Matt B Gets Lit reviewed Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos, #1)
Review of 'Hyperion' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I am so glad to finally be done with this book. It took me about a year and a half to complete it: I got frustrated about a third of the way in and had to put it down for a while. Then I would read sections of it in between other books I was reading.
The book was sold to me as "Canterbury Tales in Space," literally. It was a mystery book, wrapped in paper at a bookstore, and that phrase was written on the outside. Sci-fi isn't my usual genre, but I took a chance, thinking, "I like Canterbury Tales, and maybe this is a discounted price because the title is a secret." Spoiler alert: it was not a discounted price.
Yes, this is a book about a group of travelers, each telling their tale while on the pilgrimage. But that's where the comparison ends. The Canterbury Tales …
I am so glad to finally be done with this book. It took me about a year and a half to complete it: I got frustrated about a third of the way in and had to put it down for a while. Then I would read sections of it in between other books I was reading.
The book was sold to me as "Canterbury Tales in Space," literally. It was a mystery book, wrapped in paper at a bookstore, and that phrase was written on the outside. Sci-fi isn't my usual genre, but I took a chance, thinking, "I like Canterbury Tales, and maybe this is a discounted price because the title is a secret." Spoiler alert: it was not a discounted price.
Yes, this is a book about a group of travelers, each telling their tale while on the pilgrimage. But that's where the comparison ends. The Canterbury Tales are told in multiple formats and voices: some prose, some poetry, some bawdy, some sacred. This author can't seem to get out of his own writing voice.
Don't get me wrong. It is a super talented writing style. The attention to detail is unsurpassed. In fact, that's where my frustration came into play. I felt there was often too much detail. There were described minutia that seemed only important to the specific paragraph they were enclosed in. Will I need to know 100 pages from now why a certain planet has specific life forms, or why a weapon I've never heard of works the way that it does?
And then the diaries within diaries! There may have been six or seven story tellers, but I read the lengthy, detailed background of at least ten or eleven people. With so much going on (and admittedly, possibly due to my jagged reading), I had forgotten some of the first characters' anecdotes by the time I got to the end.
I can understand why some people would appreciate that exhaustive focus, down to the nitty-gritty, but I found myself drowning in details. Getting through the book started to feel like trudging through literary molasses.
The character Martin Silenus said it best, "Am I the only one who can tell a straightforward story in this f**king herd?"
