Date Posted:14:59:02 01/22/04 Thu Author: theButterfly Subject: Hyperion In reply to:
AntiPaul
's message, "One of my favorites" on 07:37:04 01/22/04 Thu
Based on vision, creativity and elegance of writing style, Dan Simmons really does approach even the Master. There's just one problem: he's boring.
HYPERION was a over 400 pages long and should have been at most 150--certainly not more than 200. The mainline story was very well written, but the intermittent short stories just went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I would just start counting pages until each would be over: 50 pages left (ugh) ... 45 ... 40 ... 35 ... 30 ... 25 ... only 20 pages left before I get back to the interesting stuff! In all, each had perhaps five pages of relevant story material and a whole lot of fluff. It's not like you can just skip them; that's where the story is.
So now I suppose I have mixed feelings about reading THE FALL OF HYPERION. I have to see what happens next, but I'm worried there'll be a similar ratio of filler to story.
