Loved H and FoH...

In Endymion he writes "I admit..." twenty nine times. And, another seventeen times in Rise of Endymion...

I admit... I admit.... I admit.... Where the hell was the editor!? I admit... as if the narrator was not going to tell the truth.

I admit... I would recommend Hyperion, and if someone liked it FoH. But, I don't think I would recommend Endymion and Fall of unless someone really chose to do it on their own.

The meandering (rafting pun aside), and the extreme waffling of describing completely unimportant things in painful detail that borders on Unimportant Lore Porn....

I admit... It was the *"I admit"*s that got me over and over.

Alright, so I just finished Hyperion and Fall. It's strongly suggested (and from what I can discern, true), that the people who were impaled on the Tree of Pain were sent to join Leigh on Old Earth. "ROME / COLOSSEUM / REPOPULATE." Right?

OK, so... tens of thousands of people... who have endured at minimum weeks and at most centuries (millenia?) of constant waking torture... are meant to rebuild society on Old Earth? I haven't read the other two books, but is that not absolutely insane? I feel like Old Earth would be an absolute PTSD nightmare.

Thoughts?

I've seen a lot of posts and chat that E and RoE retcon Hyperion and FoH.

I've just listened to the whole series for the 4th or 5th time (it really is a great listen on Audible, Victor Bevine is a wonderful Narrator) and the first relisten since i was aware accusations of retconning.

Let's tackle some of the bigger ones.

Paul has 2 cruciforms

In FoH, when Gladstone goes to check on Dure in the hospital, the doctor mentions ".....the cruciform parisites...." on his body. Why or how Dan changed his mind between H and FoH and / or whether the shrike removing the cruciform was a dream or not real i don't know, but it is not a retcon from E.

Technocore now has billions of factions

Countless times in E and RoE people refer to "the 3 elements" of the core, Albedo mentions them to Nemes, Nemes mentions them etc. The 3 elements are still a thing, but what we have access to now in E and RoE that we did not have previously, is Aenea's point of view, she knows so much more than any narrator we had.

Also, it would be crazy to think a species as complex and parasitic as the technocore would fit nicely in to 3 elements. I see it as religions for humans, yes there are the big ones, Christianity, Muslim etc but you also have hundreds of smaller ones.

Aenea throws shade on the Martins's Cantos

Yeah she mocks her uncle, says he couldn't possible have known exactly what happened, "How can Uncle Martin know how the river Tethys broke up, he wasn't there....." and yes a lot of what he wrote probably was made up or exaggerated, but we know he got the major parts right as he was there, the pilgrimage, Brawne being Aeneas mum etc, this is all the same, nothing has been retconned.

We are not reading Martin's Cantos in H or FoH, you can tell this by seeing we aren't reading a poem.

What about Ummon lying and what about the machine AI?

Ummon is not an omniscient narrator. He admits himself he is scared for his life, speaking in riddles, pursuing his own agenda, and operating amid competing AI factions and temporal paradoxes. Therefore contradictions between Ummon's claims and later revelations do not require a retcon; they can be explained as deception, incomplete disclosure, limited knowledge, or changes in information caused by non-linear time

As for the machine AI, Ummon talks of 10,000 possible futures, once Hyperion is taken by the "goodies" in FoH, i would argue this slims down the 10,000 possible futures to a lot less and ones where the machine AI is either non existent or severely weakened.
Albedo mentions in RoE the "the machine UI has stopped whispering back to us from the future"

How is Kassad still alive?

It's shown in RoH that Kassad time travels, it's also shown that Rachel / Moneta has spent a lot of time with him and is in love with him. So this needs to happen, and probably best happen while he is still alive. So yes, he is going to be around in the future.

The series is also built around time travel and causal paradoxes, so the idea of the future influencing or even altering the past is already firmly established within the story's own rules.

Also, like all good books, there is enough vagueness that you can come up with your own head-cannon to complete the story and you don't need it to be retconning.

If saying E and RoE retcons hyperion as a form of copium then that's fine and i can't help you.

The first time i did the whole series, i was pretty horrified by E and RoE. I could not believe how much of a drop off in quality there was from H and FoH. The padding and waffling is another level. But now i have done the whole series multiple times, i have grown to love the full story and the ending. I guess Dan wanted the sequels to be a duology like Hyperion, but it appears he only had enough story for 1 book. you could cut 50% from E and 50% from RoE and make one really zippy and exciting book that would tie things up brilliantly.

That would mean cutting some of the highlights like Raul has a lie down, Raul erects a tent, Raul builds a raft, Raul has a swim, Raul has another lie down etc etc.

Today I read that the patron saint of the day, St. Roch, had a red cross-shaped birthmark on his chest. It was regarded as a mark of heavenly favor.

The thought of suffering eternally is unimaginable. What would it do to the mind? How would an individual react if they were pulled out of it after thousands of years from their perspective? It's been weeks but i cant stop thinking about it.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about the series and finally got around to reading it. About halfway through the book right now and enjoying it very much. The pilgrims telling their separate vignettes in sequence, linked by the actual pilgrimage to the Time Tombs is such a fascinating format. please no spoilers, but would like to hear input up to the fourth vignette - the academic

Let me start by saying I love the first two books,

I’m quickly approaching the end of The Fall of Hyperion in want to know if following that is a good time to take a break from the series to prevent burnout or if I should dive right into Endymion?

From everything I’ve seen, the overall style or tone seems to shift in the third and fourth book, so I’m wondering if I should use this as an opportunity to finish another series, or if it’s better to go right through three and four.

Thoughts?

Ive seen a fair few posts about whether to read the fall of hyperion, and overwhelmingly everyone here considers the fall to be the completion/other half and as such, mandatory reading. But i wanted to ask more from the perspective i gained from re-reading adam roberts' introduction at the start of the Hyperion book.

Everything he talks about with how this book relates to keats' writing (and specifically the titular poems) focuses on how well the storytelling structure and descriptions of the shrike, echo the unfinished nature of keats' works and make the shrike a truly enigmatic and unknowable figure. I felt like the shrike was almost an eldritch being on my read-through, with how well the feelings around it were described without describing it itself too much. Im just wondering (as i know the feeling of being unable to unread a book too well) if finding the answers to how the story ends and what the shrike is, is worth losing the feeling that encompases me when i think back and re-read hyperion?

It seems there is a historical trend of ever-expanding world building over the last say 100 years or so. The world's imagined seem to expand (or contract, see 80s below) at a non linear rate through real time decades of writing. So which authors continue this trend?

1950s Foundation

1960s Dune

70s (gulp) Star Wars (please help here too!)

80s Neuromancer /Hyperion

90s ...

00s ...

10s ...

20s (now)

Will it be hard to keep up and understand the audiobooks?
I will be reading all 4 books

!!!!! Minor spoilers thru the middle-end ("climax"?) of Book 2 !!!!!!

Omg so I overall thought book 1 was great. Some of the stories got really boring but probably 75% of them were actually really great. Like Martin Silas's chapter, was sooo boring the middle but it still had a good ending. And then the stories with the 4 score and 1 and Fedman banging the shrike lmao that shit was 10/10. The professor dude's daughter getting Benjamin Button disease literally brought tears to my eyes. I gave the 1st book a 5/5

I also thought the Shrike was literally probably the most badass villain/anti-hero I've ever met and literally started looking up tattoo designed to get him added to my back piece and started compiling excerpts describing what exactly he looks like. And probably put him in front of a lapis lazuli sky 😉

But man I've now gone through maybe 75% of Book 2 and broooooo like wtf has happened. I thought I would LIKE that the flashback sequences were done and we could focus on actual story but nooooo. I hate to say it but 800 pages into this story and I somehow barely care about the end when I feel like this should be the climax of a story.

I'll probably push through but mannnnnnn it's become such a struggle 😭 I actually like the Meina Gladstone parts but when it goes to Joseph Severn it's like wtffffff ughhhhhhh. Like WHY should I care about this fucking robot dude.

Why has the Shrike become a side/background character when he was literally THE intrigue of the first book?????? Instead we get NEW completely uninteresting characters that drone onnnnn and onnnnn omg. Who the fuck is Theo and why is he all of a sudden so important omg

Tldr all of book 1 I would read an hour a day or more every chance I got and literally started to research every description of the Shrike I could find in the text to immortalize him on my body. Book 2 whole starting "okay" has been a gradual decline into boredom and now I haven't picked it up in 2 days despite being mere hours from the end.

My book will arrive in some days, it will be my first time reading this kinda of book, I bought Hyperion,if I enjoy I'll buy the others, can you guys leave tips about what is "waiting for me" or something that I must pay attention?