Hyperion Cantos
By Dan Simmons
Publisher: GuildAmerica
Published In: New York, NY, USA
Date: 1990
Pgs: 929

Summary:
Humanity has left Earth behind. Thanks to FTL and wormhole tech, humanity has reached out to the stars and made new homes, united under the Hegemony. Hyperion and the labyrinth worlds hold secrets though...secrets and monsters. The Shrike a multi armed killing organic machine worshipped by some, feared by all, walks Hyperion awaiting the end of the world or its next victim, depending on whose dogma you are listening to. War has broken out between the Hegemony and the post-human Ousters, humans who have left planet bound living behind. The Time Tombs in the home area of the Shrike are opening. A last group of pilgrims are on their way. The war. The Shrike. The pilgrims. The past. The present. The future. All are colliding on Hyperion in what may be the last days.

Genre:
fiction, science fiction, apocalypse, space, hegira, war,

Why this book:
I’ve read both the books that make up this book before and love them deeply. I wanted to re-read them again and finding them in the Cantos format was a godsend. This is a huge sweeping space opera covering the future history of man in a mysterious universe with more mysteries than answers.

This Story is About:
It’s about throwing off the yokes of society. In some cases, the yoke is torn away whether the individual character wants this “freedom” or not.

Credibility:
The story is very immersive and drags you along with it causing a well crafted suspension of disbelief as Simmons shows us what he wants to show us and hints at what lies beyond.

Favorite Character:
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad comes across as a man of his time though he has things in his past that would mark him a monster by the other people of his time. And he’s a badass. The Consul is intended in the narrator/everyman role, I believe. He does have a certain attraction as he is “our” viewpoint on the stories of the others and the later events. All the pilgrims are wonderful characters, with the exception below.

Least Favorite Character:
Martin Silenius is the poet. His inclusion seems to be to give Simmons the chance to trot out bits of the classical intermixed with his own poetry. A Loki/Pan figure with a long history because of the time debt that he has accrued during long frozen fugue states on interplanetary voyages, meaning that he has seen a lot and lived through a lot, but slept through a lot of the interstellar future backstory of this world that Simmons is creating. All that said, the Silenius character continually comes across as an ass.
A close second would be Hegemony CEO Meina Gladstone. She’s as much the villain as the circumstance that sweeps through the huge community of Humans over the course of this story. Her plans within plans may “free” humanity, but she may end up killing many of them, millions, at least, if everything works to her plan.
Ummon speaks in verse or koans. Reading his dialogue is painful.

Character I Most Identified With:
Through the early stages of the book, I identify mostly with Kassad and, by the author’s design, the Consul. In the later stages of the book, you see and feel a lot through the eyes and feelings of the pilgrims plus Johnny II.

The Feel:
The story has a real “you are there” feel to it. The tragedy of Sol and Rachel Weintraub is very palpable. I can’t imagine what Sol experienced in those years as Rachel progressed. But, yes, we can imagine it. Simmons gave us good deep insight into the character of the man.

Favorite Scene:
Father Dure’s sense of wonder when he discovers what the Bikura are hiding down below, or rather the first level of what they are hiding, is a great scene.
Kassad’s first visit to Hyperion, especially, when he awakes from fugue and has to fight his way through his fall from orbit.
Kassad’s “final” battle on Hyperion, not the denouement, but when he blows hell out of one of the monuments as he unleashes the full hell of FORCE’s future sci fi weaponry. And his final, final showdown with the Shrike is pure excellence.

Settings:
Hyperion, space, the tree ship, the Tesla forests, Mars, virtual reality battles all through history, Barnard’s World, Hebron, the WorldWeb, The Moon, a replica Earth somewhere in the Hercules Cluster, the Ouster Swarm, the Labyrinths, the Datasphere/Metasphere/Megasphere

Pacing:
The pacing of the story is excellent. Not a roaring page turner, but whenever you put it down, it draws you back. At least, it does for me. You’d think with the introspection of some of the pilgrims’ stories that the pace would drag, but it really doesn’t. The story drags me along through the tragedies of some of their stories and the sheer WTF-edness of what is happening to some of them.

Plot Holes/Out of Character:
N/A

Last Page Sound:
Damn. That is awesome.

Author Assessment:
Absolutely awesome. I would definitely read more stuff by Simmons.

Editorial Assessment:
Tightly done.

Disposition of Book:
This is a Keep it. Hardback. Proud to own it book.

Why isn’t there a screenplay?
I fear that the story would have to be watered down too much to make it fit the screen. There’s just too much story here. Warner Brothers is supposedly developing Hyperion for the big screen.

Casting call:
Fedmahn Kassad would need an actor of Arabic descent who could play early middle age and world weary while maintaining the military precision aura. I know of a few older actors who could do it, but I’m not finding the “perfect” casting choice in my memory. Though I can almost guarantee that in a movie with them wanting to tighten the story, they’d combine some of the characters into supercharacters. I could see Fedmahn and the Consul combined. If Hyperion had become a movie 25 or 30 years ago, I could see Ricardo Montalban in the role, either as Kassad or a combined Kassad and Consul. Vinnie Jones would be excellent in the role. Faran Tahir would as well. UPDATE: Coby Bell from Burn Notice would be perfect as Fedmahn Kassad.
For the Consul, if he maintained his character from the book, I could see a Ewan McGregor or a Joshua Jackson...type.
I have a picture of Sol in my head. But I’m not sure there is an actor currently acting who fits with what I see in my mind’s eye. I see an old man slipping toward ancient. The dome of his head is bald with a fringe of white flyaway hair. I went through an image search of bald actors and can’t find someone who would be perfect..
Johnny Lee Miller could be Martin Sillenius. His Sherlock on Elementary makes me realize that he could inhabit the character of the poet out of time who remembers Old Earth before the Big Mistake. ...and the gravitas and sadness and madness that would inevitably characterize a persona that has lost so much.
Judi Dench could play Meina Gladstone, CEO of the Hegemony.

Would recommend to:
Genre fans. Space opera fans. People who like a crunchy plot with lots of characters and lots of action spread over a wide range.

I've read all four books twice they really are that good I'm gonna do it again

....These two vastly different looks at the same conflict make the books almost inseparable in my opinion. Putting them in one omnibus edition makes a lot of sense. Without the in depth looks at the motivations of the pilgrims Fall of Hyperion doesn't work well as a novel. On the other hand the ending of Hyperion is rather abrupt. There isn't really any sense of conclusion at the end of the book the see what the sacrifice the pilgrims are making is all about. I rarely read two books that are so different yet so much interlinked. Each of these books has its merits but it's the combination that makes it a great work of science fiction. Do not start on Hyperion without a copy of Fall of Hyperion at hand.

Full Random Comments review.

It's possible I'm being too harsh on my first read of these two books (Hyperion and Fall of) -- because granted, the world building ends up being breathtaking in its scope and variety, and I especially liked the kernel of Gene Wolfe's inscrutable intellectuality and obsession with Catholicism that Simmons infused into the space opera of it all -- but I ended up just not caring too much about the characters. I also found his tic of saying like "It reminded John of a quotation from a song 900 years ago from Old Earth" to be offputting over time, but that is a relatively small thing. The Shrike is amazing, even if, as pure Horror, I thought it fit poorly with some of the other novel-stuff. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could.

Hugely drawn-out and not very imaginative. Pacing improves in the final book but then is suddenly rushed at the end. The poetry and Keats angle could have been a nice, sophisticated touch but it ends up being a huge drag and feels more like a projection of the author's own aspiration to such a talent.

Wish I could give more than 5 stars, incredible!

Actually epic.

Opus magnum.

The shrike scares me.

Be warned: there are some spoilers here...

I really enjoyed many aspects of the Hyperion Omnibus and would certainly recommend it to anyone, however (isn’t there always one of those?), it was a bit of an up and down experience for me. The Priest’s Tale was excellent, with its cruciform parasites and how the horror of them for a catholic drove Father Dure to do what he did, and I quite enjoyed how that plot thread was woven in later on. But balanced against that, what later seemed the proselytising of the C. S. Lewis kind, with a bit of L. Ron Hubbard thrown in for good measure, had me gagging. Apparently love is a fundamental basis of the universe, whilst god, being woven in at the Planc level, transcends time and is the triune entity of the Christians ... and lo the messiah is to be born!

The Soldier’s Tale with its violence, military technology, mysterious woman (and with Kassad’s yet to be explained encounter with the shrike as the mysterious woman) I much enjoyed too, though later on this was a plot thread that tended to fizzle. The Poet’s Tale, whilst still enjoyable, suffered from a problem I felt was endemic throughout the books: too much in the way of literary allusions and pretensions. How often I found myself skipping the obsessing about Keats and pointless quotations of poetry. There’s much about the power and wonder of poetry and poets, and the implication that isn’t the pen mightier than the sword? Yeah, well, take your Parker to your next sword fight and see how you get on. The Consul’s and The Detective’s Tales were great too, but by then I was starting to get anxious about the proliferation of ideas and plot threads and the possibility of this not completing.

The setting of Hyperion was excellent, with this whole story taking place under a sky lit by interstellar war, as was the interplay between the shrike pilgrims. The tree of thorns is a horrifying image that sticks, and the time tombs were the kind of idea just about any science fiction writer would be jealous of.

The shrike itself was good whilst only glimpsed, but suffered under close inspection. My feeling was that it started out as a monster from Dr Who and was not cured of the rubber mask syndrome by the later add-ons from Alien. And, now I’m reading Endymion, by its Terminator II transformation into a good guy.

There were lots of ideas and threads needing to be tied together in these books, and so they were, sometimes very well and sometimes in a kind of soapish babble. Simmons did manage to pull the rabbit out of the hat, but it had lost one ear and most of its fur during its stay. Still, don’t get me wrong, there are hours and hours of science fictional reading pleasure here. I in fact loved the whole massive chaotic canvas of this story which, really, wouldn’t have been possible without that mass of ideas and interweaving plot threads.

Can’t help myself … back for the third time. Absolutely love this series and can’t wait until my kids are old enough to begin to understand it.

Hyperion: On the eve of interstellar war between the Hegemony of Man and the barbarian Ousters over the fate of Hyperion, seven pilgrims embark on a journey to the Time Tombs and their mysterious protector, The Shrike, a three meter tall, four-armed monster covered with blades. One pilgrim will have his wish granted and the others will be impaled on the Shrike's Tree of Pain. Only one or more of the pilgrims isn't what he appears to be...

Every once in a while, a book comes along that eclipses many that came before it. Hyperion is one of those books. Told with a structure similar to the Canterbury tales, Hyperion is the story of seven pilgrims on a journey that will end in death for most of them. Interested yet?

Each pilgrim tells his or her story and Simmons doesn't skimp. We get a horror story, a detective story, action, tragedy, comedy, the whole nine yards. Instead of info-dumping the back story of the complex world he's created, Simmons rations the information and doles it out one bite-sized morsel at a time, mostly in the stories told by the pilgrims. The Shrike is going to stick with me for a long time after I'm finished.

The writing is superb. Simmons continues to wow me with his versatility and the concepts he introduces are amazing. Farcasters, tree ships, time debt, reverse aging, artificial intelligence, it's amazing the sheer amount of thought that obviously went into Hyperion's conception. Surprisingly, Hyperion is a fairly easy read. I have no idea why I've waited this long to accompany Kassad, Masteen, Lamia, and the others on their journey to meet the Shrike.


Fall of Hyperion: The situation in the world web rises to a fever pitch as all out war between the Ousters and the Hegemony of Man erupts. Or does it? And what do the pilgrims on Hyperion and an artist named Severn have to do with it? Is the Hegemony of Man doomed? And what does the Core have to do with everything?

That's about all I can reveal of the plot without blowing all the twists. Suffice to say, Dan Simmons is the man. The story of the seven pilgrims continues and the plot threads hinted upon in Hyperion are tugged and stretched to the breaking point. Things that seemed of minimal importance proved to be integral to the overall plot. Questions are answered, more questions are raised, the shit hits the fan, and dogs and cats begin living together. I never would have guessed whose blood it was in the wind wagon in the first book.

I can't imagine not reading the Fall of Hyperion after reading the first book and it must have been agony for those waiting for it when it was first published. I'd better wrap this up before I start giving away plot details about Brawne, Hoyt, Kassad, and the others. Suffice to say, The Hyperion Cantos are now on my measuring stick list of books, along with the Dark Tower, The First Chronicles of Amber, and the Matthew Scudder series. Highest possible recommendation.