I haven't left bed yet

But I did finish the Fall of Endymion. I guess I will get my annoyances with these books out of the way first.

1. Raft and kayak travel is too fast in this series. A canoe or kayak is rarely faster than walking speed plus current speed, while a raft is locked to the speed of the current; a river like the Mississippi rarely exceeds three miles per hour. Still, they sometimes travel more than 100 miles in a day. I wonder if Simmons is conflating experience from a short canoe trip with a long motorboat trip. I did enjoy these elements but I felt they were too short.
2. Way too much retconning. Simmons denies most of the major revelations of the Hyperion books, and the Rise of Endymion even ignores things in Endymion. There is a very humorous scene at the beginning of Endymion where one character makes a list of ludicrous demands of the hero, in such a way that you know these things are meant to be accomplished by the end of the series. However, at least one of these demands is never accomplished, nor mentioned again by either character, although there were at least good opportunities to bring it up.
3. The characters in Hyperion sparkle with rivalries, which they mostly resolve by the Fall of Hyperion. The inter-character conflict is not as compelling in Endymion. The protagonists are simply too nice and the antagonists have no apparent motive for the political intrigues. I wasn't given any reason to care which of the multiple bad factions came out on top, and I wasn't even sure why the baddies cared. If you are lusting for power it is presumably for love or hate or at least change, but none of the characters seemed to have significant plans for how to use the power they plotted for.
4. Everyone blinked. A lot. I started to think I was in the land of Tink Tonk.

My impression of this series overall is that Hyperion is a very strong, character-driven work. The Fall of Hyperion is a satisfying conclusion. Endymion and the Rise of Endymion have amazing settings which are generally let down by the plot and characters.

I guess I should get up now and start on my own poor writing.

UPDATE: I forgot the most important thing, which is while browsing Dan Simmons website I ran across a link to this.

The September 27th post

Well, I finished it and I'm not really sure what day it is right now or if this is any good. I am pretty sure I did not get across what I wanted to, and not really sure what I wanted to communicate made any sense!

I just had this feeling when I was out on the river that I was living close to the metal, so to speak, and somehow the arts were like this rarefied privileged thing, which well, they aren't.

So maybe it is appropriate that I finally wrote it up in a haze between nap and sleep after pointlessly reading websites for an hour that I knew would make me angry.

Which, well, suggests I need another blog.

If we accept Freud's classification of ego, superego, and id, which is trite but somehow useful, I think this blog could end up functioning as ego, the excuses excuses thing as superego, and I still need some place for the id to rage. I suspect this should be anonymous.

At least that is what the superego tells me.