[…] posting a full article on each of them. So I’m going to roll them into a single post like I did once before. I’m posting these book reviews here for several […]

[…] David Brinn’s Uplift Saga saying it was just as good, if not better. That worried me because I didn’t like the Uplift saga. It seemed silly, infantile and too schematic. Reality Disfunction – Emergence (The Warner Books […]

I enjoyed the first Hyperion book enormously, both as independent narrative and as a comment on the different SF subgenres tackled, but the second book failed for me in the same way the Brin book did. I groaned at the last-minute hand-waving use of the old join-forces-with-enemy-against-third/common-foe trope, which was trite already by the time Zelazny used it as afterthought in his Lord of Light and Amber novels. It has been a long time since I read the book, but my lingering impression is one of disappointed expectations, of hinted subtlety and complexity reduced to simplistic pulp cliches.

@ copperfish: I suffered through the whole Startide Rising, hoping that at some point it will introduce some worthwhile thoughts and ideas but it didn’t. It was a waste.

@ Mackattack: I agree on the guardian thing – it rubbed me the wrong way too.

I was also bit dissapointed with the Ousters but then again, I quickly got back into it. I guess the problem is that Simmons didn’t really spend that much time exploring their society, customs and technology.

The body mods were superficial – yes, but I took that as a hint of diversity rather than decadence. I sort of imagine that each of these breeds lived in habitats designed to support the specific kind of body type – that the mods were functional rather than purely aesthetic. We just saw them out of their home environments when they came out to check out the visitors from Hegemony, and during the meetings.

But yeah – it’s hard to say how exactly was their way of life “better” than ours. I guess they had the rapid development thing, and supreme adaptability down to perfection while the rest of humanity was getting stagnant with their technology and over reliant on the techno-core. Ousters chose to break away from the world controlled by artificial intelligences and fend on their ow, for better or for worse.

But yeah… I had similar reaction to the fantasy, faerie people thing at first.

I can’t decide which is the better book between Hyperion and it’s sequel, though I found Fall of hyperion to have a lot more memorable content. Some of it completely passed me by (The templars and treeships rah rah rah, totally lacking in depth and almost a carbon copy of “The Saga of Seven Suns” treeship things) but other lines totally blew me away – The AI technocore protagonist especially:

Once Ummon asked a lesser light \\
Are you a gardener? \\
// Yes \\ It replied //
// Why have turnips no roots> \\
Ummon asked the gardener \
Who could not reply \\
// Because \\ said Ummon //
Rainwater is plentiful]

The metaphor of turning the AI’s thoughts like “spinning hindu prayer wheels” was astounding in scale – However this relevation was totally out of the blue, the setting of everyone wearing mentally implanted com-chips was barely, if at all mentioned in the first book, and glossed over and mentioned as sidenotes in the second.

Other things like the Ousters being a mish-mash of animal traits and what have you shattered my sense of disbelief. I went from having my head spun by the idea of zero-g architecture and ecospheres to balking and shouting “oh COME ON.” at the Ousters who had butterly wings/covered in fur/ etc etc. It struck me as being hugely trite, drawing inspiration from 3D avatar programs where these kinds of things were available. For all his condemnations of the “tawdry” oldschool human culture sustained by the Worldweb, his Ousters don’t actaully offer much alternative. The body modifications the ousters exhibit are childish and trivial, and don’t have a patch on current in-testing things in the REAL world of body modification, like magnetic implants and digital tattoos, or Neal Stephensons Diamond Age modifications like nanotech entire body tattoos, or even the world of Bioshock. He condemns dogma for and tradition for its hollowness and then fails to provide anything other than adolescent immaturity in return in the Ousters homeships.

Monica being some kind of “Guardian”, were a let down, and quite contrived.

Despite these flaws, I still thoroughly enjoyed The Good Bits, which were thick enough to sustain the inconsistencies and trite ideas where Simmons was clearly reaching and grasping for original “Filler” content that evaded him outside of the headspinningly bold AI protogonist.

Thanks for the Flowers for Algernon mini-review. I’ll give the book a read.

I agree with you regarding Dan Simmons. And he doesn’t only write science fiction. There are also his horror novels like “Carrion Comfort” and “Song of Kali” and his historical novels like “The Terror” and “Drood”. I’m a huge fan.

Startide Rising. I tried it twice because the Uplift books are a popular series. I couldn’t. It felt like I was reading a poorly written children’s adventure.