Hyperion

Introduction

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, was published in June 1989. Hyperion is the first of what eventually became four novels in the Hyperion Cantos series. This novel is much admired with high ratings on book review sites.

I listened to the audiobook of Hyperion in April and May 2011, and at the time I rated it three stars (good). I noted at the time that the novel had won the 1990 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the novel was ambitious, and I didn’t really care for it much. I returned to Hyperion for a repeat listen after listening to the Hugo, Girl! podcast (episode of June 2, 2021), which provides an excellent discussion of the book.

The structure of Hyperion is modeled after The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The novel comprises a framing tale and six stories told by pilgrims traveling to the Time Tombs and the Shrike on the planet Hyperion.

Simmons’s novel has a complicated universe and plot, and I often lost track of people and events while listening to the audiobook. For reference, I read the Wikipedia articles on Hyperion and the Hyperion Cantos. I listened to a two-hour summary of the book by SuperSummary using my CloudLibrary subscription. And I read portions of the Hyperion Cantos Wiki, which is marred by heavy advertising. I can’t recommend the latter two resources unless you’re really interested in this series.

There are also many YouTube videos about Hyperion and the four books in the complete series. Some YouTubers say Hyperion is one of the best science fiction novels ever written.

The Pilgrims’ Tales

Although there are seven pilgrims, only six give a tale. Each tale has the length of a novella, and I wonder if these tales had been written separately for another purpose and then adapted for the novel. (I am probably wrong about this.)

The Priest’s Tale: “The Man Who Cried God”

The first tale is told by Father Lenar Hoyt, who tells about Father Paul Duré, a Jesuit priest who lived with and studied the Bikura people on Hyperion. The Bikura are sexless, stupid individuals, seventy in number, who are maintained and resurrected by the cruciforms, cross-shaped objects attached to their bodies. The cruciforms cannot be removed. Eventually, a cruciform is attached to Father Duré, giving him great pain. Father Duré’s efforts to rid himself of the cruciform leads to horrifying results. The cruciforms have an obscure connection with the Shrike.

I have an antipathy to any novel involving Jesuits and the Catholic Church, so I did not particularly enjoy this tale.

The Soldier’s Tale: “The War Lovers”

The second tale is told by Colonel Fedmahn Kassad. This tale contains the tired male fantasy of the mysterious woman (Moneta) who visits Kassad for silent sex and then disappears. Hey, no obligations, no conflicts, etc.! At one point it becomes evident that Moneta is an apparition of the Shrike, but the story could be completely independent of the Shrike.

I thought this tale was tiresome.

The Poet’s Tale: “Hyperion Cantos”

The third tale is told by Martin Silenus the poet, a very old and obnoxious boor. Silenus claims to be a native of Old Earth, born eight hundred years ago. Silenus has written an epic poem that has become a best seller in the worlds of the Hegemony, making Silenus a famous and wealthy one hit wonder. Given his personality, it’s difficult to believe that Silenus could write anything sublime (but this has happened many times in literature). Most of the story Silenus tells has nothing to do with the Shrike until near the end.

I was not interested in this tale.

The Scholar’s Tale: “The River Lethe’s Taste Is Bitter”

The fourth tale is told by Sol Weintraub, who on the pilgrimage carries his infant daughter Rachel in his arms. This is a sweet and moving story about how Sol and his sife must deal with the situation in which their grown daughter has time reversed when she is working as a scientist in the Time Tombs on Hyperion. Rachel is growing younger every day, and the assumption is that she will die when she reaches the age of zero days old. Rachel’s affliction is called Merlin’s Disease, after Merlin the magician, where aging is reversed and the individual grows younger over time. Rachel’s disease is connected to the Shrike in some unexplained way.

I thought this was the best tale of the six as it explores what Sol and his wife must do in their attempt to correct Rachel’s disease. It explores the biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac in which God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, examining in an interesting way the relationship between an individual and a god-like being.

The Detective’s Tale: “The Long Good-Bye”

The fifth tale is told by Brawne Lamia, a detective. Brawne Lamia is the only woman pilgrim; her story imitates a noir detective story in which Brawne Lamia is a private detective working for a cybrid named John Keats. The John Keats cybrid is a human with a personality constructed by AI using the life and works of John Keats (see below). The John Keats cybrid and Brawne Lamia become lovers, and they travel virtually somehow in the AI matrix of the Technocore.

Brawne Lamia is wholly unconvincing as a detective, and the noirish narrative is lame. But Simmons is prescient about the potential behavior of AIs, which we’re seeing now in the 2020s.

The Consul’s Tale: “Remembering Siri”

The final tale is told by the Consul, an official of the Hegemony who once governed the planet Hyperion. The tale starts out as another male author’s sexual fantasy of a white, imperialist, privileged military male who meets a naïve native girl (Siri) in a tropical paradise. As is the way with sailors in port, he impregnates and leaves her.

It is troubling that the man is nineteen and the woman sixteen when they begin their sexual and romantic relationship. The story refers to “baby fat,” “budding breasts,” and “little bitch,” language I found unpleasant. This story is reminiscent of Jeffrey Epstein and his friends who sexually exploited girls and young women.

The man returns to the planet between space missions, but because of his space travel at relativistic velocities, he ages much more slowly than the woman, and this is apparent and awkward as the difference in their biological ages increases. In the end, the woman dies in her 70s while he is still young. She is faithful to him, but he is not faithful to her.

In the tale, the advanced civilization of the Hegemony takes over the paradise planet and utterly ruins it with tourism, immigration, environmental degradation, and overpopulation. The woman Siri is a leader of the native opposition to the Hegemony.

I didn’t like this story much except for the twist at the end.

The Missing Tale

Het Masteen, the Templar who greets the Consul on his arrival at Hyperion, is the seventh pilgrim. Masteen is “the voice of the tree” (the tree ship, Yggdrasil, that brings the pilgrims to Hyperion.) Yggdrasil is the tree of the world in Norse mythology, and the name comes from words meaning Odin’s horse. Masteen’s luggage is a Mobius trunk, a storage container, the contents of which are a mystery. (This is an example of Chekhov’s gun; the alert reader knows that the Mobius trunk will be used later.) Het Masteen does not give a tale because he disappears before it is his turn.

World Building

Simmons’s plot is complex with some good world-building.

The Hegemony, the Technocore, and the Ousters compete for dominance in the portion of the galaxy settled by humans. Simmons does not describe the extent of human expansion, nor does he mention alien species other than the Shrike. The Hegemony is revealed to be imperialist and genocidal. The Technocore is a society of artificial intelligences with its own agenda, perhaps desiring to exterminate humans from the universe. The Ousters live in space beyond the Hegemony and have modified themselves, presumably through genetic engineering, to survive better in space.

The Shrike may be terrifying to many people, but I don’t understand its purpose or find it credible. Consequently, I am mentally outside of the story, rejecting its premise.

In my opinion, the book contains too much magic technology, by which I mean technology that can’t be explained by our current understanding of physics. There is also a lot of technobabble that makes no sense.

Simmons borrows from Literature with a capital L for the Chaucerian frame story, John Keats, the story of Abraham and Isaac, the tales of King Arthur, and The Wizard of Oz. He probably uses literary symbolism that I’m unaware of.

John Keats

Reading Hyperion prompted me to look into the life and poetry of John Keats, one of the poets of the romantic school of the early 1800s. Keats died early at the age of 25 from tuberculosis. According to the Wikipedia article, Keats was little known during his short life, but he became much admired later and is now considered one of the great poets of English literature. The names Brawne and Lamia come from the life of Keats.

I checked out the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poems of John Keats and read a few of the poems. I do not like this type of poetry much.

Keats’s poem “Hyperion” concerns the god Saturn after he and the Titans have been overthrown by the Olympian gods. This is a topic that is not interesting to me.

Final Notes

Simmons’s book is creative and imaginative, and Hyperion is a major accomplishment worthy of admiration. We learn a great deal about the technology, culture, and politics of the Hegemony from the six tales. Simmons is a good writer with many very fine passages; he is exceptionally strong at building suspense.

The novel also has many faults, some of which I’ve mentioned above. Unfortunately, there is no resolution to the plot at the end of the book; it becomes the first volume of a duology with Fall of Hyperion (1990) as the second volume. The final two volumes, Endymion (1996) and Rise of Endymion (1997), pick up the story after the passage of nearly three hundred years after Fall of Hyperion.

I somewhat regret spending so much time on this book since I didn’t think it was that good. These notes are here to remind me of what I thought on this reading in case I ever get the urge to read the series again.

I cannot give this book a “very good” rating because of its flaws.

Rating: Three stars, good.