My thoughts
Finished
I enjoyed The fall of Hyperion a lot more than the first book in the series but it's still not living up to the hype for me unfortunately. I love when Sci-fi authors go into depth on how future systems work both technically and in society. The societal and interpersonal implications of the "Hyperion" universe on it's inhabitants is well covered so far in this series. Unfortunately, the books seem to leave a lot of the crunchy technical explanations out. I still enjoyed the book, but I think one of the reasons it's not hitting quite as hard as I'd like it to is the lack of "hard" science fiction goodies. The other piece that's been irking me about this series is the seemingly ever-present misogyny. Nine out of ten times, if the author is writing about a women, they're somehow minimized, sexualized, compared to a man, or put into the context of their male partner. Early on, I thought this was an intentional flaw in some the character's and gave it a pass. It's presence in this book seemed more trite. Obviously you can't hold a book from the 80s to today's standards. That said, I've read a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov from the same time period or older; I didn't notice this in any of their books. It was present enough here that it left a bad taste in my mouth.