It seems that I'm the only person in the world who has read Hyperion and not loved it. I found the independent stories mostly unbelievable and stupid - let's take Rachel's story, for example; isn't it classic scifi in the negative sense of the term? A simple idea, looks brilliant on paper but turns out to be impossible to do well enough? The same can be said of the whole epic. Simmons just rushed head over heels into something he couldn't handle. And the basic plot drags on without awaking a spark of interest in me. I'm just glad it stopped before the climax; now I only have to avoid the rest of the series so that I'll never have to know what sorry idiocies our beloved author made up for the ending.