Hyperion is a book I've been meaning to read for years-- as I've made a more concentrated attempt to read celebrated works within sci-fi and fantasy over the past couple years, I've finally decided to do so.

In short, I liked it. It's excellently paced, thanks to the Canterbury Tales-esque format, allowing the individual stories of each character to keep things fresh within the narrative as well as bring nuance to all the main members of the cast. It also manages to balance elements of science fiction, fantasy, action and horror quite effectively. It's a creative world, built in a way that doesn't go overboard with detail. By repetitively using unfamiliar terminology, the world feels unique and alien, but allows the reader to become used to said terminology through their own observation rather than through a glossary. Sol Weintraub and Martin Silennus's stories were particularly compelling.

I do have some complaints however-- While the 'tales' format works really well, it leaves the forward-momentum of the main plotline to stagnate a bit, and I do think that it was a rather cheap tactic to end the book on such a massive cliffhanger. By concluding it at the precise moment that the whole plot is building toward... it left me kind of frustrated--whether it was written at the same time as its sequel, almost like a singular work, I don't know, but it's still frustrating. As an aside, outside of the character Brawne Lamia, the manner in which most women characters were described got a bit distracting, as the text would often hyper-focus on their superficial physical attributes more than anything, and not in a way that highlighted/criticized the pitfalls of male-oriented narration.

So, again, I did like it quite a bit, and definitely enough to read its sequel. But, I'll be honest in that while I get the general praise, I'm not quite sure why it's among the absolute most celebrated works in the genre.