gemini://gem.acdw.net:1965/page/2021-01-06. Hyperion

I recently finished reading /Hyperion/, by Dan Simmons. It was recommended to me by someone on IRC, so if you’re reading this, thanks for the recommendation! I really enjoyed it.

If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s kind of a cosmic-horror, science fiction version of the /Canterbury Tales/ or the /Decameron/. It follows seven pilgrims on their way to the Time Tombs on the galactic Outback planet Hyperion, on the last Shrike Pilgrimage before intergalactic (I suppose actually intragalactic) war. The Shrike is a mysterious, otherworldly character, with four arms covered in blades, who can move through time and kills people gruesomely. The Time Tombs are its home and its prison, and they’re in an anti-entropic field, called the Time Tides, which make time move strangely within them. The pilgrims were chosen for their connections to the Shrike, the Tombs, or to Hyperion, and so they decide to share their stories in order to figure out a way to defeat the Shrike upon their meeting. The bulk of the book is in these stories.

The stories themselves are very good, a great mixture of cyberpunk, space opera, Lovecraftian horror, mystery, and character-driven fiction. The world is fully drawn and deep – when I looked up Simmons after finishing the book I wasn’t really surprised to find that he had been an English teacher for a long time before writing anything. He also packs in allusions to literature and history, both historical and future-historical, and mixes them in a way that feels real and lived-in.

My one issue with the novel is a common one among its readers: so much of the story is spent in flashback tales, there’s not much plot development in the current time of the novel. I found myself waiting for the big payoff at the end of the novel, only to find it never came. For this reason, I find it more accurate to describe /Hyperion/ as a collection of closely-connected short stories, as opposed to a proper novel. That being said, I’m definitely going to read the sequel, /The Fall of Hyperion/, to see what happens.

2021-01-06. Hyperion - Dan Simmons