The Fall of Hyperion

This is a continuance of the story that began with Hyperion. That storyline was made up of separate experience narratives told by the small group of pilgrims allowed by the Hegemony Web of planets to venture to the mysterious time tombs on the planet Hyperion, prior to Hyperion being annexed into the Web. These narratives interlock to provide the reader the background for the main storyline dealing with the mysterious Hyperion and the time tombs. The valley of the time tombs is unique in all the known explored galaxy where time flows backward within an entropy field and where a mysterious and monstrous metal entity, known as the Shrike, exists. The four armed Shrike, with its body made up of razor sharp blades, is known to slice and dice those who enter its realm and skewer the living bodies of its victims on a boundless, interdimensional thorn tree, that leaves the victims in an unending eternity of living pain. While the pilgrims take their long and treacherous journey across Hyperion to the time tombs a space war between the Hegemony Web and the mysterious Ouster Swarms is about to take place and is centered on the control of Hyperion. Hyperion ends suddenly just as the pilgrims reach the time tombs with many questions left unanswered, and so The Fall of Hyperion continues where Hyperion left off.
It is hard to give a brief overview of The Fall of Hyperion, it is so densely packed with several ongoing narratives, characters and locations. These narratives cover politics, religion, spirituality, personal relationships, interstellar warfare and weaponry, planetary genocide, interplanetary ecology, anthropology, philosophy, time displacement, Artificial Intelligence, cyborgs, interplanetary travel portals and spaceships, interplanetary communication technology...and of course the homage to the life of Keats and his poetry. Still interwoven within the grand and complicated tapestry of the story is the ongoing narrative of the trials and tribulations of the original group of pilgrims and their individual quests to the time tombs of Hyperion, guarded by the dangerous Shrike. If the reader is able to stick it through to the end of this often confusing but action packed tale, almost all will be revealed in the end, sort of. This is a book that probably requires more that one reading to try and grasp all its intricacies, but with so many books of interest awaiting....?