A novel speaks a thousand pictures.
There is this patently false but widely accepted notion that visual media have a higher bandwidth than textual ones for inter-human-mind communication. It is patently false, because all it takes is to read a novel to experience a lifetime that a movie cannot transmit. In a few dozen pages, a great writer can make you have an experience that feels scarily real, yet is fiction.
Words are also clumsy swords in the hands of the amateurs, as I'm painfully illustrating here with my trot. So rather than try to attempt to convince you, the reader, that the eternity of a textually conveyed experience is of a different and more expansive nature than that of movies, I'll just let the point drop abruptly, as Hyperion ended. Abruptly.
I had an inkling this would happen, because if there is one flaw in the medium, it is the fact that I hold the book in my hands and as I reach the end, it is manifest that the pages are running out, and so must the life I'm living.
But nothing in the brilliance of Mr. Simmons prepared me for the letdown the ending was. I'm not unhappy, or mad, I was chuckling to myself as I could picture myself in the author's shoes, just done with it, just wanting to end it. I've quit on short notices many a times in my life, and this felt like the author just deciding one day that the project they'd undertaken required more creativity than they had remaining in them.
I don't care though. I am so thankful to the author, that he published the book, and allowed me the few days of sleepless nights reading on page after page, way past the time I'd go to sleep, groggily waking and going through the next day, yet start salivating at evening at the prospect of jacking back again in the universe they'd sketched.
If anything, my problem was not with the ending, but that the book ended. I wanted more, but as I said, perhaps the author's creativity ran out, as it totally expected. To tell tales of such grip, they must've exhausted the reservoir they must've built in their lifetime preceding (and I imagine that the success of the book wouldn't let it ever replenish again).
“Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated,
the energies displayed in it are fine.”