Book Post: Hyperion

Earlier this year I read Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, and it was an excellent read. It’s one of those sci-fi books like Dune that plays fast and loose with science, but has so many wild ideas in it that you can’t dismiss it. It’s also a book about poetry and storytelling. The story is soaked in Keats in a way that I don’t have the literary background to appreciate, and the format of the book itself calls back to the Canterbury Tales. The characters are wrestling with ancient myths to guide them through an incomprehensible present.

Here’s a summary of the tales, which I’m mostly writing out to gather my thoughts. The characters tell their life stories, which spin around the Shrike, an avatar of unstoppable violent death. There’s a priest who has a run-in with the horror of apparent immortality. There’s a father unwillingly shepherding his daughter through a sort of inevitable reverse death. There’s a poet who takes death as his muse in his struggle with the loss of his past and the emptiness of what civilization offers. A noire detective finds and loses love uncovering a vast conspiracy, and is mysteriously saved from further consequences by the death cult. A soldier keeps meeting his mysterious lover on the battlefield as he deals death across the galaxy. A man must work in dilated time to build spacefaring infrastructure for his neocolonialist government, but his wife is a leader of the planet he’s working to colonize, and he finds her to have aged many years more than he has every time he goes to the surface to visit her.

The characters bring stories out of an empire which is vast and powerful, but also ugly and more fragile than it may seem on first glance. Simmons portrays civilization as dirty and deserving of its inevitable doom. An uncaring universe has ravaged everything the characters care about, and they seek various forms of closure from death’s avatar. The stories contemplate the idea of time, whether it’s running backward or running out. Like I said, the science doesn’t hold up, but the technological limitations are well-defined, and the contemplation on how civilization might react to having certain technical abilities is compelling. This goes on my list of books which take a philosophical stance I don’t wholly agree with and portray it beautifully.

I also read the sequel The Fall of Hyperion, which was too long, but it did wrap everything up nicely. I wouldn’t recommend the sequel, unless you’re willing to slog through a lot of words to get closure and some half-baked but viscerally imagined contemplation on the dangers of sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence.