If you’re looking for editorial comments, I’d say that there are a few points where you lapse into confusing SF/science jargon: “emergent” computers, “causality violations,” and some others. Frankly, I was never all that clear about what Stross was talking about with causality violations, light cones, etc. I’ve read that FTL travel violates causality, but why that’s so is beyond me.

I see. Its that i never read past the first Hyperion, and was perfectly happy with the no-ending ending. The heroes go on their merry way, hand in hand into whassisname-Oz cave-or-something.

Author tells us, more or less “see? it’s about the tales, the books, litterature and all that”, disappears with a flash and a bang. Good fun.

I don’t get why Simmons explains it all in the sequel? Why, oh why? Maybe i didn’t get the first books after all : were the sequels decided from the beggining?

I see some bad books are mentionned above. So i feel compelled to mention Ender’s Game, who should be added to every list of bad books ever conceived.

By the way, if we are having a contest for greatest disappointment in a final series book, Absolution Gap has to be in the running.

An element, but only just. The popular ballot (which far too few WFC members bother with anyway) establishes two of the five “finalists.” The other finalists are established by the judging panel, which also selects the winner.

On a different subject, I do want to marvel at the people who appear to have found Susanna Clarke’s novel dry, humorless, devoid of wit, etc. Clearly, humor is a quirky and subjective thing, as we knew already.

Also: Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle is as good as everyone says it is. You can order it (and read four chapters from it) via this page.

The Hyperion series started out a lot more literary, and again I liked the first couple books quite a lot, but the last two…I think there was something about some entity controlling the teleportals in a manner that just happened to exactly match the needs of a writer narrating the events of that universe. Instead of being driven by the internal logic of the world, an inititally hidden powerful being is posited that happens to want things exactly such that a nice plot is constructed. This is the downfall of many a series, including great ones like the Neuromancer trilogy.

But the difficulty of sustaining an SF series is another topic, I guess, though these last couple years much of Hugo-type SF has seemed like the latter books in a waning series… I think Hyperion was my all-time best abandonment though: I read the first two avidly, the third with increasing trepidation, and the last, some 2000 pages into the series, I abandoned about 150 pages from the end when I couldn’t take the absolute failure to resolve the plot according to anything like a internal narrative logic. Deus ex machina is a pitfall of any SF machina that’s too Deusy—as much SF is today.

(slinks away, muttering)

Butbutbut… Isn’t Hyperion something about something else entirely? It’s about books or about litterature or something, no?

Stross’s books seem like a watered down Banks, a more overtly politicized version like MacLeod’s (excellent) novels, but without the imagination or sense of humor. Singularity Sky is the only one I’ve read a significant portion of, but apart from the wooden characters (which writers of neo-Space Operas seem to deliberately indulge in), the Special Relativity 101 details and the master intelligences working to preserve causality seemed just as forced here as it did in Simmons’ Hyperion novels and whenever else a god-like intelligence is posited to patch up a scientifically impossible scenario. This is a pitfall common of singularity stories, and why the sub-genre has rapidly become so conventionalized and un-novel.

Clarke’s book was like a Potter for adults—young adults. Like Potter, the magic had very little imagination or sense of wonder. Next to folks like John Crowley or Philip Pullman, it felt like very weak stuff, and dragged on for ages with little real wit or character to pull you along.

The Banks novel I excitedly picked up when I was last in London, only to very disappointedly conk out on it in midflight back home, having had enough of the supposedly droll gigantic blimp people. Banks: just because it’s big and old, doesn’t make it funny or awesome. The anthropological moments were so tiresome and long I just couldn’t make it back to the real plot, and again, no real character development. The bad guy was like someone out of the old Star Trek (which I’ve always thought Banks’ Culture novels were a clever rewriting of, until this one).

Miéville’s books—I haven’t read the new one yet—have at least pulled me through. The language is great, and the characters seem a bit more real. That said, The Scar was a big step down from Perdido Street Station; the floating city felt very reminiscent of other floating cities (such as the one in Snow Crash), and he too falls afoul of the big-is-cool trap at times. And the last half of the book was obviously written in haste: count the appearances of “aghast” and “his eyes widened,” or note the mistaken reappearance of a second hand on a key character. But that said, at least Miéville’s books have enough imagination, literary craft, and character development per page to keep me going. The same can’t be said for the rest of them.

Oh, and Perfect Circle is wonderful.