I listened to a fascinating podcast yesterday, an episode of the New Books Network. It was so interesting I listened to it a second time. It was an interview with an anthropologist in Australia who has recently published a book on difference and perceptions of difference, between Aborigines and white settlers. One of the most fascinating bits, that I might integrate into the grandmother story, deals with something reported from all over Australia: the earliest Europeans writing in their journals how often the Aborigines just didn’t see them, even if they tried to get their attention. She interpreted it as similar to travelling on the Tube (or, to use her analogy, the New York subway) and acting as though you are the only person in the world, not admitting others into your world. To me it also seems like an act that allows for digestion, of an experience beyond knowledge, of realisation that the world has changed, and the need to wait until one is able to see this change.
I have also finished Fall of Hyperion. Unfortunately I am amongst those who feel one should stop after Hyperion. I found Hyperion highly deficient in a lot of ways: badly written, terrible and often uninteresting characters, boorish theology of the sort beloved of old school science fiction writers (ie Catholicism and Christian symbolim on one hand, Buddhism on the other), and with some eye-rolling attitudes to race and national characteristics (the mention of people from the planet Fuji and their cameras came close to dislocating my eyeballs).
But the positives were such that I forgave Hyperion – virtuoso worldbuilding that accreted over each tale in a Canterbury Tales structure, genuinely big ideas in a seemingly endless stream of ideas, and a finale with a profound sense of inevitability.
Fall of Hyperion, unfortunately, was far less good. The world had been explained and now it was time to show its Matrix-like underpinnings, complete with cod-theology. The least interesting characters were deified, the better ones became boring. The ending, which runs through a list of planets describing how they react to a particular event, has a Muslim planet sink into in retrograde holy war, and a Jewish planet form a kibbutz. Almost every character (even more noticeably because I was annoyed) is white; those who are not are almost always described by their skin colour. Bah. I wish I hadn’t read it, but I’ll expunge it from my memory and move on to the book I’ve had waiting on my Kindle for a while, Frankenstein in Baghdad.