Hyperion

Do you remember the Earth when you were young? I looked at my world with young eyes, but the Earth was younger too, more innocent and trusting. Now, I see my world with old, jaded eyes and the Earth looks back, older, jaded, and hurting. In just the 60 years since I was young, a fragment of a blink in geographic time, we have hurt our beautiful Planet beyond the point of healing, and rescue. All because of a species that values a meaningless medium of exchange that can't be held beyond our graves.

Now, project 7 centuries into the future. Old Earth is long destroyed in a plan by our future capitalists to force their sick expansion of humans into as many star systems and their planets as possible, destroying any indigent species standing show more in their way. If you possessed the means to stop them, even if it meant the loss of your own, and your loved ones' lives, even if it meant interstellar war, would you do it?

In a heartbeat. show less

Hyperion successfully mashes up several different genres while all existing in the same universe, with only the occasional suspension of disbelief required. The Shrike also makes for a memorable monster, although it's not as large a part of the book as I thought it would be going into it.
The best part of Hyperion is it's melancholy view of the future. Interstellar travel is possible, but only at the price of many years of your life. You can see many generations of your family grow old and die after a single star voyage because of complications from time relativity. Planets are hooked up to a fabulously wealthy system of interconnected portals and trade, but often at the cost of environmental degradation, cultural submission, imperialist show more genocide of alien species, and on and on. The fate of humanity is to join together in a noisy, ignorant, rapacious Hegemony at the cost its soul. The start of the book suggests a terrifying apocalypse and the end makes you question if that apocalypse would really be that bad.
I'm giving it only four stars because there are a couple of plot points and turns of phrase made me roll my eyes, but overall I liked it. show less

4/5

The story of the seven last pilgrims sent to the Time Tombs on the mysterious and far-away world of Hyperion, where the metal instrument of death known as the Shrike prowls. As every other review of Hyperion has already said, it's told in the style of The Canterbury Tales, something that I've never read myself. Each of the pilgrims, in turn, tell the story about why they were personally selected for the journey, and the events surrounding their connection with the planet or with the Shrike. In my opinion, this style of storytelling is one of the strongest elements of the novel. It's just an engaging way to read a story. However, not all of the stories are created equal.

The first story, the priests tale, is one of the best novellas show more that I've ever read, one of the best SF stories I've read. It's the major reason that Hyperion is getting a high score from me. It's something that could totally be read independently from the rest of the text, so at least there's that. The writing is stellar. Simmons shows that he can craft prose that is not only beautiful, but also engages the reader and tells them about the world at the same time. There's a palpable sense of dread, and horror as the story plays itself out, and a high strung tension that made me completely incapable of putting it down. Simmons is especially fond of and good at describing lighting, including sunsets, light shafts in building, and the diffused quality of twilight. It's also incredibly memorable. The main character, the tesla trees, the cruciform, the Shrike himself. I only wish that the quality of this first tale continued into the rest of the book.

Some of the other tales are good to passable in quality, and while they aren't nearly as good as the first, they are at least good enough to deserve a place in the novel. The scholar(a father/daughter story), the consul(an environmental and colonization themed love story) , and the solider(a historical fiction action love story) all fit into this category to me. Sometimes they were a little bit on the nose, overly saccharine, sometimes even cringy, but they were fine for the most part. If nothing else, they were good ways to see glimpses into the larger world of the hegemony. I appreciate that the world of the hegemony feels expansive. I'm also glad that Simmons made an attempt to create historical events that took place between our known history, and the time of the book, something that I think is sorely missing from a lot of SF epics.

Unfortunately, both the scholars tale and the detectives tale were sore thumbs compared to the rest. The story of the scholars tale was interesting, and I think could have been passable, but the scholar himself is so annoying that he ruined the story. Some of this annoyance even bleeds out into the interstitial material in between the tales. Why make him so annoying to read? It seems to serve no purpose to the story or the character. If you don't find his character so annoying, I'm sure that his tale would be more palatable. The detectives tale was by far the worst. At times I was astounded that it was written by the same person who wrote the priests tale. Not only is the quality far lower than the rest, but the tone clashes with the rest as well. Maybe I just don't like detective stories, but Jesus, I think it's objectively bad.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the ending. It sucked. It's a total non-ending. I've talked about my opinion on books that are written with a sequel in mind, and they aren't favorable. I think the reader deserves some sort of closure after reading such a lengthy novel. As it is, Hyperion ends not just without an ending, but without a climax entirely. It's the literary form of spiteful edging. 500 pages of build up to an event that doesn't even happen. Now, I'll also note that I like a story that ends with some form of ambiguity, something that keeps you curious and thinking about it afterwards. If you've given enough pieces of puzzle to the reader, you can let them forms those last pieces themselves, entertaining multiples ways in which things fit together. This is not the case with Hyperion. Simmons gives you all of the edge pieces of the puzzle, with the middle completely missing, flips you off, and says "Guess you'll have to read the next one, dickhead".

This is probably the most negative review I've ever had for a book that I've rated so highly, and that speaks to how good the priests tale is. God, if only Simmons could've kept that same quality throughout. Or at least finished the book with some sort of conclusion. As it stands, Hyperion has some of the largest wasted potential I've ever seen. It could've been one of the gold standards of the genre, which I guess it still is for lots of folks. I still find myself struggling to reconcile these diametrically opposed feelings I have towards it. Ultimately though, I think that's a point in it's favor. At least it elicits strong opinions, in both directions. Hyperion is easy to talk about passionately. There's a lot of things you can say about it, but hey, at least it doesn't fall into the doldrums of mediocrity. show less

Is Hyperion a novel? These are the kind of questions I irritated my Modern Novel class with. There are two potential objections you can make, I think. The first is that it's actually a series of short stories. The second is that the story doesn't actually end: Hyperion is really only the first half of a novel that ends in The Fall of Hyperion. (These are, I guess, mutually exclusive objections.)

Yet, I would argue, Hyperion stands on its own. Fall is a vastly different book with a different focus; it picks up what was begun here, but the focus on character and genre that motivates Hyperion is gone. And Hyperion comes to a perfectly satisfying conclusion in its own way. But I'm getting ahead of myself there.

Like so many of the stories I show more like, Hyperion is a story about stories. Its format is self-consciously literary from the moment someone in the book actually points out that you're reading The Canterbury Tales in space (p. 25). This is brought to the forefront in chapter 3, the Poet's Tale: "Hyperion Cantos." Martin Silenus asks, "Haven’t you ever harbored the secret thought that somewhere Huck and Jim are—at this instant—poling their raft down some river just beyond our reach, so much more real are they than the shoe clerk who fitted us just a forgotten day ago?" (180-81). I suspect this is an Adam Bede reference; in that novel, the narrator complains that people identify too much with fictional characters: "It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers—more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish [...], than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay." You'll note that for George Eliot, having more sympathy for fictional characters than for real salesmen is a negative, whereas Silenus seems to revel in it. But then, Silenus is an ass.

I doubt he would have been into Hyperion, but I think there's a sense in which Henry James agreed more with Dan Simmons than George Eliot when he wrote "The Art of the Novel." According to James, "It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a 'make believe' [...] shall be in some degree apologetic—shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to compete with life. This, of course, any sensible wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it, disguised in the form of generosity. [...] The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life." Now, Hyperion does make that confession that James says fiction should not, but I think it does so in order to compete with life. James wanted literature to compete with history by pretending to be history: "if it [fiction] will not give itself away, [...] it must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian." But for Simmons, literature wins by unabashedly being literature.

This Hyperion does. It has a profound sense of history, yet at the same time, it is conscious of its fiction. Hyperion is okay with competing with reality-- and possibly even beating reality-- because Simmons, like James, knows that we need stories to make sense of the universe: "history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians" (Hyperion 190). Without stories, we won't know we're in a cow, we'll only perceive a dark, digestive mess. But, on the other hand, perhaps the cow is lie, for Silenus says that words "are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. 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" (191). This is what's happened to all the characters in Hyperion: they are all locked in the prisons of the stories they have told about themselves.

But that's the reason Hyperion spans seven different genres: because each genre supplies a different truth about the world, building up our composite picture. When the Hyperion pilgrims tell each other their tales, they are set free because they are able to see all the other possible stories. They have gone from having a cow to having seven possible explanations for the dark, digestive mass that is life.

And this is why Hyperion actually is a novel. It may be made up of seven different stories, and it may continue into a second book, but it does have a conclusion and a resolution: having told their own stories, and having heard those of the others, the Hyperion pilgrims achieve a measure of self-acceptance, and walk off into the unknown, singing "We're Off to See the Wizard." Reading it, I got the shivers. A group of broken people has achieved peace at last.

Hyperion lets us step outside of our stories and histories, remove ourselves from our prisons, by showing them to us in a new context: it lets us reevaluate faith by imagining we live in a world where faith can literally be proved, or lets us imagine what it means to be a parent sacrificing a child by imagining a world where God literally contacts someone to get him to do this, or lets us contemplate how we build God by showing us computers literally trying to build God, or lets us explore the relationship between sex and violence by giving us a being that is literally sex and violence.

At the same time, these people hear the disparate stories, and step outside their own prisons. No matter what happens in Fall, they've escaped their prisons and so have we, through the art of the novel. show less

For years, I had Dan Simmons’s Hyperion lurking on the edge of my awareness. I knew it was sci-fi, I suspected it might be good, but I had never looked it up.

Big mistake.

Hyperion is not good; it’s fantastic. And since it’s now been around for over 20 years, it’s certainly my loss for not having read it sooner.

Briefly, this is a quest story based on a quest story that’s based on some other quest stories. Simmons assembles an excellent cast of characters from different walks of life – a warrior, a cleric, a scholar, a poet, and so on – and sets them off on a pilgrimage, a la the Canterbury Tales, and along the way each tells his or her story. All of the constituent stories are good, but I was particularly taken with the very show more first one, the Priest’s tale. Throughout the novel, other literary and historical references and allusions abound – including the eponymous planet, to take one obvious example.

Where are the pilgrims heading? In search of the Shrike, an immediately compelling and enigmatic monster who somehow holds the fate of humanity in his hands – uh, pincers.

The novel’s episodic structure and real-historical call-outs are clever orientating moves that many other sci-fi writers have tried, but few have pulled off as well as Simmons does here. He writes extremely well, and he’s got a firm and realistic grip on the murky essences of human nature, which are not likely to change even as technology advances.

One minor caution to prospective readers: this is the first installment in a four-book series. I knew that going in, and was glad of it. Hyperion comes to an end, but you’re really meant to go right on and continue the series. And that’s precisely what I shall do.

Highly recommended. show less

Hyperion is as good as space opera gets, in a beautiful and lyrical story that teases at a much bigger issue. The planet Hyperion lies on the edge of the human Hegemony, an interstellar civilization bound together by teleportation gates and the guiding aegis of the independent AI TechnoCore. On Hyperion are the Time Tombs, mysterious temples guarded by an anti-entropic field, and a horrific killing machine called the Shrike. Seven pilgrims have been selected for one last pilgrimage, in the very teeth of an invasion by an opposing civilization of star-travelling barbarians, each of them seeking some blessing from the Shrike. As they travel from deep space to the Time Tombs, the pilgrims each tell their story of an encounter with the show more Shrike, and Simmons shifts to another genre, revealing more mysterious, and painting a picture of a deeply decadent civilization.

Father Lenar Hoyt is a Catholic priest who carries the heavy burden of the Cruciform, a cross-shaped parasite he picked in the immense labyrinths under Hyperion (as an aside, nine planets are labryinthine worlds, with massive tunnel complexes deep in the crust. No one knows who made the tunnels, or why). Fedmahn Kassad is a retired soldier, obsessed with a strange woman he met in his training simulations. Kassad once fought a battle on Hyperion, teaming up with the woman and the Shrike to defeat an Ouster landing force. The next time, he plans to kill them. Martin Silenus was born on Old Earth, before it was destroyed by an artificial Black Hole, and became a great poet. He lived in the artists' colony of Keats, writing an epic canto as the Shrike killed everyone else around him. Sol Weintraub's daughter was an archaeologist who has been afflicted by a strange disease from the Time Tombs and is aging backwards; in less than a week she'll be unborn. Jewish, he dreams of the God of Abraham demanding that he sacrifice his daughter at the Time Tombs. Het Masteen is a starship captain and Priest of Muir, and killed before he can tell his story. Brawne Lamia is the daughter of a senator and a private investigator. She's hired to investigate one Johnny Keats, a recreation of the poet (who wrote the original Hyperion cantos) made at immense cost by the AI technocore for their own mysterious purposes. And The Consul is the former governor of Hyperion, a grandchild of one of the greatest rebels in history, a participant in genocide, and now traitor to the Hegemony. Everybody carries and unburdens a terrible secret, building to a complete picture of an immanent Catastrophe, some unknown event which will pivot around these few people and the Time Tombs...

And that's where the book ends, with them singing a song from the Wizard of Oz and tramping towards their destiny. The sequel, Fall of Hyperion, has the proper conclusion, but Fall didn't win a Hugo, and I haven't read it recently. Hyperion is so good that it doesn't need a closure. Simmons' writing in this is perfect, a live wire that connects the biggest cosmological mysteries with the lives of more-or-less ordinary people. I know how it ends, how the pieces all fit together, but this story with it's deliberate gaps and constant revelations, is a true masterpiece. show less

Llevo sin leer libros de Dan Simmons años, y no sé por qué. Es un autor que escribe bastante bien y cuyas historias nunca son aburridas, destacando sobre todo su imaginación. Como me suele pasar, cuando leí alguno de sus libros, me entusiasmaron tanto, que me compré más novelas suyas. Que, como también es habitual que me suceda, acabaron es ese monstruoso montón de libros al que llamo Pendientes De Leer. Y es que siempre hay (y habrá) otro escritor o escritora que me guste más en un momento determinado; y yo, infiel de mí, me dedico a las nuevas adquisiciones dejando las viejas para otro momento, que normalmente suele ser indefinido.

'Hyperion' es un novela absolutamente indispensable para cualquier lector de ciencia show more ficción. Escrita por Simmons en 1989, fue un golpe de aire fresco para el género. Simmons homenajea la mítica obra poética 'Hyperion', de John Keats, haciendo referencia a nombres y fragmentos. Añadir también que 'Hyperion' forma parte de una tetralogía, la llamada 'Los Cantos de Hyperion'.

La historia es compleja y a la vez atractiva. Estamos en el siglo XVIII, donde se ha formado la llamada Hegemonía del Hombre, una red de mundos. Pero ahora está en peligro. Un enemigo exterior, los llamados Éxters, que se separaron de la humanidad hace siglos, amenazan la Hegemonía. Pero no sólo a la Hegemonía, sino también a sus aliados, el TecnoNúcleo, una comunidad de Inteligencias Artificiales provenientes de Vieja Tierra, que ayudan a los humanos en el manejo de tecnología, como pueden ser los Teleyectores, artefactos capaces de teletransportar instantáneamente a través de todos los mundos.

Para hacer frente a la amenaza Éxter, la Iglesia de la Expiación Final ha patrocinado una última peregrinación a las Tumbas de Tiempo, situadas en el planeta Hyperion, que ocultan muchos secretos, entre ellos el del temible Alcaudón, un ser que no deja acercarse a ninguna nave. Unos lo consideran una deidad, otros la última esperanza de la humanidad. Serán estos peregrinos quienes tendrán que hacerle frente.

Los peregrinos son siete: un diplomático, un profesor, una detective, un poeta, un sacerdote, un soldado y un navegante. Ninguno de ellos sabe porqué ha sido elegido, pero todos ellos tienen claro que su destino será posiblemente la muerte a manos del Alcaudón. Para no aburrirse en su viaje a las Tumbas de Tiempo, deciden contarse su historia, para de esta manera saber qué los une, tanto entre ellos, como con Hyperion, cuáles son sus motivaciones. Y esta es la clave de la novela, donde Simmons utiliza todo su arsenal de ideas, ya que utiliza diversas técnicas narrativas para contarnos las diferentes historias de los peregrinos, pasando así mismo por diversos géneros, cyberpunk, space opera, terror, en un tour de force prodigioso. show less