Review: Hyperion

2022-07-24

I loved the idea of an unkillable alien god. Unfortunately, the Shrike alone was unsufficient to carry the novel. I was okay with some of the stories in the anthology, but others were just bland. I gave up part-way through the Consul's story, as I was bored out of my mind and didn't want to go through another slog for what I understood was a cliff-hanger ending. I enjoyed some of the stories, such as the priest's and the poet's, but as they progressed, I found myself less and less engaged with the novel.

The amount of sci-fi word soup was absolutely unbearable. There's nothing wrong with introducing having new terminology or throwing the reader into the deep end a-la Malazan, but it felt less like a well thought out universe and technology, and more like the author was just dumping a bunch of nouns and shoveling them back up with a blank book. Planet and city names felt lazy as well, often taking an existing place and adding "New" in front of it, or naming it after a person, although I suppose this is in line with how we do things in real life.

I don't think there's much to say about this book. The mystery around the Shrike was cool, the planet of Hyperion was neat, but the characters and their arcs become boring either because of the constant stop-start between disconnected stories, or because their arcs were just plain uninteresting, and the word spaghetti was a constant source of background irritation.

2/5