The Fall of Hyperion

Six pilgrims reached the Time Tombs at the end of the previous book and the book stopped. This one opens with a man dreaming them from a great distance while a war starts around him.

Hyperion made promises and this volume settles them. Six tales, six genres, six mysteries left standing at the door of a tomb, and a sequel obliged to convert all of it into one plot. Conversion is the entire job here, and it is a different skill from the one that made the first book extraordinary.

Simmons had to choose between two virtues and he took the harder one. He could have left the Shrike unexplained and kept the charge that mystery carries, or he could answer and risk the answers coming out smaller than the questions. He answers. Most of the answers hold.

Appetite for answers settles this one. A reader who wants the tombs opened and the Shrike accounted for finds a book delivering on an almost unreasonable scale. A reader who suspected that some of the earlier power came from not knowing was correct, and this volume cannot hand that back.

The Severn device solves one problem and manufactures another. Simmons needs to cover a pilgrimage, an interstellar war and a political crisis at once, so he invents an observer who dreams the other threads and reports them to the government. Coverage solved. The observer cannot act, though, so his chapters are reportage, and the reader spends real time with a protagonist whose function is to watch. The frame sits furthest from the pilgrims exactly where the pilgrim material is strongest.

Meina Gladstone is the spine of the book and its strongest addition. A head of government running a war she suspects she was manoeuvred into, deciding on partial information under time pressure, and Simmons writes the texture of executive power better than he had any obligation to.

The Keats material is the strangest element in the sequence and Simmons commits to it without flinching. A dead poet's mind reconstructed, an unfinished poem load-bearing on the plot, the whole cycle named after it. That should be unbearable. It is not, because he declines to treat it as decoration.

Sol and Rachel are where the emotional weight sits. A father carrying a problem that cannot be solved by being clever, inside a book otherwise built entirely out of clever solutions, and Simmons keeps returning to him at the moments the machinery gets loudest. That thread does what the war material cannot.

War writing is the volume's weakest register. Fleet actions described from briefing rooms, casualty figures standing in for consequence, and an enemy kept abstract for long stretches for reasons the plot requires. The politics are excellent. The battles are furniture.

Structure is the honest complaint about the pair of them. Hyperion could be six things because a frame tale permits it. This has to be one thing, and one thing is less interesting than six, so the sequel comes out more accomplished and less astonishing than the book it completes.

Answering is a different craft from asking, and it is the rarer skill in this genre. Simmons is among the few who attempted both in consecutive volumes and got a defensible result twice, which is worth saying plainly, because the usual outcome is a second book that refuses to answer and calls the refusal artistry.

The tombs were built to open. What comes out of them is the argument.