Dan Simmons is an amazing writer. His prose is consistently readable and fluid (though most of the time unremarkable); it is his imagination that stands out. I don't read very much science fiction, but I won't let myself miss any that this genre-hopping scribe produces.

It is a much stronger novel than Endymion, but not as good as the first two novels in the series, which can be read as a pair ( Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion). Many of the loose ends from the first three novels are resolved in the final novel of the series — most of them satisfyingly — but the main flaw is that too many of the plot twists have a deus ex machina quality to them. Raul Endymion is somewhat awkward as a hero, and both he and Aenea remain remarkably shallow characters for the 1000+ pages devoted to them. My main complaint is that Simmons devotes more energy to developing the planets that the characters visit than to the characters themselves. On the plus side, some of the characters from the first two novels do gain in depth during the final installment of this epic.