Hyperion

Can definitely see why this is a classic - but also not a book written for my tastes.

Final Rating: 3.1/5

5/5

Hyperion well and truly deserves every inch of praise and accolades that it has been given and those that will continue to be given. This really is fantastic.

Hyperion is structured into several short stories each told from the perspective of a very distinguished and colourful cast of characters embarking on a pilgrimage to a holy site on the planet of Hyperion itself, detailing their reasons for doing so, whilst seamlessly tying into an overarching narrative. Whilst ostensibly, Hyperion is Sci-Fi Fantasy, it takes aspects from every genre, whether that be romance, or horror, or themes of neo-noir.

Admittedly, whilst the quality of the short stories vary, even the weakest of the stories is still exceptional. The Priest's Tale is sensational, and the zenith of Hyperion's storytelling being The Scholar's Tale - which is undoubtedly some of the best literature I've ever read.

All roads lead to Hyperion.

One of the most though provoking books I've read.

This is one of my favorite SF novels.

Easily in the top ten. It has just about everything I could want in an SF while also elevating the entire SF conversation at the same time.

And a virtuoso performance is another term I'd use, as if the character of Martin Selinius had popped out of the pages and wrote this very book, wowing the AIs connaisseurs and elevating the very first Literary SF form to do universal justice to the term.

Back when I first read this book, the same year it came out, I was stunned by just how THOROUGH Simmons was. Of course, I was coming off my high of David Brin's Earth and I thought I had seen it all, a worldbuilding extravaganza that tore apart the planet in a really big, really flashy way.

But then Simmons had to come around and pull a The Canterbury Tales written as a fantastic pitch-perfect genre mini-stories within the equally mysterious and fantastic over-story.

Imagine, for a moment, that we have the mystery of the Catholic priest on the strange and horrific world of Hyperion, reading like A Case of Conscience but having one of the most horrific and soul-scarring scenes in any HORROR novel, let alone an SF novel.

Then imagine that the tone completely changes, as well as genre and the type of storytelling, to one of the best Hard-SF military fiction sequences in the next storytelling sequence.

Only to go completely Lit-SF, with a humorous, bawdy, ancient poet who is as brilliant as he NEEDS to court his deadly muse.

And then to the next genre that is quietly horrific even as it is quietly scholarly... with one of the hardest-hitting SF ideas I've ever read, making me burst into tears.

To a wonderfully cyberpunk detective noir fiction on par with Gibson, with an AI love story, intrigue...

To a tale of love, revenge, interplanetary colonialism, and time-dilation.

Where each tale provides us with a piece of a much larger puzzle that is Hyperion, even if most of the action takes place off the world, itself.


Of course, my simply describing the stories-within-stories can't do it justice. Nor would describing the Shrike (a huge golem made of blades), the time-vaults, the sheer emotional impact that EVERY one of these stories brings to the table of this otherwise not-simple pilgrimage tell you a damn thing about WHAT MAKES THIS NOVEL GREAT.

For those thematically oriented, you could say that the whole thing is a huge question: searching for a godhead or meaning and reason for the pain. Each one of these characters has been driven to sacrifice everything for an answer. A real answer.

Unfortunately, all they can reasonably expect is to get impaled on the Shrike's spikes.

You could say this is a metaphor, but the way the worldbuilding has set it up, it all makes absolutely excellent sense in the narrative. Shockingly so. It's the main power of mystery, after all.



Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one little important detail: this is not a complete novel without The Fall of Hyperion. -- Unless you like all your mysteries to sit on the knife's edge without ever getting cut, that is. ;)

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

I thought I was well-read in the genre, having tackled most of the big names in the 80's and early 90's, but somehow I missed out on the saurian in the room. WOW!!! I can't remember the last time I was so amazed at a new series, instantly jumping into the next book after I read the last page of this one and marking it as one of my All-Time Top 5. (Actually, I vaguely remember reading the first page of the prologue back when it was first published and sneering at the florid language and at the fantasy vibes, which show what kind of pretentious punk I was back then)

We need your help. It is essential that the secrets of the Time Tombs and the Shrike be uncovered. This pilgrimage may be our last chance. If the Ousters conquer Hyperion, their agent must be eliminated and the Time Tombs sealed at all cost. The fate of the Hegemony may depend upon it.

The Consul is interrupted from his melancholic musings by an urgent holographic message, weirdly similar in tone to the one Luke Skywalker received one day, calling him to save the Galaxy from the evil Empire. The main difference here is that the Consul is an old, disillusioned man that feels he has already done his duty for the Hegemony. But I'm getting slightly ahead of the story... Let's try to decode that message for first time readers:

The Hegemony is the current structure controlling more than two hundred inhabited planets after humankind was forced to abandon Earth in the wake of a physical experiment gone horribly wrong. To do this, the Hegemony relies on the Hawkins drive, a FTL technology that has the drawback of stretching time for the crew and passengers, on Farcaster portals that allow instant travel between worlds previously connected, on an implant- and commlog-based galaxy-wide-web of instant communication and on the TechnoCore, an assembly of Artificial Intelligences that have emancipated themselves from human control yet continue to help the Hegemony with these technologies that make travel, commerce and communication between star systems possible.

The Ousters are the part of humanity that preferred to live in freefall, among 'swarms' of spaceships and asteroids, instead of colonizing new planets. They serve the role of barbarians at the gates in the economy of the novel, the military threat to the Hegemony.

Hyperion is where the 'gates' currently are, the nexus where the forces of the Hegemony and of the Ousters converge for the battle to control the ultimate mystery of the Galaxy. The planet is currently an independent backward piece of real estate, colonized first by agricultural settlers and next by a bunch of poets led by Sad King Billy. What makes Hyperion special are :

The Time Tombs , a series of ruins that travel back in Time !!! and
The Shrike , a Frankenstein monster that hunts humans for fun and impales them eternally on a tree of thorns.

tWith only days left before the beginning of hostilities, the Hegemony petitions the local Church of the Shrike to allow a set of seven pilgrims to travel to the Time Tombs and there to petition the Shrike to grant them one wish. The catch? According to church gospel, the Shrike will only answer one and kill all the rest.

Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.

What I have written so far represents only the frame story, and the first layer of meaning for the novel. Each of the pilgrims, as they travel to their doom, will tell his or her back story, hoping that it will help the others understand why they were chosen from among billions of other people, and what they expect from the Shrike. What have a catholic priest, an army colonel, a poet, a scholar, a templar/ecologist, a private investigator and a politician have in common? And who among them is a traitor to the Hegemony?

Let's hear from everyone before the contributors start getting chopped and diced by that ambulatory food processor we're so eager to visit.

With each story we learn not only about the fate of the individual pilgrim, but also more about the big picture, exactly like the puzzle referenced earlier. Yet the stories often raise more questions than they answer. For me, the key is not necessarily in the parallels to the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, although they are apt, but in the more obscure yet stronger pointers towards "The Dying Earth" by Jack Vance and the poet John Keats, who himself started an unfinished poem named 'Hyperion'

I retitled my poem The Hyperion Cantos . It was not about the planet, but about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans. It was about the unthinking hubris of a race which dared to murder its homeworld through sheer carelessness and then carried that dangerous arrogance to the stars, only to meet the wrath of a god which humanity had helped to sire.

The true scope of the novel is then nothing less than the survival or extinction of the whole human race. Do we deserve the stars? Can there be a God in our future, and if there is one, will it be benevolent towards our multiple sins? While this axiom may be true for a lot of other epic science-fiction series, Dan Simmons truly shines here in the combination of technology with metaphysics, of poetry mixed with character study, in the multitude of layers and literary references that are both demanding and respectful of the reader's intelligence. Hyperion is much more than just a Star Wars clone.

I am tempted to leave out as many details as I can from each pilgrim's story, letting the readers make their own choices for meaning or reason for inclusion in the overall puzzle. I believe each of them represents an avatar of humanity, a personification of a potential path to redemption.

As usual, the priests stand in for faith and surrender of individual will to the greater good. Yet when Fathers Paul Dure and Lenar Hoyt come to the planet Hyperion they are shaken to their very core. The crucifixion, redemption through pain and even resurrection all play a part in the drama that unfolds as they come face to face with the Shrike.

"There has to be more," I said, although I felt little conviction. Paul Dure may reference here a need for life to have a direction, a higher purpose than simply survival.

Fedmahn Kassad, the next pilgrim to confess, is probably the easiest to decode. He is the belief that all problems can be solved by Force, can be blasted into oblivion. Yet during his long and bloody career in the Hegemony FORCE, he repeatedly comes face to face with a beautiful ghost, until Kassad too visits Hyperion and meets the Shrike.

Your past. My future. The shock wave of events moves across time like ripples on a pond.

Martin Silenus is provocative and often obscure, but his tale is the most revealing about the original destruction of the Earth when a black hole is accidentally sent towards the planet's core.

From my earliest sense of 'self', I knew that I would be – should be – a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race's thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.

Silenus wants to know if we deserve to be saved, or at least he wants to chronicle our fall from grace. He too has previously visited Hyperion in the entourage of Sad King Billy and his long epic poem is unfinished. Will the Titans (humankind) be replaced by the Shrike (whatever that monster represents) ? Silenus gives us one of the first descriptions of the monster, even as he fails to explain his motivations other than on the allegorical plane.

The blur resolved itself into a head out of a jolt addict's nightmare: a face part steel, part chrome, and part skull, teeth like a mechanized wolf's crossed with a steam shovel, eyes like ruby lasers burning through blood-filled gems, forehead penetrated by a curved spike-blade rising thirty centimeters from a quicksilver skull, and a neck ringed with similar thorns. [...]
He hangs around the Time Tombs waiting to come out and wreak havoc when it's mankind's time to join the dodo and the gorilla and the sperm whale on the extinction Hit Parade list.

As a side note, Silenus talks also about the art of the novel, giving us one of the secrets for a successful epic (his own string of commercial success was a series called "The Dying Earth"):

Dislinear plotting and noncontiguous prose have their adherents, not the least of which am I, but in the end, my friends, it is character which wins or loses immortality upon the vellum.

Sol Weintraub is for me an avatar of a future humanity that has no need for gods, unless you consider humanism and Reason / common sense another form of religion. A professor at a famous university on an underdeveloped agricultural planet, Weintraub is pulled into the web of the Shrike when his daughter Rachel is infected by an incurable disease while on an archeological dig at the Time Tombs. Sol is drawn back to his Jewish roots by the incident, as he tries to reason out the purpose of God in harming his daughter.

Sol realized one day that the topics of the heated debates were so profound, the stakes to be settled so serious, the ground covered so broad, that the only person he could possibly be berating for such shortcomings was God Himself. [...]
Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior towards an innocent human being was evil.

A piece of the puzzle is removed from the Big Picture as one pilgrim disappears before he can tell his story. Was Het Masteen, the ecologist traveling in a giant treeship, kill to prevent this or was he the spy the pilgrims were warned about? The answer is left for the next volume

Brawne Lamia is a private investigator hired by a person who claims to have been murdered before coming to her dingy office. How is that even possible? Apparently it is so, if the person is a 'cybrid' , a human clone with its brain controlled by the TechnoCore, the rogue artificial intelligences that have emancipated themselves. The fact that the genetic material for cloning comes from the same John Keats poet adds more food for thought in the growing puzzle. With the additional question of whether the AI still needs humans in order to pursue its own secret goals.

The Consul is the last to take the stand, but instead of telling his own story he mesmerizes his audience with a love story to defy time and space between an astronaut spending most of his time at FTL speeds and the woman who ages rapidly as she waits for him on a planet not yet connected to the web and the Hegemony. It is also a cautionary tale about a dominant culture that destroys both the environment and the diversity of different worldviews. The planet Maui Covenant is modeled both on the geography and the fate of the original tribes of Hawaii, a lost Garden of Eden.

As the pilgrims switch means of transport from a treeship to a riverboat pulled by giant manta rays, on a landship pushed by winds over an ocean of grass, then high over frozen peaks on cable cars and finally to a derelict castle in front of the Time Tombs, we are left to ponder what have learned so far? That humanity has destroyed its homeworld, and now it embarks on a war that can engulf the whole known colonized space. And that a God-like mysterious figure that may have been sent back from the future waits in judgement. Which of the pilgrims will receive the Shrike's answer?

But who is the wizard?
And what is Oz?
And just who is off to see this wizard?

So many questions left me with no other option than to start immediately on book two (I have the omnibus edition.) As I write this review, I have already finished reading "The Fall of Hyperion" and all I have to say is : double WOW !!!

(2.5?) It's such a popular "Classic Sci Fi" that I expected to love it.

Frankly I only liked the first and fourth story. I resented that the only female character is basically there to be pregnant...

Part of me is glad it wasn't worth the hype since I don't want to read more or support this author.

Hyperion es uno de esos libros que eleva la Ciencia Ficción a otros niveles. Dan Simmons se inspira en Los cuentos de Canterbury de Geoffrey Chaucer para contarnos las historias de 6 personajes mientras peregrinan hacia su destino para enfrentarse al Alcaudón, un misterioso ser del planeta Hyperion.

Las historias del profesor y del sacerdote se me van a quedar marcadas mucho tiempo e hicieron que pasase media noche sin parar de leer. Y eso no me ha pasado con muchos libros.

Pero atención, este libro no termina, por criterios de la editorial se dividió en dos tomos y si te embarcas en la lectura de esta historia te tienes que hacer a la idea de que termina con La Caída de Hyperion, porque si no te llevarás una desilusión por el final tan abrupto.

Some parts blew my mind and others just went straight over my head… 3.5 stars. But I am intrigued enough to read the next book!!

My 600th review goes to Hyperion, an absolutely imaginative and magnificent classic science fiction novel.

After years of having Hyperion by Dan Simmons on my TBR, I can finally say I’ve read this beloved classic sci-fi novel. Before I started reading this novel, I didn’t know much about the premise or the content of the Hyperion except that there’s this creature called The Shrike in it, and also this book or series is one of the most beloved and highly praised sci-fi novels of all time. I’m actually shocked that Hyperion was first published in 1989. It holds up incredibly well. Hyperion felt like a book written way ahead of its time, and I’m not surprised this has become a classic now. Hyperion has been on my TBR pile for almost 6 years, and because I’ve been missing sci-fi a lot lately, I thought I might as well read this series now, and I’m definitely not disappointed by the first installment of the series. It's the other way around. This has turned into one of my favorite sci-fi novels.

n  n   

“It occurs to me that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.”

n  n

Hyperion is the first book in the Hyperion Cantos quartet by Dan Simmons. On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, there waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret.

Picture: The Shrike by Jaime Jones



As many reviews have stated, Hyperion is often pitched as The Canterbury Tales in space opera. It is essentially seven novellas in one novel, and it’s different from the majority of novels I’ve read so far. I didn’t know that I would be reading six different tales told by each individual, and I get how this can be a hit or miss because it feels like a collection of connecting novellas. Initially, it did take me some time to get used to the narrative structure. My degree of likeness with each story differs, but I loved how each one of the stories shed utterly important revelations regarding each individual, Hyperion, and the ominous creature called The Shrike. My review will consists of my brief thoughts regarding each tale in Hyperion.

n  n   

“You have to live to really know things, my love.”

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The Priest’s Tale
This is the tale about Father Hoyt and mostly Father Dure. The Priest's Tale is the first story told by the pilgrims embarking upon Hyperion. And I think the ending of this tale could easily be the make-or-break moment for the reader. As I said, I did not know what kind of book Hyperion was, and reading the tale of Father Dure being told in the form of a diary took me some time to get used to. I wondered, "Where is this story going? What is the purpose of this tale?" And when I neared the end of the chapter, my jaw dropped. What happened to the Priests was insanely terrifying and impactful. The Priest's Tale allowed Simmons to inform his readers immediately that Hyperion will be a bleak and harrowing tale. The theme of faith was elaborated carefully, and we get to find that The Shrike is not the only creature that should be feared in this universe; there are more. I absolutely loved this one, and I consider The Priest's Tale my second favorite tale in the novel.

n  n   

“I now understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it.”

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The Soldier’s Tale
If I were told to describe The Soldier's Tale in three words, it would be blood, war, and sex. The Soldier's Tale tells Kassad's fight against the Ousters and why he needs to go to Hyperion. Overall, while it is well-written and great, I did not like this action-packed story as much as The Priest's Tale. But seeing more glimpses of what The Shrike is capable of here has certainly mesmerized me. By this stage of the narrative, I already thought of The Shrike as one of the scariest creatures in science fiction, and reading the book further has proved that notion more. I rank The Soldier's Tale as my fourth favorite tale in Hyperion.

Picture: The Lord of Pain by Ari Ibarra



The Poet’s Tale
I really loved The Poet's Tale. The third tale in this book is told from Martin Silenus's POV, and the depiction of writing, poetry, art, and what it means to become a writer was so profound. Out of all the Tales in Hyperion, this was the one that made me highlight so many passages. Simmons successfully put many thought-provoking and resonating passages without making them a hindrance to the pacing. The revelations about The Shrike revealed in this tale, in addition to the previous tale, were so mind-blowing to me, and I can't wait to find out whether it's all true or not. The Poet's Tale is my third favorite tale in the book.

n  n   

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

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Picture: The Poet's Tale by Raymond Swanland



The Scholar’s Tale
This is it. The Scholar's Tale is my favorite tale in the entire novel. It's probably the most different compared to the other stories. By putting the extraordinary circumstances in ordinary lives, Simmons effectively made The Scholar's Tale, the fourth story, the most heartbreaking and powerful tale to read. I read this long chapter about Sol and his family in one sitting. I just couldn't put it down. Family and parenthood are the key themes of this tale, and once again, the gradual sadness caused by the unstoppable passage of time was incredibly well-written. It is a poignant tale, one that will make you sit and think, make you reflect on what truly matters, and it's so worth your time to read.

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“Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things - the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.”

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Picture: The Scholar's Tale by Raymond Swanland



The Detective’s Tale
Unfortunately, after the greatness of The Poet's Tale and The Scholar's Tale, this tale felt tame in comparison. The fifth Tale is a murder mystery story, and comparatively, it's my least favorite in Hyperion. It's one of the longest chapters in the book. I couldn't feel invested in the love story, and it's disappointing that it doesn't add many big revelations regarding The Shrike or Hyperion. Despite that, I cannot deny I still found the tale readable and engaging enough.

n  n   

“Most murders,” I said, “are acts of sudden, mindless rage committed by someone the victim knows well. Family. A friend or lover. A majority of the premeditated ones are usually carried out by someone close to the victim.”

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Picture: The Long Goodbye by Jaime Jones



The Consul’s Tale
On my first read, the final Tale in the book was my least favorite Tale. I retract that statement. While it is, in a way, plagued with the same issue as The Detective's Tale, the Consul's Tale did offer some tidbits about Hyperion and the Shrike. It did not have the impactful pieces of mysteries and revelations on The Shrike provided in the first four tales that made them memorable, but I enjoyed reading how the Consul's Tale connects with the other pilgrims.

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“Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.”

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Picture: Siri's Rebellion by Jaime Jones



I haven't done my research on this, so I can't confirm whether this is true or not, but the relatively abrupt ending might mean that Hyperion and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion was one big book divided into two novels due to its length. If I were to rate Hyperion based on the first four Tales I read, I'd rate it with an easy 5/5 stars rating. However, although the final two tales didn't earn that rating because they did not click with me as much, I am still sticking with 5 stars for my rating of the book as a whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts here, and Dan Simmons has shown his versatility as a writer so damn well with all the Tales told in Hyperion. The Tales combined has constructed an impeccable sci-fi novel that stood the test of time and will continue to do so. Undoubtedly, I am eager to read The Fall of Hyperion next month. Hyperion was utterly brilliant. I desperately need to find out how this grand setup will be concluded.

Picture: Hyperion by Jaime Jones



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