Inspired by the structure (and to some degree the characters) of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", each of the pilgrams; a Priest, a Soldier, a Poet, a Scholar, a Detective, a previous Consul to Hyperion and a starship's captain (who never gets around to telling his story), tell their stories through a series of their own and other characters journals and personal accounts. In the Priest's tale, Father Lenar Hoyt reads from the tattered remains of the journal of Father Paul Dure, who after being exiled from the Hegemony for falsifying an archeological discovery, travels to Hyperion to search for a lost tribe, the "Bikura", human descendants of a centuries-old crashed interstellar colony-ship. Father Dure discovers the Bikura, who have regressed into a sub-human state after being infected by a cruciform-like parasite which makes them immortal by regenerating their bodies when they die. After Father Dure is unwittingly infected by the cruciform himself, he seeks deliverance from the immortality it imparts on him by crucifying himself within the native flame-forests of Hyperion, where his body is continually electrocuted and burnt over seven years before he is found by Father Hoyt and freed of his parasite and allowed to die.
In the Soldier's Tale, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad tells of his love affair with a phantom girl who appears to him while wired into a military tactical simulation environment, meant for training soldiers of the Hegemony during his days at military academy. After graduating, Colonel Fassad rises through the ranks to become the Hegemony commander at the battle of Bressia, a colony world invaded by the Ousters. When Fassad is wounded and flown out of the battle zone, his hospital ship is attacked by a Ouster raiding party while passing through the Hyperion system. Fassad is the sole survivor of the attack and being pursued by Ouster commandos, manages to crash land on the planet where he encounters the phantom girl from the simulation in physical form. Identifying herself as "Moneta", the phantom gives Kassad the power to distort and slow-down time which he uses to fight-off the pursuing Ousters before it is revealed that Moneta is some sort of manifestation of the Shrike which has used Kassad to lure the Ousters and set the seeds for the interstellar war about to be fought over Hyperion.
In the Poet's tale, Martin Silenus tells of his early days on old Earth several hundred years ago before the planet was destroyed by a human-generated black hole in the "Big Mistake" of '38. Just before the destruction of the planet, Silenus is sent on a 167 year space trip in suspended animation, from which he awakes suffering from a stroke and must re-learn to speak (all but nine words). While recovering and undergoing hard labour in an effort to pay off his debts, he writes a book of poetry celebrating life during the last days of Earth, and becomes one of the richest men in the galaxy. Years later, jaded by his writing career, Silenus works as a poet on Hyperion under the artistic patronage of Sad King Billy, who sets up a new colony on the planet. Silenus rediscovers his muse and sets about writing his cantos about the same time as the planet's new inhabitants start being mysteriously killed-off one-by-one by the Shrike. Silenus eventually leaves Hyperion and spends several more decades and centuries occasionally in suspended animation up until the current date of the pilgrimage.
In the Scholar's tale, professor Sol Weintraub tells of his daughter Rachael, who at the age of 24 is struck down by a strange illness while working on an archeological research project at the Time Tombs. Rachael begins to age backwards (think "Benjamin Button") and wakes up each morning remembering only events that have happened before her current backwards-moving age. As Rachael gradually loses the memory of a lover, her studies, school friends and eventually how to walk and talk, her parents desperately seek a cure while Sol is plagued by strange dreams of a voice that commands that he bring his daughter Rachael to Hyperion as a sacrifice. After his wife is killed in a tragic accident, Sol becomes obsessed with the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac and it's significance to his own circumstances. As Rachael's "birth-date" approaches, Sol is called to the pilgrimage.
In the Detective's tale, private investigator Brawne Lamia tells of a client who approaches her to investigate their own murder. The client is a human-clone controlled by an artificial intelligence which resides in the "Web" and is an emulation of 18th century poet John Keats. Through investigating the murder, Lamia is swept up in a political plot by AIs that seek to predict and model the future but have difficulty in integrating the Time Tombs into their models; one faction of AIs seeks to integrate Hyperion and the Time Tombs into the Hegemony and another faction seeks to distance the anomaly.
In the Consul's tale, the Consul tells of the love affair of his grandparents Siri, a young girl of the backwater world Maui-Covenant and Merin, a crew-member of the starship Los Angeles which is involved in the development of a farcaster portal that would link Maui-Covenant to the rest of the Hegemony. The two meet when Siri is fifteen and Merin nineteen, but Merin leaves the system every few months to return to Hegemony space, a round trip that takes a few months ship-time but eleven years on Maui-Covenant time because of the relativistic speeds at which the Los Angeles travels at. Eventually a 25 year old Merin returns to Maui-Covenant to find Siri has passed away from old age; Merin leads a rebellion against the construction of the farcaster after he is convinced by Siri over the years that the link to the Hegemony will only bring destruction to the pristine marine ecosystem of the planet. The Consul reveals that he has secretly held the hatred for the Hegemony and played an instrumental role in the developing conflict with the Ousters, acting as a double agent, hoping that interstellar war would free the Shrike from Hyperion and the Time Tombs, allowing it to wreak havoc on the Hegemony as a form of vengeance for the Hegemony's actions on his home planet. Throughout the story-telling, the pilgrims slowly journey towards the Time Tombs and the novel ends with the six remaining pilgrims descending into the valley of the tomb.
"Hyperion" reads a bit like a series of novellas placed end-to-end; each story is somewhat self-contained, but the reader is gradually introduced to more and more elements of the universe of the novel as the stories go on. Action occurs in-between the stories, but doesn't really have a big affect on the overall narrative; in the end we don't find out what happens when the pilgrims arrive at the Time Tombs, it's their journeys to arrive at this moment which are important (so there is a sequel apparently that wraps this up, but the word seems to be it's not that good). What I really liked about the novel was the individual tales. Like "The Canterbury Tales", to some degree the novel has each pilgrim telling their tale in a style and voice that matches their character; this was probably done best with the Priest's and the Poet's tales but could have been perhaps a bit stronger with the other characters. Probably the best tale (in my opinion) was the Priest's; it was the most interesting and kept me wanting to read every new page by holding on to the interest. The use of the voice of the storyteller in the Poet's tale made for good entertainment value as did the action of the Soldier's tale. The Scholar's tale was genuinely heartfelt and although the Detective's tale started well (with a twist on the classic hard-boiled private eye story) it felt a bit convoluted towards the end. I also liked the Consul's tale with it's the use of the time-dilation coming between two lovers (perhaps with inspiration from Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War"). The novel uses a lot of jargon that is kind of thrown at the reader early on and kind of expects you to fill in the details from a familiarity with the genre or contemporary ideas in popular science. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I can see how non-sf readers might find this frustrating. After reading "Hyperion" I can see a similarity in the universe to elements of Peter F. Hamilton's books; I wonder if this is Simmon's influence on Hamilton or just some sort of cross-fertilisation as the two authors wrote vaguely in the same time period (funnily enough, Peter F. Hamilton wrote the introduction to the edition of the book I have too).
I did really enjoy reading this one; some of the tales were really well constructed and overall the backstory and universe to the novel was very entertaining to unfold if nothing else. That said, somehow I can't help thinking that the book could have been so much greater; there were a few moments and parts of the story that just seemed to go off-track a bit. I never really understood why it was needed to open up all the business about the AI factions so late in the book. The Siri/Merin component of the Consul's tale was great but it did end up feeling like it had been chopped out and placed into the rest of the Consul's story, which felt a bit clumsy (I'm being a bit harsh here; I mean in comparison to the excellent quality of some of the other character's tales).
Overall, although I wouldn't rate this as a definitive classic, its definitely worth reading; very entertaining, clever and unique.
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