Hyperion

Rating:
Summary: One word...AWESOME
Review: This book ranks up there with the greats: Dune, Enders Game, Foundation. Simmons creates a great and original universe with great character development, cool technology and a plot that is not predictable. One warning...you MUST have Fall of Hyperion ready to go when you finish this book. I don't want to spoil anything, but trust me, you will be sorry if you don't. Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion could have been one book. ENJOY!!!

Rating:
Summary: Hyperion- Great SF
Review: Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Hugo award winning novel (1990) with a brutal cliffhanger ending. Very cool picture of the universe and the "hegemony of man" in the future. If you liked the Vernor Vinge books you will like this... it unfolds similar to the Canterbury Tales... with 6 travelers sharing their tales to the group while on a pilgrimage. The Hegemony is a "web" of worlds connected by farcasters(teleportation devices). There is a troubling technological over structure called the "techno-core" which is populated by AI constructs that seceded from the Hegemony and serve as the technological framework of the government and economy for their own, unknown, reasons. There are mysterious constructs on the world Hyperion called the Shrike (apparently a creature that brings only death) and the empty "Time Tombs" that are both moving BACKWARDS in time for unknown reasons as well.

I finished it last night and now need to get the sequel (Fall of Hyperion) because of how it ended.

Rating:
Summary: Some bad, some very good. Worth a read.
Review: Hyperion is a book of somewhat uneven quality. The sentences have a short, irritating, grating feel sometimes. It's not the most polished of works.

The story is in a somewhat unimaginative style where several pilgrims head off to Hyperion and get to hear each other's stories. There's a lot of fluff in Hyperion and the novel could have been cut down substantially.

That said, some of the stories are very strange and powerful. The priest's story and that of the man with the child were very disturbing and left a strong impression. Those two alone make the book worth reading. The others were mixed, some ok, a couple very dull.

Worth a read, but not a sci-fi great.

Rating:
Summary: Why this book is over-rated garbage!
Review: Well to start, I never post comments, and only sign up so i can express my true feeling having read this unimaginative garbage. i've seen all the review, and my honest opinion is that book lacks the luster that is usually expected of an award winning book (just goes to show that anyone can win an award these days).
The book starts with the author gathering all the pilgrims in a pilgrammage to the planet Hyperion. All the action that occurs to reach there destination could have been summed up in 100pgs or less, but it isn't--and why not? Well, the author (who people think is a genius) decides to fill the rest of the book with the pilgrims each telling their stories--each more boring than the rest. The story of the priest was interesting, but unmoving; the story of the military man was stupid space-military drama, and the poets story was a boring yarn. All in all, nothing worth remembering happens because the story is left at a cliffhanger. If i knew this book was going to be a cliffhanger, i would have asked my [money amount] back and gone with buying a more worthy book. I recommend Dune if your looking for a story filled with intrigue and conspiracies.

Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: This is a great book. It's the first of four, and you need to read them all, twice. The story line is involved, complex and very engaging. Simmons had great depth, he makes you care about his characters. He reminds me of Steven King.

Rating:
Summary: Literature. Period. SF. Period.
Review: With 328 reviews thus far that add up to a nearly perfect 5 rating, its obvious that Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" is beloved by many readers. Indeed, the novel seems to bring out the rhapsodical in many reviewers. And if you've read any of these reviews, you know its for good reasons.

"Hyperion" is, to the best of my knowledge, the first SF novel that must be considered a literary masterpiece, which is to say, canonical as literary fiction. In mho, it marks the emergence of contemporary SF as Literature. And because Dan Simmons wrote such a beautiful novel back in 1989, a generation of SF writers has emerged to write a species of fiction unprecedented in the history of literature, a species that thenceforth has redefined the idea of the Novel. That may be overstating the case, but the purity and overpowering poetical sensibility of Simmon's writing cannot be disputed. And in no way to diminish the achievements of Gene Wolfe and Robert Silverberg - the grandfathers of literary SF - but Simmons was the first novelist to deliberately embrace the so-called literary canon and weave it into a profound and beautiful SF tapestry.

"Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion" constitute a single novel often referred to as "The Hyperion Cantos" (after the book club edition title). And taken as a single story, a single novel, it is a breathtaking affirmation of the imaginative storyteller's art and craft. But it is not simply a story well told, it is SF. And that means it is about ideas. "Hyperion" and its sequel are ideas cloaked in literature. They are, in point of fact, novels that provoke wonder (which is exactly what science fiction has always been about).

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Rating:
Summary: Unique but excellent Science Fiction
Review: Hyperion is the first volume in what so far seems to be one of the finest SciFi epics ever written. Despite the fact that I'm an avid SciFi/Fantasy reader I'd never heard of Dan Simmons until reacently. I saw an advertisment for his new book Illiad on a website. It looked interesting so I decided to check him out. I enjoy reading epic series (Wheel of Time, Sword of Truth, etc.) and when I was selecting a book by Simmons to try I saw that he had written a series and decided to read the first book, Hyperion. I'm very glad I saw that advertisement because the end wresult was one of the finest Science Fiction novels I've ever read. It was very different then what I expecte4d and also very different then any other SciFi book I'd ever read. However, for someone who's fed up with cliched stories this was definetlly a postive point
The plot revolves around 7 Pilgrims from seemingly unique backrouds who are selected to go on a Pilgrimage on the planet Hyperion. The galazy is on the brink of complete war and the pilgrim's goal is to find the mysterious Shrike. This first volume is devoted largely to them telling their individual stories. 6 of them share and they discover that their backgrounds are all connected in someway to Hyperion and more specificlly the Shrike. I won't tell which one doesn't share and for what reason.
The novel ends in a cliffhanger leaving the reader eagerly awaiting the second volume. After finishing Hyperion this afternoon I immediatlly went out and bought The Fall of Hyperion. I'm glad to have discovered not only this excellent story but also this excellent writer. I hope that if you haven't yet read Dan Simmons you'll give him a try and read some of the best Science Fiction you've ever read.

Rating:
Summary: The first step of a journey of 1000 books (I wish)
Review: Hyperion is a testament to the joy one experiences upon discovering at random a wonderful new author who has created an exciting and well-written new universe. I'll admit that picking randomly from the list of Hugo award winners increases the odds of this happening, but it doesn't detract from the feeling of "wow". The only reason I'm awarding only four stars is that Hyperion suffers from a dreadfully slow start. If the writing continues this strong in Fall of Hyperion, I expect that the sequel will receive the full five.

On the subject of the sequel, which I have not read yet, it will be almost certainly a continuation, not a true sequel. I won't give out any spoilers the way some reviewers have felt obliged to, but Hyperion is not a stand-alone book. The action is not even close to finished at the end.

Dan Simmons has engaged in universe creation here, like many science fiction novelists, and it is as rich as I've seen. He even pays homage to William Gibson's Neuromancer when borrowing his imagery (don't worry, Hyperion is better). And like real life, filling in one gap in knowledge opens up two more. The story is basically one of a group of pilgrims travelling to the highly mysterious world of Hyperion before the start of what promises to be a terrible war. Each one successively tells the story of why they were picked to make the trip. What events from their pasts brought them to this particular world? These stories make up perhaps two thirds of the novel, and were to me the more interesting parts. Better than many authors, Simmons actually makes them sound like many different people with drastically different backgrounds and styles of speech. As we progress through, it becomes clear that at least some are related to the greater events alluded to outside. Perhaps more connections will be clear in the sequel. I certainly look forward to finding out.

Rating:
Summary: Original and unique...not everyone's cup of tea
Review: STORY: On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.

MY FEEDBACK:
1) SETTING: The story is really seven short stories strung together. In the telling of each character's background drama the setting of the universe is revealed. The universe Simmons creates here is rich, detailed and complex. Very well thought out and delivered

2) CHARACTERS: The problem with many books is they don't spend enough time on the characters to flush them out and have you really know then. That is the opposite here because 90% of the book is comprised of a short-story describing how each character came to be where they are presently in the story. Thus, a lot of time is given to characterization through creative short-stories and lends itself to having ample time and pages to describe each character.

3)PLOT: Here is where I'm not very happy with the book...
a) You MUST read the next book to find out what happens because very little is resolved other than letting the reader get to know the characters and experience their very short journey together.
b) Even though each of the character background stories were unique, I was bored. The book is 90% flashback as the characters tell their background stories, thus very little plot moves the story forward in the present.
c) Even when the "spy" is revealed there seems to be very little if no consequence for our pilgrams. Yes, it makes sense why the characters react the way they do, but I was left unsatisified as if a grave injustice had occured.
d) Yes, there is some R-rated/Soft-X content here that isn't for everyone. I agree with a few other reviewers who also didn't feel it was necessary in most cases.

OVERALL: If I wanted to read a collection of short-stories I'd pick up Thieves World or Bolo. I had certain expectations going into the book, of which were not satisfied. Thus, my dislike for this story could just have been my preconceived notions of what the book was "supposed" to be about.
As mentioned this book isn't everyone's cup of tea but it has some really well crafted components (which is why I gave a book I didn't like a full 3 starts) that have obviously won many over(based on the number of 5 star reviews).
I'll probably have to read every single review on the Fall of Hyperion to see if I'm swayed away from cutting my loses and not worrying if I find out how things resolve.

Rating:
Summary: Some people need to read some classics, it seems...
Review: I'm not going to claim here that Hyperion is a great work just because Simmons used an old literary trope during the creation of this book. Just because he modeled his book after the frame narrative style of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book is not transported magically to the realm of High Art (if there is such a place beyond the pomposity of so-called artists). Maybe he was trying to inject a bit of literary style into the SF genre in some way. Who knows what his intentions. The point is, I read on this site a recent two-star review where the reviewer makes the fact that 'the story as a whole is really a compilation of six ... short stories loosely tied together by an additional 100 pages of story set in the "present"' seem like a terrible thing.
Hey, maybe he was writing an homage to Chaucer's tale (which by the way is heavily riddled with bawdy sex, which the reviewer also seemed to disagree with). I guess my ultimate point is, hey, read some classics for once, people, so things like this won't slip by you and you don't embarrass yourselves. Oh, and about the book in general: IT'S GREAT! Read it. Thanks for your time.