This is the sequel to Hyperion, but unfortunately I didn’t find that it could live up to the majesty of its predecessor. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, it’s just that I can’t rave about it frothing at the mouth like I did for Hyperion.

The tale continues with the travelers but also we have a story in parallel about what is going on with the greater universe. We meet two of my favorite characters in this series. Meina Gladstone is the CEO of the Hegemony and a complex and fascinating character; there are some shocking revelations about her as the story goes on and in many respects I look up to her for her foresight, but it’s also not all good. She is a political leader worth studying.

Then there’s Joseph Severn, who is another cybrid of Keats (the character Johnny, from the first book, was also a cybrid of his). But Joseph Severn has dreams, dreams of the group of pilgrims on Hyperion that are actually reality. This turns out to be of major import to the plot, as CEO Gladstone is able to receive remote information on the happenings on Hyperion through him.

As expected, there are developments on the planet of Hyperion. Sol Weintraub’s daughter, Rachel, continues to age downward towards age zero, and that tension gets palpable by the end. We also learn more about the Shrike and about the identity of Monica, the mysterious woman from Colonel Kassad’s story. Likewise, the characters continue to die one by one in appalling ways.

And that story does have some rather satisfactory loose ends tied up by the end. It takes a while to get there, though, and there’s a lot of brooding and wondering about when the Shrike is going to turn up, and not being able to do anything about it but just worry about it. There’s lots of wandering around in storms and the group keeps getting separated. I found this story to sag in the middle but grow compelling towards the end.

Although even at the end, it never quite felt like absolutely everything was explained, such as the true nature of the Shrike.

But while that story is going, there’s a second story going on with CEO Gladstone, Joseph Severn, and the unfolding war with the Ousters. That story actually has quite the enjoyable, epic arc. It starts with utmost confidence in the war and ends in disaster of Biblical, epic scale.

And it turns out that that whole bit about the AI TechnoCore doing some weird stuff with a copy of Earth? And trying to invent the Ultimate Intelligence? That turns out to be pretty relevant. So I was glad to see that a lot of those things weren’t wasted. There was a point to some of those earlier stories with the original Hyperion book.

I felt like, once these two books are taken together, there definitely is an epic scope, there is a lot about it that is satisfying, but somehow the second book just didn’t feel as neatly wrapped up as the first. Still glad I read it, but I guess it’s hard to compare to the first book when it’s such a masterpiece.