At 02:17 AM 6/2/2004 -0700 Richard Baker wrote: >George said: > >> Concur, great series. Simmons can write. > >The first two are excellent, even if parts of _The Fall of Hyperion_ are >a mess and the ending isn't as clean as it should be. I was much less >impressed by the two Endymion books though.
I've got to agree with Rich Baker here - and I'm glad that I'm not alone in this, but in my mind _Fall of Hyperion_ seriously failed to deliver on _Hyperion_. Basically, the high point of the series was "The Priest's Tale" which opened _Hyperion_ and "The Scientist's Tale" - mostly because the latter's daughter was about the only charachter I managed to care about between the two books. Actually, I'm probably being too harsh there - I pretty much enjoyed the entirety of _Hyperion_, with the exception of anything having to do with Silenus. ;-) At any rate "Fall of Hyperion" just seemed like a muddled mess to me - difficult to follow, and as Rich noted, a very unclean ending. Since _Hyperion_ can't really stand on its own as a book - there's no way it can be rated the best of anything, since its companion invariably drags it down. I haven't read _Endymion_ if only because the preview blurb in the back of _Fall of Hyperion_ seems to indicate that _Endymion_ will center around the most-annoying character of all time - Silenus and will feature the Catholic Church as the Evil Empire as a major plot theme. I can't say that either of those teasers has me running to the book store to read the next book. ;-) JDG - Then again, maybe I should have read Keats before reading Hyperion.....
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