Mykal Machon

I read through and loved the foundation series; I wanted to read through the empire series as an origin story for the foundation's “empire” sounded interesting. I was expecting foundation-esque stories across generations providing peaks into the flawed rise of a ubiquitous empire.

Unfortunately, the book is mostly a 1950s dry romance between a plastic space princess and an entitled college kid. The story lacks the scale and philosophical-scifi magic of the foundation series and all that's left is wordy dialogue, wooden characters, and some Sci-fi babble about the logistics of spacecraft and how planets are distributed in solar systems (this comes up a lot for some reason).

I was left really disappointed. I usually love asimov's writing, but this is the first book I've read by him where I see its flaws. I might still read the second book in the series out of morbid curiosity, but if you're looking for more foundation, I would skip this one.

TLDR: This is how I felt about Robert Neville throughout the whole read.

While I found some of the concepts in this book interesting, I found the protagonist so unrelatable and unlikable from the start that it ruined the book for me.

I do realize that Robert sort of being a monster in the new world is the whole point, but I think this was supposed to be a twist at the end, not something I felt throughout the whole read. I do realize that realistically, any person in this situation would not be mentally sound. That said, from the neck-breaking, 180 degree shift that is “this vampire reminds me of my dead daughter” to “I want to sexually assault this vampire” that happens more than once in the book, to the pseudo scientific experiments on the infected (that also look like his daughter!). The guy comes across as a self-righteous, creepy, overconfident weirdo from the first chapter on.

I didn't ever really feel conflicted in my dislike of Robert. The exception being when he tries to connect with the stray dog near the middle of the story. Around that point I started to think that there may be some room for Robert to have some moral redemption. He had seemed to drop the weird fetishization of the vampires. Plus, who can't related to wanting to pet a dog! After the dog passes, he seems to realize that the vampires are still alive, just infected, and likely mentally struggling. After that revelation, he decides he needs to hunt and kill his infected neighbor (what?). From there, he didn't really recover in my eyes. He knew that he was killing conscious beings, and just kept at it!

Beyond my issues with Robert Neville as a sympathetic anti-hero, some of the horror in this book is dated to the point that I burst out laughing while reading it. The concept of vampires waiting outside the protagonist's house and flashing him to try and lure him outside but not being smart enough to open a door is probably the earliest example of this.

All of that said, I realize that this was an early entry in the modern psychological horror scene, and it much of it seems dated because it inspired today's tropes. I think I would have liked this book a lot more if Neville didn't seem so far-off from where I would mentally be in his shoes.

I enjoyed The fall of Hyperion a lot more than the first book in the series but it's still not living up to the hype for me unfortunately.

I love when Sci-fi authors go into depth on how future systems work both technically and in society. The societal and interpersonal implications of the “Hyperion” universe on it's inhabitants is well covered so far in this series. Unfortunately, the books seem to leave a lot of the crunchy technical explanations out. I still enjoyed the book, but I think one of the reasons it's not hitting quite as hard as I'd like it to is the lack of “hard” science fiction goodies.

The other piece that's been irking me about this series is the seemingly ever-present misogyny. Nine out of ten times, if the author is writing about a women, they're somehow minimized, sexualized, compared to a man, or put into the context of their male partner. Early on, I thought this was an intentional flaw in some the character's and gave it a pass. It's presence in this book seemed more trite. Obviously you can't hold a book from the 80s to today's standards. That said, I've read a lot of Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov from the same time period or older; I didn't notice this in any of their books. It was present enough here that it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm conflicted about this book. I loved some of the chapters and disliked others. Chapter 4 was one of the most heart wrenching things I've ever read, but some of the others were either mediocre or have aged poorly.

My review may change, but 3 stars feels good for now.

My wife bought this for me for Christmas. It's definitely aimed for kids (think 8-12) but I thought it was cute; definitely something I could see myself reading to my kid at night.

Its also a really quick read (took me around 3.5 hours) so I could see it being great for kids that way too.