Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Escapist Sci-Fi!
Review: To put it mildly, Dan Simmons succeeded in completely transplanting me into another world. This book, along with it's two sequels, completely absorbed me. I can't recommend this book and this series highly enough. Thanks Dan!
Rating:
Summary: Waiting for the next book was torture
Review: This is a must read for anyone who appreciates both fine literature and Science Fiction. No cowboys in space here... Well maybe a little...
God, Monster, killer time traveling robot or all of the above... Every one should familiarize them selves with the Shrike!
Read the first two books and you'll be locked in.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprise
Review: Like another recent reviewer, I discovered this book purely by accident. I'm not much of a sci-fi buff, and was expecting a "trashy novel" (which I happened to be in the mood for). It definitely was not that; but while I enjoyed it -- and the whole series, twice -- immensely, I thought it had enough problems to warrant 4 stars.The six vignettes that make up the bulk of this volume are all fascinating: I found the scholar's tale to be by far the most moving, and the priest's to be the most interesting and most disturbing. They serve as excellent vehicles for fleshing out the characters (though the priest -- perhaps the shallowest character -- is fleshed out more by implication). The poetic allusions are a little heavy-handed, and sometimes feel contrived, though they can be of interest to literary devotees. And one weakness that appears through all the Hyperion books (with the possible exception of Endymion): the ending is rather trite, and unnecessarily so. It wouldn't be a huge problem, except that it becomes disproportionately noticable given its high-visibility position. Simmons's style seems to employ a tasteful amount of camp (if that makes sense) generally; endings may be the exception to this rule. The book's strength is, as with science fiction generally, in my experience, as a thought experiment that happens to be a novel. As becomes increasingly apparent in later books in the series, the man vs. machine theme is central, and handled far more competently than, say, the way it was handled in the recent Matrix movies. Of course, the Shrike is more thought experiment than character, but an engaging one. Environmentalist topics are dealt with as well, and in an ingenious enough way that someone not sympathetic to environmentalism (e.g., me) will give the subject a new think.
Rating: 
Summary: I love this book!
Review: Dan Simmons has written an exclent book. Although the book is confusing, he still describes the characters well. He uses suspense to let the reader enjoy the book. Simmons describes the characters so that the reader can image them as real people.
Rating:
Summary: truely great work from a true sci-fi master
Review: i have been a fan of simmons for several years now and it is all due to the Hyperion Cantos. These four books and Orphans of the Helix are works that I truely believe, like the works of Lovecraft, Aurthur, and Asimov, to name a few, will stand the test of time. The characters are so well drawn out, and weaved so intricately into the story(even over the 300+ years it takes us through{700+if you factor in Orphans})that I've read the series through 6 times and undoubtedly when i do it again, I will find more that I have missed. It is a definate read. I have told everyone I know of the magic that is this story, and the master that is Simmons.
Rating:
Summary: Just read it.
Review: This book and the entire series is great. Honestly it may sound cliche but from the moment I picked up this book I was addicted. I've been scouring used book stores for the last five or six months and finally got the fourth book of the series for my collection. While I can understand how people who just read the first book are upset you have to put all the books together. I admit when I finished the first book I felt a little unfufilled .However as soon as you get into the second book it all goes away. I can't help but get the feeling that while Simmons was writing this book he had the rest laid out perfectly. The way the characters all come together and relate with their stories is just plain addictive. In a way it's a little like a Quentin Tarantino movie, but in novel form.
Rating: 
Summary: Hugo for Nothing
Review: I have been on a reading quest to catch up with previous Hugo award winners. Having just finished the impressive Virnor Vinge novels I was anxious to continue my trek of great Science Fiction. Hyperion is not a novel. That is the first thing a potential reader should realize. It is a collection of six short stories, each of which has an ending that requires the main character to meet a bug-eyed-multi-armed-time-traveling monster on the planet Hyperion. As a plotting ploy this is great, most of the characters have interesting stories to tell and you end up waiting impatiently to see what happens when they meet the monster. They don't. I don't feel I'm spoiling the ending, because there is none. The entire set of stories ends with the "pilgrims" stepping foot on the monsters temple. Absolutely nothing is resolved in this novel. It isn't a question of disliking the ending, it is a question of where is the ending? Some might call it a cliffhanger, I would just call it a waste of time. Having wasted too much time on this novel I cannot justify spending more money on the sequel. I have not guarentee that it will resolve anything or just be another setup to sell more books. I'm disgusted that this "novel" is considered a Hugo winner in the company of such wonderful novels like "A Fire Upon the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky".
Rating:
Summary: pretentious, old-fashioned, and worth the read
Review: ~
Well, no. Not a classic. It's a cut above most science fiction, and occasionally it rises to the best quality, as in "The Scholar's Tale," in which Simmons looks at how the parent and child relationship could be reversed in a really astonishing way. But not a classic. I'm not saying that Simmons isn't capable of writing a classic, but he hasn't written one yet. For all the irritatingly self-conscious "literariness" of this book, it's really very old-fashioned science fiction, and it has the vices and virtues of old-fashioned science fiction. The vices: the characters are wooden and stereotyped. There's not a trace of real cultural difference or sensitivity: all these characters are actually present-day Americans hastily dressed up as denizens of the future. The plot is extravagant: the fate of mankind is in the balance, of course. business as usual. The virtues: there is sometimes in Hyperion the real "let's turn the universe on its head and see what falls down!" experimentation, the "visions of the future" kind of science fiction. The dystopian elements are nicely done. Is it the barbarians or the forces of civilization that are threatening humanity? Is the destructive impulse of humanity really its salvation, really its creative impulse? Simmons runs with these as far as any classic science fiction ever did. I haven't yet read the Fall of Hyperion -- and I plan to, so you can see that I can't be all that disappointed -- so some twists of the plot are yet to be untwisted. I may be favorably surprised. But some things can't be recovered from. The "poet" figure is a disaster from start to finish, a hackneyed comic-book version of the foul-mouthed hard-drinking artist, and the supposed insight of his tale -- that lust, the creation of art, and predation have something, vaguely, to do with each other -- is hardly late-breaking news even within the precincts of science fiction. The "soldier" is equally pointless. There's an awful lot of blood and gore mixed up with sex, which is at least thematic, here, but I still don't like it. The end of the book -- as noted in many reviews -- is really just a "to be continued": but having these people suddenly singing and skipping down the yellow brick road was an awful, awful mistake. There was supposed to be a sort of Zorba-dancing feel to it, I guess, but it gave more the feel of an motiveless authorial freak. None of these people is the "ah, hell, let's dance!" type. So what worked well? The "framed tales" worked really surprisingly well, actually catching some of that strange, indirect narrative force that Chaucer managed to harness. Every once in a while one of Simmons' arch turns comes off and is hilarious -- when he suddenly dropped into the style and plot of the hard-boiled detective story for "the Detective's Tale" I actually laughed aloud. What this author needs -- and, sadly, what he's terribly unlikely to get -- is a ruthless editor who will stop him in his tracks and say, "is this particular arch turn worth trashing the mood of the story?" and "what really is the heart of this story, and how does this episode take us deeper into it?" Until he gets that sort of discipline either from the inside or the outside, we'll be getting, not classics, but clever pastiche.
Rating:
Summary: The BEST
Review: The best Sci-Fi ever, the whole series (Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion). The characters, the plot and the intensity make it a must read not just for Sci-Fi buffs but for any Fiction reader. Dan Simmons has as big of a surprise in the end as did Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. This series touches on all aspects of humanity in seven characters lifetimes through a plethora of worlds.
Rating:
Summary: Great science fiction, uninteresting characters
Review: I have to say that the immense detail that Simmons goes into in this book is truly amazing. He manages to meld a whole futuristic universe together and make it seem like your actually there. However, by the end of this book, I was left feeling uninterested in anything that had passed. The short stories are intertwined rather well, but overall lead in no general direction whatsoever. While this lets you get a good idea of what each character is like, each story is very very anticlamactic. I had no want to read the next book in the series after finishing this, Ill take the book in for the experience It was, a decent read...
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