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| Trade paperback, 517 pages Published 1990 Acquired June 2006 Previously read July 2007 Reread January 2017 |
Rereading Hyperion to teach it motivated me to read the rest of the quartet-- for the second book, this was a reread, whereas I'd never got around to reading books 3-4. The Fall of Hyperion, I think is a good book or even a great one, but not the book I thought I was going to read next when I finished Hyperion. The end of Hyperion is amazing because it brings all the different emotional journeys of the pilgrims together and unifies them into one and gives them catharsis; I expected Fall would pick up from that, but I actually felt like it tossed the pilgrims aside. The group is torn apart, and the pilgrims' actions feel largely incidental to the (very complicated) proceedings. The giant conspiracy and big concepts underpinning Fall are good, but they move the focus to CEO Gladstone and the new Keats cybrid, who weren't even characters in the first book. It's a good brink-of-war sf thriller with some clever twists (some too clever for me), but without meaningful roles for the pilgrims it doesn't really succeed as a follow-up to Hyperion.
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