’m just now inventing, which is don’t review two books in one post. But Hyperion is an exception, which you’ll soon see why.
Hyperion:
I struggled a bit with Hyperion as well, but coming as a recommendation from my brother, I was willing to give it a bit of leeway. I don’t put much stake in awards, but Hyperion did win a HUGO award, after all, which is nothing to sniff at. And overall, I was glad I pushed through the slower parts to finish it.
Hyperion is essentially Canterbury Tales in space and while I was never a huge fan of the Canterbury, and while the intro and some of the tales/characters were pretty dry (I’m looking at you Consul, Kassad), the book also had some great stories (Tesla trees? Reincarnating crucifixes? Unexplained subterranean Labyrinths?), some really neat and well-executed ideas (pure-metal time-travelling death robot called the Shrike?!) and a few great characters (My favourite was the potty-mouthed poet Martin Silenus). Even the over-arching pilgrimage story, which started off slow and was really a conceit to tie the stories together, grew on me so I was well prepped and ready for an engaging ending upon their arrival at the mysterious time tombs to face the Shrike!
Then came that uncomfortable feeling you sometimes as a book’s pages dwindle that there really does not seem like there’s enough runway for the story to end in a satisfactory way…
Yet you race along, like a booknerd Thelma and Louise, hoping there’s going to be a bridge or a road or something at the end of that cliff. In this case the runway got so short I was half-expecting the book just to end with a sudden ‘The End,’ rising up like some stone wall in a Wile E Coyote cartoon.
In Hyperion’s case, the book just trails off, with the main characters singing ‘Off to see the wizard’ (no, seriously) before actually meeting said ‘wizard.’ The book and marketing copy cleverly avoids mentioning that Hyperion is not a complete book. It’s not even like the first book in a series, or something, that sort of ends. It’s literally just half the story, and after turning that last page, I had to visit my friend the Internet just to find out that I needed to read a whole ‘nother tome to finish the story!
After spending some months both galled and impressed at the chutzpah of the publishers to pull this over on their readers—not to mention that half-a-book won the HUGO!—I set down to its sequel.
The Fall of Hyperion:
Unfortunately, Fall of Hyperion takes all the worst aspects of the first books and magnifies them. To be fair, I don’t really think Dan Simmons had much of a plan for the sequel, and probably much less time to complete it than the first. As I understand it, the series as a whole was an excuse to repackage several short stories he’d been writing and polishing for years, into a full book form. Thus the Canterbury Tales story structure.
Unfortunately, the second part of Hyperion is left with none of these stories and nothing but to try and wrap up in an interesting way all the threads and promises opened by Hyperion.
Spoiler alert, it fails.
(Side note: I don’t like writing bad reviews of books. It’s a minor miracle that any book is finished, let alone published and then read. Writers, of all abilities, put a lot of work into their product and my goal is never to tear down someone’s efforts. That said, I’m also way more fascinated by things that don’t work than those that do, and Fall of Hyperion is full of them, so here’s my review. (Sorry Dan!)
As a writer, FoH reads like Dan Simmons popped a page into his typewriter and just started writing, hoping to find his way to a conclusion, then gave himself maybe one draft to fix it up. After having dropped off his seven main characters at the time tombs at the end of the first book, he struggles to find out what to do with them. The characters spend a bunch of time, variously in danger, bouncing back and forth between temples, waiting for the Shrike I guess, and slowly getting eliminated, but not. It doesn’t seem like they had much of a plan after arriving, and it doesn’t feel like Dan Simmons had one either.
Meanwhile, our new central character, Joseph Severn, is largely a living plot device who exists solely to connect the separate plot worlds of what’s happening in the Hegemony war room with what’s happening to the aforementioned characters at the time tombs.
Joseph is a recreation of a character named Johnny from the previous book (who was killed off in the previous book and then resurfaces for a while before being re-killed in this book). They are both AI recreations of the poet John Keats from a fake Earth after the real earth was blown up. The book’s obsession with John Keats, which was a little distracting in the first book, gets almost embarrassing in Fall of Hyperion. The name Hyperion comes from a poem by John Keats. The poet character is essentially trying to finish an unfinished poem by John Keats and the not-one-but-two characters that are John Keats replicas are somehow needed to save humanity. Then there are random quotes from John Keats’ poetry throughout the novel. One might ask, why tho? And one might get the answer, ‘I don’t know.’
The vast majority of Keats related flavourings have no meaningful connection to the story as far as I can tell. And it never really makes any sense why the John Keats recreations are needed to save humanity, or why those recreations needed to be John Keats. Either Dan Simmons just has that much of a literary crush on Mr. Keats, or the story for this book came from a writing prompt ‘Imagine a famous poet in space.’
But getting back to the Severn character, he’s actually kind of hilarious in that in order to serve as this plot device, he needs to sleep to ‘dream’ what’s really happening to the characters stuck at the time tombs, so for the first half of the book the author keeps contriving reasons for him to fall asleep or get knocked out. Eventually Simmons gives up on the conceit and he just writes those characters stories straight up, which is an improvement, but not unnoticed by the reader.
Meanwhile, Joseph has been hired as a portraitist of Meina Gladstone, the most important person in the Galaxy, as she navigates an existential threat with the Ousters, and invading force set to invade Hyperion and the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Joseph’s excuse for his participation–that he’s been hired to serve as M. Gladstone’s portraitist in crucial moment in human history–is a bit more believable, but still fairly absurd, especially once entire planets start being obliterated.
The other big problem, other than a contrived main character who serves entirely as a plot construct and the seven other main characters who don’t know what they want or what they are doing, is that the big existential threat, the Ouster invasion, is not that compelling. Told only through war room briefings of Severn documenting Meina Gladstone’s discussions, it’s always too distant to feel threatening, and too technical to feel interesting. This plotline also wanders a lot…but at least has more directionality to it than the other stories.
The Fall of Hyperion really wanders in search of its plot and a good 70% of its bulk feels like, as Dav Pilkey of Dog Man fame (who is pretty good at plotting) likes to facetiously title some of his chapters, ‘A bunch of stuff happens.’
It doesn’t take more than about one-hundred to one-hundred and fifty pages to know this book isn’t really going to turn around, so why did I disobey my own rule and keep reading? Largely because I felt like I’d already paid for the first half of the show and even if the story had worn out, I wanted to know how it ended. Despite my lack of interest in the new characters or storylines, I was still invested in the seven previous main characters, and the Shrike, and curious as to how their story would end.
Then suddenly, about half-way through this very long book, the AIs appear as the main antagonist, and things get exciting for about five pages.
Unfortunately, none of this was set up in the previous novel or the first half of the book. It comes out of nowhere and so loses a lot of the impact it could have had. In fact, before this point, the AIs largely seemed like part of the world building and not really a character at all. But I bought into it because I was waiting for the story to start going somewhere, and it was a cool idea, somewhat ahead of its time.
But the story soon bogs down again. It has secured an end point, but we still do all sorts of wandering to get there. Brawn Lamia enters then exits the datasphere for no apparent reason other than to meet with AIs for the reader’s benefit. The reincarnated priest miraculously escapes from the temples, travelling light years to the Web with assistance from the Shrike (why tho?). Joseph/Keats is transported to a replica of Earth where he’s forced to live out the death of the real life John Keats (I told you it gets weird). Simmons types furiously, trying to rejoin his contest-sized knot of spaghetti and deliver on the many promises he’s made. At this point I kept reading more to see how and if he was going to be able to pull it all together, plot holes and all.
The last one-hundred pages are more interesting than the first five-hundred, but hardly any of it makes sense or feels like a conclusion that was anticipated by the author until he was 80% of the way there. Generally, the characters are not agents in their story, but passive victims the story happens to.
Sadly, even the Shrike, who is a compelling and fascinating antagonist in the first book, makes no sense here. It just appears, staring ominously when the author needs tension, or killing and maiming, but also often just standing around without interfering for no reason. Even when it’s finally defeated (the second time, because there are apparently multiples of them in different times) it’s a total deus ex machina as Brawn Lamia develops inexplicable powers at the last moment. Then they all wander back to their lives, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. (I shit you not.)
The Fall of Hyperion gets a lot of positive ratings, so I feel safe that my critique here won’t spoil the book’s reputation. In my experience, The Fall of Hyperion, with its lack of focus, falls far short of that hype, and of the first book, which is a compelling work, overall, but if you’re curious about the Hyperion series, read the first. You might enjoy it. Just know, that if you do, it’s only the first part, and you may feel compelled to read the second.
P.S. If you liked this review, or also didn’t like Hyperion, why not check out some of my writing.
