Hyperion
Review
Hyperion is ’s masterpiece. It is the first book in his Hyperion Cantos. It follows seven pilgrims as they travel to the Time Tombs on Hyperion to petition the Shrike. Along the way, each tells their own story, weaving together history, myth, and prophecy to tell of the impending downfall of man.
I didn’t love Hyperion when I first read it about two years ago. It’s a book full of deep intertextuality, influenced heavily by ’s Hyperion, but also by ’s The Canterbury Tales. Simmons uses that classic pilgrimage structure as a frame to present six different stories, each one a pastiche of a different genre. But I missed almost all of that the first time. Instead, I was distracted by lasers, barbarians, and the god-like Shrike covered in blades.
Themes
The central theme of ’s Hyperion is the inevitability of change, especially the collapse of the old order. In his poem, this comes through in the Titans being overthrown by the Olympians. carries this theme into his Hyperion. We see it in the looming downfall of humanity, with their replacement by either the TechnoCore’s AIs or the Ousters, but also in smaller ways throughout each pilgrim’s story.
explores several other themes in his work: the relationship between beauty, truth, and power; the connection between knowledge and suffering; and the role of the poet. Simmons adopts these themes as well.
Tales
There are seven pilgrims, but only six live to tell their tales. uses each story to explore a different genre, but also to explore ’s themes in new settings and scales.
The Priest’s Tale
The Priest’s Tale tells the story of the priest’s mentor, Father Paul Duré, who is banished to Hyperion after faking evidence of a pre-human Christian civilization on Armaghast. On Hyperion, Duré ventures deep into the wilderness in search of the Bikura: the descendants of settlers from a crashed ship. He finds them living by a twisted Christianity, one that promises eternal life not through faith, but through the cruciform parasite that revives its hosts in a grotesque parody of the resurrection.
Here, the Catholic Church represents the old order being swept away by new, distorted religions. This tale inverts ’s idea that the new triumphs because it is beautiful—the Bikura are hideously disfigured. Duré suffers spiritually and physically, enduring a crisis of faith and eventually crucifying himself on a Tesla tree for seven years to defeat the parasite. His diary becomes the means by which he turns that suffering into understanding.
The Priest’s Tale is thematically similar to ’s Heart of Darkness, with Duré journeying into the wilderness only to uncover a horrifying truth about faith and humanity. It also reminded me of ’s The Star, where a Jesuit’s faith is shaken after learning that the star of Bethlehem was born from the destruction of an alien civilization, and ’s The Man, where Jesus wanders from planet to planet.
The Soldier’s Tale
The Soldier’s Tale is military sci-fi that follows Colonel Fedmahn Kassad from his training as a FORCE commando, through his commission and suppression of various uprisings, and finally into battle against the Ousters. In the middle of these conflicts, he is visited by a mysterious woman named Moneta, who appears at the moments of greatest violence. Her name comes from the goddess of memory in ’s Hyperion. This story is our first real hint that the Hegemony isn’t what it seems—that its power rests on brutality and hidden evils.
The story first shows the Hegemony as an old order able to hold off challengers again and again, but then reveals the Ousters as the possible heirs to the throne. Moneta herself ties beauty and power together, effortlessly destroying Ouster landing parties.
The Soldier’s Tale references John Carter from ’s A Princess of Mars. The scene where Kassad programs a surgical robot to attack the Ousters is directly referenced in ’s Lords of Uncreation. The reference to “rock and thighbone duels” reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The virtual battles are seen again in ’s Surface Detail, and the semi-sentient spacesuits call back to his short story Descendant.
The story also has one of my favorite lines from the whole book:
Firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient theological disputes…
The Poet’s Tale
The Poet’s Tale tells the story of Martin Silenus, born on Old Earth before the Great Mistake destroyed it. He becomes an author, writing popular books and unpopular poetry, before traveling with Sad King Billy to Hyperion. There, Silenus discovers his muse in the Shrike as it murders the other artists one by one. Left alone, Silenus becomes convinced that his poetry not only responds to the killings but may have summoned the Shrike in the first place.
Silenus watches the old order, Earth, fall, replaced by the Hegemony. He writes his Hyperion Cantos as a lament, claiming that humanity doomed itself by destroying its homeworld and would in turn be destroyed and replaced. His belief is explicitly Keatsian: that great poetry can shape the physical world, just as he thinks his Cantos summons the Shrike. Silenus is only able to write in the midst of pain, first during his exile on Heaven’s Gate and later on Hyperion as the Shrike is cutting down the other artists. His role is to witness the fall of humanity and transform that suffering into his greatest work of art.
In The Poet’s Tale, Silenus “writes” works based on real ones. His Dying Earth borrows from ’s The Dying Earth, and his Hyperion Cantos is the very text we are reading, collapsing reality into art. King Billy tries to destroy the Hyperion Cantos by burning it in a fountain with a statue of Laocoön. Like the Greek priest, Billy is killed for opposing divine power. The statue itself—Laocoön and his sons writhing in the grip of serpents—embodies suffering turned into art.
Because it is a story about writing, The Poet’s Tale makes the most allusions to other works. The Shrike is directly compared to Grendel from Beowulf. It mentions Huck and Jim from ’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sherlock and Moriarty from ’s The Final Problem, and the Eloi and Morlocks from ’s The Time Machine. Silenus even cites a fake book by a , almost certainly a reference to and .
The Poet’s Tale also reminded me of other stories. The super-rich staying behind to die on Earth reminded me of the dynasties in ’s Judas Unchained. The TechnoCore rebelling against its makers was like the Hivers in ’s Shards of Earth. The bio-sculptors brought to mind Ximenyr from The Hydrogen Sonata. The debates in the All Thing recalled Locke and Demosthenes shaping public opinion in ’s Ender’s Game. Even the android honorific “A.” mirrors the “R.” used by robots in ’s The Caves of Steel.
The Scholar’s Tale
The Scholar’s Tale retells the Binding of Isaac from The Book of Genesis. Sol Weintraub is a philosopher studying , whose daughter Rachel contracts Merlin’s disease while researching the Time Tombs on Hyperion. The disease makes her age backward, forgetting each morning what happened in her future. God—or the Shrike—appears to Weintraub in dreams and demands that he bring Rachel to Hyperion to sacrifice her, just as Abraham was asked to sacrifice Isaac. The irony is unavoidable: Weintraub is an expert in , whose Fear and Trembling is about the same ethical dilemma he now faces.
In Weintraub’s tale, the fall is of the rational universe—where God honors His covenants—into one that defies logic, where Earth has been destroyed and God demands Rachel’s sacrifice. Suffering and knowledge are inverted in this story, with Weintraub and his family suffering terribly as Rachel ages backward and loses her identity while his knowledge is powerless against the disease. He hopes—irrationally, as matches the new order—that Hyperion holds a cure.
This is one of my favorite stories. As a father, it’s hard to read because so much of Weintraub’s struggle is about helplessly watching his child slip away, but it also makes me more grateful for my own children. I cried both times I read it. It reminded me a little of ’s Flowers for Algernon, with the way it charts Rachel’s mental decline, but this one hit me much harder.
The Scholar’s Tale also makes a passing reference to ’s Ansible, seen in Rocannon’s World, The Left Hand of Darkness, and throughout her Hainish Cycle. The requirement to sleep to survive faster-than-light travel without going insane also shows up in ’s Shards of Earth.
The Detective’s Tale
The Detective’s Tale is a hard-boiled cyberpunk story, like a story written by . Brawne Lamia,1 a Lusian detective, is hired by an AI cybrid recreation of John “Johnny” Keats to investigate his own murder—the sudden disconnect between the AI and cybrid body that erased his recent memories. She soon learns the TechnoCore has three factions: the Stables, the Volatiles, and the Ultimates. Only one wants humanity to survive, yet all three are obsessed with Hyperion, a place their predictive routines can’t explain.
This tale shows the fall of the Hegemony and its possible replacement by the TechnoCore, led by the genocidal Volatiles. The Keats cybrid is beautiful in mind and body, seeking the truth of his death; he is literally a poet built by the TechnoCore to understand both humanity and Hyperion. Lamia loses her father, then her lover Johnny, and is nearly killed in a firefight outside the Shrike Temple. From this suffering, she uncovers the TechnoCore’s plans—and carries Johnny’s personality preserved in a Schrön loop inside her head.
The Detective’s Tale references a wide range of works. Its cyberspace cowboys recall Neuromancer; one is even named Gibson. Lamia uses a Schrön loop for data transport, right out of Johnny Mnemonic. There’s an allusion to ’s Big Brother from 1984. Johnny’s yearning for humanity echoes ’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. The possibility that the Shrike was sent back in time by the TechnoCore or the Ousters to change their future is directly from The Terminator. The hacking as a battle with the TechnoCore foreshadows the same scene in Surface Detail. The creation of the Keats cybrid, by compiling all his written works, reads today like how we train large language models.
The Consul’s Tale
The Consul’s Tale is a sci-fi romance based on ’s Romeo and Juliet, except the insurmountable force separating the couple isn’t their feuding families, but the laws of physics and time dilation.
The tale follows the Consul’s grandfather, Merin Aspic, who falls in love with a native woman named Siri while on unauthorized shore leave on the water-world Maui-Covenant. Their romance is cut short when Siri’s cousin kills Aspic’s friend, echoing Tybalt killing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Forced to flee, Aspic and Siri meet only a handful of times across her entire life, stretched by relativity into decades for her but only a few years for him. Their affair becomes a legend, and Siri convinces Aspic to resist the Hegemony’s assimilation of her world. After her death, Aspic honors her by sabotaging the project and sparking a rebellion in her name.
Here we also learn that the Hegemony and the TechnoCore conspired to destroy Earth with the Great Mistake, and that the Hegemony has been committing quiet genocide against other intelligent species, including the human Ousters. The Consul confesses to betraying the Hegemony to the Ousters, then double-crossing the Ousters to unleash the Shrike and force a war.
This story shows the fall of two orders: first Maui-Covenant, destroyed by the Hegemony, and then the Hegemony itself, undone by the Ousters with the Consul’s help. The Consul flips ’s idea that beauty and power go together. For him, the Hegemony is ugly, and destroying it is an act of beauty. He suffers the slow loss of Siri, but through it learns what the Hegemony truly is.
The Consul’s Tale reminded me of other works: the talking dolphins are straight out of ’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or ’s Sundiver. Siri’s gift of a powerful gun to Aspic reminded me of ’s A Gift from the Culture.
Conclusion
I’m sure it comes through clearly that I had a lot of fun on this second read-through, trying to pin down all the themes and references. To me, that’s what makes Hyperion a masterpiece: it’s a great sci-fi story on its own, but with levels of meaning hidden below the lasers, barbarians, and god-like Shrike covered in blades.
The only catch is that Hyperion is just the first half of the story. To get the full effect you have to read The Fall of Hyperion, which I plan to do again after a taking a quick break to read The Triumphant, and maybe Last Stand, The Sirens of Titan, and Fugitive Telemetry. I’m looking forward to it! And who knows? Maybe this time I’ll make it all the way through Endymion and The Rise of Endymion.
Previous Review
Hyperion was not at all the book I expected. To give you an idea of how much I misjudged it, about a third of the way through I would have rated it two stars and almost put it down, about two-thirds of the way through I was solidly at three stars, and by the end I was up to four. It was not the all-time great I was promised, but it was very good.
It is told as the tale of six different pilgrims traveling to the planet Hyperion to visit the Shrike, a cruel, death-god-like figure. Hyperion is very much The Canterbury Tales in space. At first the stories seem unconnected, but as the pilgrims travel and tell their tales we realize they are all connected, and they reveal a hint at the wider universe that the book takes place in. The book ends “suddenly” but the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, picks up right where Hyperion leaves off.
A theme that runs through the book is “the old gods replaced by the new”, based on ’s Hyperion poem about the Greek Titans falling to the new Gods of Olympus. We see this with the Humans and the AI TechnoCore, the humans and the Ousters (a breakaway post-human faction), the Scholar and the Old Testament God, and Catholicism and the new religions.
The Priest’s Tale
I think this story is supposed to be carried by the mystery, but it didn’t hook me. Not as much a horror story as I assumed halfway through, it’s still a little too far into the genre for me.
The Soldier’s Tale
A story with action, mystery, and our first really good look at both the Ousters and the Shrike.
The Poet’s Tale
Starts off slow, but the payoff is good. Silenus, the poet, is a spoiled annoying character, but the way he comes to believe that he has set the Shrike loose with his writing is exciting.
The Scholar’s Tale
Emotional, heartbreaking. In the Scholar’s Tale we learn why Sol Weintraub brought a two-week old baby—one getting younger all the time—on the deadly pilgrimage.
The Detective’s Tale
This story gives us a great look at the TechnoCore: the artificial intelligences that seceded from humanity but are still tightly involved in our affairs. The story hints that the TechnoCore’s three factions—the stables, the volatiles, and the ultimates—are engineering the coming war over Hyperion. The end is a bit too 1980s cyberpunk (dodging code phages in the neon cyberweb!), but the characters and history are compelling.
The Consul’s Tale
The final tale starts off as a love story between a planet-bound woman and a space-faring man who, because of relativity, ages much slower. But at the very end the story twists and it becomes a tale of revolution. It explains why and how the Consul intentionally set the entire Hyperion crisis in motion.
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Named after ’s real-life lover Fanny Brawne. ↩