Title: A serious letdown
Review: Simmons is a very good writer and the writing in this book is fairly good, but it definitely seems a step down from the Hyperion books. It could have used some more editing. It just seemed sloppy.The writing style, however, is the best part of the book. The characters seem rather flat and the plot is contrived. I would almost guess the Mr.Simmons was making it up as he went along. There's a lot of Deus-ex-Machina save-us-in-the-nick-of-time stuff, without a lot of explanation. This is the stuff of bad action movies. There is even a 'super-shrike' now that the shrike is apparently a good guy(kind of like the Terminator movies). I loved Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion is one of my favorite s-f books, but this was so bad I didn't even read the next one. Sorry.
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