Spoilers Ahead

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Rating: 4 of 5

Hyperion is a excellent SciFi novel. Its really more like six novellas that are tied together.

The six novellas are:

• The Priest’s Tale of death and resurrection
• The Soldier’s Tale of passion
• The Poet’s Tale of sanity, insanity and art
• The Scholar’s Tale of loss and sacrifice
• The Detective’s Tale - a noir style detective story story
• The Consul’s Tale of humanities inhumanity to nature

The six novellas are all loosely tied together into the larger Hyperion storyline. Where the seven characters from the novellas are journeying to a planet called Hyperion to have audience with a mystery monster called the “Shrike”. The reason for this pilgrimage is vaguely explained in the back story of the Consuls and Detective’s tale.

Of the six novellas I most enjoyed the Priest, Poet, Scholar, and Consuls Tales. The Soldiers tale was fun, but more of chunky piece of action SciFi with some pretty graphic sex and violence. It had a reasonable “twist” at the end. Overall I found it to be a little formulaic and below the quality of the other novels. I think the Detective’s tale was bad. To me it felt like a weird story that was written to tie together the other five.

What Hyperion does well is create a epic and engaging world where Humanity is spreading through the universe like a virus aided by its AI semi-partners. I enjoyed that the theory of relativity was somewhat respected as traveling “offworld” without the aid of the magical far-caster caused “time debt” which would slow down aging of the individuals relative to those who stayed planet side.

Dan Simmons does an excellent job using SciFi tropes like teleportation, time travel, slow space travel, alien life and the evolution of man to explore more traditional themes like mortality, morality, passion etc in compelling ways. The novel is at its best when its more traditional literature acting like SciFi then when its SciFi pretending to be literature.

My biggest critique of the novel is that the detectives tale is just down right bad. It weaves the story together in a somewhat cohesive narrative by providing back story for the AI’s and their relationship with humanity which I think is really cool and interesting idea. But in truth the novella itself was crap. The sex scenes felt strange and the noir detective trope felt over done. Machine becomes man and woman falls in love with him… blah, blah…. Why the weird massive gun battle? Nothing felt like it fit right.

The other thing I didn’t really enjoy about the novel was that it has a lot of literary references to various songs, authors and poets. Most specifically John Keats. I struggled with this because I was mostly ignorant of these artists and didn’t want to take the effort to research them so I could better understand their component of the story. I don’t feel that I missed out on a lot by not knowing who John Keats is, but it was a bit of mental nag for me.

The mystery of the Shrike & Time Tombs. The Ousters - humans who have lived in deep space for centuries. The TechnoCore - a singularity of AIs living beside humanity. The Hegemony of Man - Humanities hyper technical society linked by the magical far-caster teleportation devices.
The human colonies humans inhabiting far away space without access to far casters. All these diverse components creates and epic and engaging world both for some enjoyable SciFi and for exploring old literary themes in fresh ways.

Overall I enjoyed Hyperion and strongly recommend it. There are three more Hyperion Novels but at this time I don’t believe I’ll read them. I enjoy leaving the ending of the novel as a mystery and the resolution of the Hyperion epic to my own fantasies rather then allow Dan Simmons finish it. For me a lot the fun of Hyperion is in the ambiguity. Resolving this ambiguity will take away from my own imagination of the tale.