Sequel I: The Fall of Hyperion

[Sam]

I finished The Fall of Hyperion yesterday, and thought I'd share my thoughts. There will be spoilers here.

Simmon's worldbuilding blew me out of the water again. The use of farcasters to create the Great Concourse and the River Tethys was amazing. The description of the Ouster swarm was also really neat. These are the kind of things that make me love science fiction

Bringing back Keats as the protagonist was odd at first, but I quite liked it. The ending felt quite dues ex machina, but that was a major theme in the book.

I found the destruction of the worldweb struck me hard. All the beauty of what had been created: the concourse, the Thethys, all gone. The burning of God's Grove and Heaven's Gate by the "Ousters" too. So much beauty destroyed.

I'll probably post more thoughts, but this what I have for now.

[Jason]

I thoroughly enjoyed this sequel to the excellent Hyperion. There was so much material but at the same time I didn't feel overwhelmed or that Simmons was tackling more than he could handle. It flowed really well.

"To John Keats Whose Name Was Writ in Eternity". Thus starts the novel. When Keats finally dies, he has Hunt inscribe the following on his tomb: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water". Water is constantly flowing, shifting, changing - the opposite of eternal. What did Simmons mean by this? Considering the fact that the Keats persona lives on, it's even more curious.

I was surprised when it is revealed that Old Earth was actually not destroyed but transported by the Core. Technical hurdles aside, it's a neat idea that a collection of AIs would "steal" a planet. Having Keats and Hunt trapped on distant Earth, traipsing around Rome with no other life forms besides a horse and the Shrike, evoked a lot of neat imagery. What is so special about Earth?

I particularly enjoyed Kassad's battle with the Shrike through time. You knew he couldn't win but were still cheering for him anyway. When he ends up in the distant future, meeting Moneta for the first time, it all made sense. Her future is his past. Rachel/Moneta has a psychological arrow of time that goes in the opposite direction from the norm. So she is saved as a baby, and Sol raises her again in the future, whereupon she is then sent backwards in time? And after all that complex weaponry, Brawne destroys the shrike by merely touching it?

The reveal that it was the Core attacking and not the Ousters was pretty shocking. Talk about the ultimate betrayal, somewhat reminiscent of the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. With the sheer numbers they had, the Core must have been building a Cybrid army for a very long time. We've learned that the Core has more resources and intelligence than imaginable. And that it exists within the farcaster matrix - brilliant. I'm sure some of the AIs survived in the metasphere as Keats refers to it.

The destruction of the farcaster network must have been absolutely world-changing for the citizens of the Hegemony. Hearing about families being separated by light years, people being sliced mid-transit, it's just so sad. It's hard to imagine having instantaneous travel; even harder to envision it suddenly being taken away. And what sent that strange message when the Fatline went down?

The imagery of the Shrike tree was explored even further, and you can almost feel the pain of those impaled on it, which we learn are simply connected by umbilical within the Shrike Palace. These direct brain connections reminded me of Neuromancer and cyberpunk in many ways. The one thing I wasn't too impressed with was Het Masteen's conclusion. How was he supposed to fly the Shrike tree if it wasn't even a real tree? Or was it real, but merely populated with holograms of the Shrike's victims?

I was skeptical when Simmons amped up the religious aspect of the world, speaking of the human and AI "God". But he did it in such a way that it tied the abstract to the practical. It seemed logical that the Core would start to seek the "meaning of life" as humanity has been doing since becoming sentient.

I loved the Ouster asteroid with the antigravity river. The Ousters seem even more evolved than the members of the Hegemony, as if they were following humanity's true path. I thought they were very reasonable and fair with the Consul. Considering they were originally introduced as being purely evil, this is a big shift, and by the end I saw the Hegemony as being truly helpless. This ultimately stemmed from their utter reliance on technology, something we're seeing more and more in our own world. I can't help but wonder if Simmons was writing a warning to us, one that we hopefully heed before it's too late.