Hyperion

I enjoyed most of Hyperion, it's a weird mishmash of different bits and pieces. I guess the intention is that the different stories are contributing to some sort of overarching narrative, but I didn't get much of a sense of that. But the individual stories are mostly interesting. There are two that I didn't particularly like though. The first was the benjamin button/fifty first dates story, which I guess is supposed to be sot of tragic, but just comes off as a bit goofy.

The other story I didn't like was the last one. Just everything about it is either creepy or stupid. So this late teen/early twenties guy meets a sixteen year old, they spend a few days or weeks together, and then the guy disappears for like ten years. Because of time dilation he come back still a young man to find that the girl, Siri, is now in her mid twenties. So ten years have passed, but Siri, who met this guy like a decade ago for a handful of days, is still in love with him? And then this pattern repeats throughout her life. This just struck me as so stupid, so implausible that it completely took me out of the story. It's also very much told from the perspective of the guy, and the reaction we're supposed to have is "oh weird, this woman is aging way faster than the character we're supposed to identify with". But I couldn't help thinking about things from Siri's perspective. She falls in love with this guy she meets for a couple weeks when she's sixteen, and then he fucks off for a decade and what? She just... Pines away for this dude? And is happy to let him back into her life when he shows up ten years later, over and over again? It just doesn't make sense.

So, Hyperion is an uneven book, with some high points and some low points. It feels more like a collection of short stories than a real novel, and the overarching narrative doesn't really resolve itself at all. I know there's a sequel, but come on, I just read 500 pages of this, I deserve some kind of closure. I don't really understand why this is seen as a classic.