YMMV / Hyperion Cantos

• Badass Decay: The limits of the Shrike's power are explored in the second duology, where it faces creatures nearly as powerful as itself.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The series is littered with literary references, from overt to subtle.
  • The colour of the sky in Hyperion is frequently described as "lapis lazuli." The specific shade of sky blue on Earth is commonly called "azure," which derives from the Latin word for the lapis lazuli mineral.
  • Martin Silenus spent some time with his body remade to look like a Satyr. Silenus was the name of a Satyr who was a companion of the Greek god Dionysus.
  • Father Duré had problems at the beginning of his story due to the discovery that he faked the results of an archaeological expedition. The books often compare him to and reference Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, along with other things, was among the people who found the Piltdown Man, and caught a lot of flak once it was exposed as fake (not that he was the chief suspect, it's just that all the other serious suspects were dead by then).
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The first book has quite a tender moment between all of the characters near the end. Each of them resolving to face the Shrike together while singing "We're off to see the Wizard [of Oz]" with laughter on their faces.
  • In the second book, the ending is even more heartwarming. And more than a little bit of a tear jerker.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Since Moneta is revealed to be future Rachel, this means that Kassad was telling Sol about all the times he had throes-of-passion Interplayer Of Sex And Violence type sex with Sol's daughter in his tale.
• Sequelitis: The 3 other books in the Hyperion Cantos - Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion - are divisive. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say the second pair is divisive - the series is really two two-part stories, with the first dealing with a mystery and a large and diverse cast in a world somewhere between cyberpunk and post-scarcity, and the second dealing with the fairly direct exposition of all the mysteries, a much smaller cast with a single central character, an obsessive focus on a romance (you'll never read the words 'My love' so often) and a setting most readers will probably find regressive from that from the first two novels, albeit with some interesting nightmarish technologies of its own. The two pairs are so different that it's unlikely any given reader will like both equally.
• Tear Jerker: Sol Weintraub's story, definitely.
  • Merin's conversation with the dolphins.
    Dolphin: Miss Shark/Miss Shark/Miss Shark/Miss Shark/Shark/Shark/Shark (It's "miss" as in "yearning/pining for", not "madame".)
  • Martin on the Shrikes Tree with Sad King Billy.
    "My Lord, I'm sorry."
  • Kassad's Dying Moment of Awesome in battle with the Shrike.
  • Aenea's death as well.
  • The last 50 pages of The Rise of Endymion count too, but then the tears are mainly tears of happiness.

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