The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written. Meina Gladstone was just such a leader for our Final Age, although none then could have dreamed that there would be no one but me to write the true history of her and her time.

“I know that anticlimax is the warp and woof of the world,” says Silenus. “But this is fucking ridiculous. All dressed up with nowhere to die.”