As I’ve reported in my previous reviews of this series there were times where it seemed as if my gray matter was going to be permanently frI survived!
As I’ve reported in my previous reviews of this series there were times where it seemed as if my gray matter was going to be permanently fried by this epic sci-fi story. I finally got through to the end with most of my marbles still in the bag they came in.
It’s almost impossible to give a summary of this without spoiling the previous book so I’ll just say that Aenea and Raul Endymion continue their interstellar journey to fulfill her ultimate destiny as the powerful forces of a corrupted Catholic Church and the artificial intelligences of the TechnoCore try to stop them by increasingly desperate means. Oh, and the mysterious and deadly time-traveling Shrike continues to pop up.
This isn’t just your standard sci-fi space opera about a chosen one saving the galaxy from the Death Star. What Simmons has done here is create a tale that spans time and space in which even Jesus was a player and the ultimate stakes are the fate of evolution of life in the entire universe. As with the other books, he’s done an incredible job of building multiple stories and fusing them all together into a rich and diverse whole. Any one of his concepts could have been the basis for an entire book or series like a planet where the cities have been built high onto the tops of mountain peaks due an acidic ocean at lower altitudes. That’s just one stop along the way for Aenea and Raul.
So how did I live through it? Dan Simmons finally revealed himself to be human and somewhat fallible here in the last book. Don’t get me wrong. It’s still an excellent series and one of the most ambitious sci-fi stories I’ve read. But there were a few things that irked me in this one that took it down from five stars to four and that probably kept my brain pan from overheating.
First is that Simmons goes back and alters some of what we’re previously told in the earlier books. I’m not sure if he originally planned to end it after two books but carried it to four and had to do some changing to fit an ending he came up with later, or if he just discarded some ideas late in the game, but I didn’t like that what we thought happened in the first two books turned out to be untrue. Simmons didn’t commit any crimes against his fans on a George Lucas scale, but it bothered me, particularly the revisions to the Shrike’s origin and ultimate fate.
I also don’t think that Simmons knew when to turn off the creative mode and shift into resolution mode. He kept adding elaborate new settings and characters and events right up until the end game, and it started reminding me of how Lost just kept piling new characters and mysteries into its final season and didn’t do nearly enough wrapping up. Simmons still managed to provide a mostly satisfy ending, but when he added yet another mind blowing new setting in the last quarter of the book, I found myself getting a little impatient.
Still, these are minor quibbles about a sci-fi story that swung for the fences and managed to deliver on almost all of it’s potential....more
After weeks of medical treatment and therapAs I’ve written in my reviews of Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons is trying to melt my brain.
After weeks of medical treatment and therapy I’ve recovered enough to be rolled out to a sunny spot in my wheel chair with a nurse to wipe the drool from my chin. Despite the doctors’ warnings about continued exposure to Hyperion, I’ve gone ahead and read the third book in the series, Endymion. While there are still monumentally big sci-fi ideas in this story, I think that my earlier encounters have allowed me to build up some resistance to Simmons. I got through this one and only went blind in my right eye and lost all sense of smell, but no coma this time.
It’s hard to summarize this without giving up too much away. It’s about 250 years after the events of the last book, and we’re introduced to Raul Endymion, a young man with a checkered job history who is saved from death by a familiar character. Raul is asked by this person to find and protect a young girl, Aenea, from the forces of the Catholic Church who want to capture her. Aenea had been sent forward in time via one of the Time Tombs on Hyperion and the Church wants her captured immediately for unknown reasons.
The Church seized political and military power by using the parasitic cruciforms (handily shaped like crosses) that can resurrect a person from death to offer everlasting life to those who toe the Church’s line. Raul had refused to bow to Church authority and accept the cruciform so he’s an outcast and seems like a good candidate to keep the mysterious Aenea out of their hands. However, the Church has sent the devout Father Captain Fredrico de Soya to capture the girl. With the help of the android A. Bettik and the intervention from the deadly entity known as the Shrike, Raul and Aenea escape and begin a journey between worlds that is supposed to enable her to fulfill the destiny the Church is terrified of.
This book is an interstellar chase story with the dedicated de Soya hot on the heels of the fugitives as they run from planet to planet. De Soya was one of my favorite parts of this book. He’s dedicated and loyal to the Church, but he’s also very decent man. He’s so committed to the hunt that he makes Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive look like a crybaby quitter. De Soya has an incredibly fast pursuit ship but every jaunt between worlds kills him and turns his body to jelly leaving his cruciform to resurrect him. It’s an incredibly dangerous and horrible experience, but de Soya doesn’t blink as he repeatedly turns himself into paste to get closer to Aenea.
There’s enough gooey sci-fi goodness like space travel, time travel, alien monsters, and cyborg killers to keep the most demanding geek fan boy happy. And all of this moves the overarching story of Hyperion towards it’s ultimate conclusion. I just hope I can live through the next book....more
“Uh..Mr. Kemper. He’s the one in the vegetative state.”
“Oh, that’s a very sad "Nurse, this patient’s chart is very confusing.”
“Which patient, Doctor?”
“Uh..Mr. Kemper. He’s the one in the vegetative state.”
“Oh, that’s a very sad and odd case.”
“According to the patient history, he was admitted a few weeks ago with cerebrospinal fluid leaking from his nose and ears, but it seemed like he should recover. But yesterday he was brought in again, barely conscious and then he lapsed into a coma. The really odd thing is that I see no signs of injury or disease.”
“That’s right, Doctor. It was a book that did this to Mr. Kemper.”
“A book? How is that possible?”
“From what we can figure out, the first incident occured after he read Hyperion by a writer named Dan Simmons. I guess it’s one of those sci-fi books and apparently the story is quite elaborate. Anyhow, Mr. Kemper had read Simmons before and knew he likes to put a lot of big ideas in his books. But this time, apparently Simmons broke into his house and managed to directly implant much of the book directly into Mr. Kemper’s brain via some kind of crude funnel device.”
“I find that highly unlikely, Nurse.”
“Most of us did, Doctor. But Mr. Kemper kept insisting that Simmons had some kind of grudge against him. He even had a note he said Simmons had left that said something like ‘Don’t you ever learn? If you keep reading my books, I’ll end you someday.’”
“Assuming that I believed this story, I guess that Kemper’s current state tells us that he didn’t heed the warning?”
“Apparently not, Doctor. His wife said she found him having convulsions and leaking brain matter out his nose and ears again. A copy of the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion was on the floor nearby.”
“I can’t believe that reading a silly sci-fi book could turn an healthy man into a turnip, Nurse.”
“Well, when they brought Kemper in, he was semiconscious and muttering. Someone wrote it down. Let see, he kept repeating words and phrases like: Shrike, Time Tombs, the Core, God, uh…no, two gods actually, farcasters, Ousters, religion, pope, death wand, space battles, interplanetary trees, old Earth, AI, mega sphere, data sphere, The Canterbury Tales, poetry, John Keats, Tree of Thorns, and Lord of Pain.”
“Jesus! What does all that mean?”
“Someone looked it up on the web and all of that is actually in the book.”
“That poor bastard. No wonder his gray matter is fried. No one could absorb all that without permanent damage.”
“Yes, I’d think that book should have some kind of warning sticker or something on it.”
“One thing I still don’t understand, Nurse. If Kemper knew that this book would probably do this to him, why did he still read it?”
“I guess he had told several people that Hyperion was just so good that he had to know how it ended, even if it killed him.”
***************************************
I think the word ‘epic’ was invented to describe this book.
What Simmons began in Hyperion finishes here with a story so sprawling and massive that it defies description. In the far future, humanity has spread to the stars, and maintains a web of worlds via ‘farcasters’. (Think Stargates.) On the planet Hyperion, mysterious tombs have been moving backwards in time and are guarded by the deadly Shrike.
Seven people were sent to Hyperion on a ‘pilgrimage’ that was almost certainly a suicide mission, but the Ousters, a segment of humanity evolving differently after centuries spent in deep space, are about to invade. The artificial intelligences of the Core that humanity depends on for predictions of future events and management of the farcaster system can’t tell what’s coming with an unknown like the Shrike and Hyperion in play.
Battles rage across space and time and the virtual reality of the data sphere as varying interests with competing agendas maneuver and betray each other as the pilgrims on Hyperion struggle to survive and finally uncover the secrets of the Shrike. But the real reasons behind the war and it’s ultimate goal are bigger and more sinister than anyone involved can imagine.
I can’t say enough good things about the story told in these first two Hyperion books. This is sci-fi at it’s best with a massive story crammed with big unique ideas and believable characters you care about. Any one of the pieces could have made a helluva book, but it takes a talent like Simmons to pull all of it together into one coherent story....more
Somehow I’ve managed to read a dozen books by Dan Simmons without getting around to Hyperion, one of his most acclaimed works. Frankly, I’ve been scarSomehow I’ve managed to read a dozen books by Dan Simmons without getting around to Hyperion, one of his most acclaimed works. Frankly, I’ve been scared of it. Simmons has been mashing up horror, sci-fi, hard boiled crime novels, thrillers, and historical fiction while often stuffing his books with so many ideas that it was all I could do to keep up so this seemed like it could be a bit more than I could comfortably chew.
Just as I feared, while I was reading and nearing the end, Simmons crept into my house like a ninja and rammed a funnel into my skull. Then he poured his wild sci-fi ideas and concepts into my brain pan like a frat boy pouring the suds in a beer bong. My mind overloaded, and I gibbered like a monkey on meth for fifteen seconds before passing out. When I woke up an hour later with a wicked headache and cerebrospinal fluid leaking out my ears and nose, Simmons was gone, but he’d left a note saying “Don’t you ever learn? Keep reading and one of these days, I will END you!”
So now I’m typing this with cotton balls stuck in my nostrils and ears while I’m waiting to get my MRI scan, and I’m once again left in awe of just how many wildly original ideas Simmons can cram into one story.
Simmons borrows the structure of The Canterbury Tales here. In the distant future, humanity has spread out among the stars, and one of the planets they’ve inhabited is Hyperion which has the mysterious Time Tombs and a deadly entity known as the Shrike which protects the area around them. A powerful religion has grown around the Shrike and many make pilgrimages to try and see him from which almost no one ever returns.
A former Consul of Hyperion is contacted by the Hegemony government and told that he must join a pilgrimage to see the Shrike with six others. The Ousters, a faction of humanity mutated by centuries of living in deep space, has been making aggressive moves against Hegemony worlds and now they’re targeting Hyperion just as there are signs that the empty Time Tombs are about to stop moving backwards in time and finally reveal their secrets.
The Consul meets the other pilgrims which include a priest, a soldier, a poet, a scholar, a detective and the captain of a rare giant tree capable of space travel. (Yes, a giant tree moving through space. Ask Simmons. I’m just reporting the news here, folks.) Realizing that they must have been chosen to make the journey for a reason, they take turns telling the stories of their connections to Hyperion and the Shrike as they make their way towards the Time Tombs.
I struggled with this book at first because Simmons throws the readers into the deep end of the pool with little explanation of the universe he’s created, and I don’t do well with books that start like: “Captain Manly Squarejaw woke up on his Confederated star potato and drank a glass of strained purplepiss juice while checking his com unit thingie to get the lastest news on the crisis involving the Whogivesashitsus.“
Fortunately, Simmons gets the plot up and moving quickly, and then uses the stories of each of the pilgrims to fill us in on the history and setting. By using the different story tellers, Simmons gives different perspectives for tales as diverse as an interstellar war to a future detective story with big sci-fi action to quieter personal tragedies like a father losing his daughter to a horrible fate. All of these stories eventually come back around to Hyperion and the Shrike.
I was also impressed how Simmons writing this in 1989 foresaw a computer network linking people, but also turning them into information overloaded cyber junkies who confuse accumulating news with taking action. There’s so many different big sci-fi ideas in here that many writers probably would have been content to make an entire career out them, but Simmons uses them all deftly to create one unified story. Oh, and memo to George Lucas: the next time you want to make a sci-fi movie with interplanetary politics being a primary driver to your plot, read this first. Or just hire Simmons to write the damn thing for you .
My only gripe is that while I knew there were sequels to this, I thought I was getting a complete story, and it definitely leaves a lot hanging for the next book. And there’s a Wizard of Oz thing near the end, and I hate the goddamn Wizard of Oz. It’s a Kansas thing. ...more
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