Review: The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

I loved the first Hyperion book; it had 7 unique, interrelated stories, amazing world-building, great action sequences, wonderful mysteries, and delightfully mind-bending ideas. I found this second book in the series to be much more hit or miss. It’s more or less one continuous tale, with uneven pacing, a few great action sequences broken up by lots of boring dialogs and discussions, a few great ideas interspersed with a lot of nonsense, a few neat characters mixed with a bunch of flat/hard-to-believe placeholders, and a few great plot twists mixed with a lot of confusing, meandering, hard-to-follow bits. I think Simmons tries to take on too much in one tale—time travel, physics, philosophy, psychology, humanity, space battles, and all that at a galactic scale—and the book suffers for it. It’s a damn shame, as you still get glimpses of the brilliance that made the first story so enjoyable, but this one feels like a much less polished overall product.

Rating: 3 stars