J.L. Sutton's Reviews > The Fall of Hyperion

“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”



A fascinating continuation of the powerful first installment, Dan Simmons' The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #2) follows the characters we met in the first book as well as several others, but with a different perspective of the galaxy-wide ramifications of this fateful pilgrimage.

The stories behind those ramifications take a different structure than the pilgrim's story used in the first book. I thought that structure had worked perfectly. Instead, the story bounces back and forth between the Hegemony government and our characters with much of the weight of the storytelling falling on a nearly omniscient narrator/character. This was probably necessary to tell the bigger story and provide closure to all the unanswered questions from the first novel, but it was a bit jarring, especially in the early going. Still, The Fall of Hyperion is an epic novel that addresses how our humanity can evolve even as it faces serious peril. 4.25 stars