Kemper's Reviews > Hyperion

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 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.