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Hyperion (novel)
Encyclopedia
Hyperion is a Hugo Award
-winning 1989 science fiction
novel by American writer Dan Simmons
. It is the first book of his Hyperion Cantos
, and is the only book in it to extensively employ the literary device of the frame story
. The plot of the novel features multiple time-lines and characters. This book is succeeded by the 1990 science fiction novel The Fall of Hyperion
of the same writer.
drive" ships and then through "farcasters", which permit nigh instantaneous travel between them regardless of the distances. The farcaster network (the "WorldWeb") is the infrastructural and economical basis of the Hegemony of Man and thus determines the whole culture and society. Also flowing across these portals are the structures of the datasphere (a network reminiscent of the Internet
in design, but far more advanced). In that lurks the powerful, knowledgeable, and utterly inscrutable TechnoCore — the vast agglomeration of millions of AI
s who run almost every piece of high technology of mankind. The unthinking hubris of man resulted in the death of the home-world (Earth
), and this arrogant philosophy was carried forth to the stars, for centuries.
The Hegemony itself is a largely decadent society, relying on its military to incorporate into the WorldWeb the colony planets, even unwillingly, and also to defend the Hegemony from attacks by the Ousters
, "interstellar barbarians" who dwell free of and beyond the bounds of the Hegemony and shun all the works of the TechnoCore (especially farcasters). The political head of the Hegemony is an executive advised by the TechnoCore advisory council. All the 'Core's advice and predictions are confounded by the mysterious structures of the Time Tombs and a creature called the Shrike
on the remote colony world Hyperion (named after John Keats
' poem). Even worse, the Ousters have long been obsessed with Hyperion, and their invasion there is imminent.
Into this evolving crisis come seven pilgrims to make the journey to the Time Tombs and the Shrike, that seems to guard the Time Tombs, there to ask one wish of it. The Shrike is the object of a cult, the Church of the Final Atonement. Occasionally the church sends a prime-number of pilgrims to the Time Tombs; there is a legend that all but one are slaughtered and the remaining pilgrim gets his request granted. Aboard a treeship the pilgrims finally meet after being revived out of their cryogenic storage state; they decide they each will tell their tale to enliven the long trip to the Tombs and to get to know each other. Simmons uses this device to unfold the panorama of this universe, its history and conflicts. The story opens in medias res
.
theologian, archaeologist, ethnologist, and follower of Teilhard de Chardin into exile on the planet of Hyperion. Father Duré planned to set up an ethnological research station along Hyperion's Cleft, where rumors place an isolated civilization called the Bikura.
He discovered the Bikura which arrived on Hyperion on one of the early seedships and were infected by parasites called cruciforms which populate a part of Hyperion's labyrinth system. These cruciforms resemble crosses that are irreversibly encrusted into the victim's chest. They store all of the information that makes up the infected individual including their memory, which allows them to be healed and to live forever, even reconstructing the body of a person after their corpse has been almost totally destroyed. But information is progressively lost and after a number of cycles the individual becomes sexless and retarded. Therefore the Bikura can be described as a society of 70 immortal genderless simpletons. As Father Duré slowly discovers the truth about them, they lead him into Hyperion's labyrinth system where he encounters the Shrike, and a cruciform is placed on his chest.
The cruciform does not allow anyone to escape the place where the Bikura live and so, to save his body from being reborn as a mindless automaton, Duré crucifies himself to an electricity-conducting Tesla tree. It is here that Father Hoyt finds him seven years later, continually being electrocuted and reborn, but not losing his mind because the pain caused by the electricity keeps the cruciform from returning him to the village, while still keeping him alive. Hoyt takes Duré's cruciform into himself and also has a cruciform implanted for his own reincarnation.
, when he was immersed in a detailed simulation of the Battle of Agincourt
. During the battle, Kassad is saved from a French knight by the mysterious Mnemosyne/Moneta, who becomes his lover there, and who comes from "outside". They meet repeatedly in further simulations, until Kassad's final year in the Academy. After he graduates from the Academy the young Martian man becomes a FORCE officer.
Kassad accomplishes various missions against terrorists, rebels, resistance groups etc. After being injured Kassad strands on Hyperion near the vicinity of the Time Tombs. There Moneta and the Shrike (re-)appear and Kassad learns that Moneta and the Shrike wish to use him to spark an interstellar war in which billions will die. He is eventually rescued and returned to the WorldWeb, where he resigns from FORCE and becomes an anti-war activist. His purpose on the pilgrimage is to track down Moneta and the Shrike, and to kill them.
over the century the voyage would take that the family's debt would be paid off and enough left over for Martin to live on for a time.
Unfortunately, the accounts were nationalized by the Hegemony, and Silenus suffered brain damage during the voyage. Deep in penury, Silenus had to work as a common laborer. The back-breaking toil forces Silenus's mind to flee to higher planes, and as he recovers his use of language, he starts work on his Hyperion Cantos, a work he began as a parody of John Keats
' famous poem, but which evolved into a dual account of Silenus's life and an epic account of the Titanomachia, in which the Hegemony of Man takes the part of the Titans and the TechnoCore the Olympians. His Dying Earth (as it is called, in an explicit reference to Jack Vance
's Dying Earth series) becomes an enormous hit, selling billions and making him a multi-millionaire.
Eventually he falls into debt again and in an attempt to produce another hit has a larger unabridged version of his cantos published, which is predicted to fail by his publisher. The work is a terrible flop, selling few copies and not recouping the money he was advanced. In order to pay his debt, Silenus is forced to produce further hackwork for his "Dying Earth" series, a misery many artists face. One day he realizes that his Cantos, his greatest work, has not been added to for years; his muse
had fled. Silenus leaves his lifestyle, liquidates his assets, and signs on with Sad King Billy.
Billy is an aristocrat of the planet Asquith, descended from the House of Windsor
, and an intelligent and sensitive lover and critic of the arts. Fearful of the FORCE General Horace Glennon-Height's rebellion against the Hegemony, Billy decides to relocate to Hyperion and create a new Renaissance by establishing a kingdom of artists. He chooses for his capital a location near the Time Tombs on the then-even less inhabited Hyperion, reasoning that their presence will give the proper ambience for the creation of great art.
For ten years, all goes well until people begin vanishing, with no abductors ever seen. At the same time, Silenus' muse returns, and he continues work on the Cantos. Soon, the culprit is discovered to be the Shrike. At this time, Silenus becomes convinced that it is the Shrike who is his muse, who, in some occult way, his poem had brought into existence. The murders continue until only Silenus is left living in the City of Poets. He writes the last line on the day that the last murder occurs.
One day, Sad King Billy returns to the deserted city. Martin is gone on a trip to the Time Tombs seeking the Shrike, and when he returns to his quarters Billy is confronting him with the fact that his writing is dependent on cold-blooded murder, and that it will need more murdering if it is to ever be completed. Billy burns his manuscript. After Billy is being taken away by the Shrike, Silenus recopies his poem as well as possible. Eventually he leaves Hyperion. In the centuries since, he has been waiting to return to Hyperion to finish the poem.
While mapping the so-called Sphinx for hidden passages or rooms, something happens to Rachel: all the instruments and equipment fail, and the Shrike appears in the Sphinx amidst a massive surge of "anti-entropic
fields". Rachel is returned to the WorldWeb where her parents learn of the novel disease she has contracted, dubbed the "Merlin sickness" (after T.H. White's The Once and Future King
), in which every time Rachel goes to sleep, she ages backwards two days (for a net loss of one day per day), losing her memories and in fact physically becoming younger; there is no sign that the condition will reverse itself when she ages backwards to her birth. Rachel's life is shattered by her slow retrogression into the past, shattering her links with the present; her parents devote their lives to caring for Rachel and trying to cure her. Meanwhile, Sol wrestles with his dreams, in which he is ordered to go to Hyperion and sacrifice Rachel, in a replay of the Binding of Isaac
. Weintraub becomes increasingly fascinated with the ethical problem that the Binding presents.
He also worries about what will happen when Rachel reaches her birthday (which will be very soon), and so he decides to become a pilgrim and to implore the Shrike for a treatment.
-ish tale, which is presumably a parody take on The Long Goodbye
, Raymond Chandler
's rather well-known Philip Marlowe
detective novel of the same name.
Brawne Lamia, the daughter of a senator of Lusus, eschewed politics for the life of a private investigator
after her father's apparent suicide (which occurred shortly after he and the then junior senator Meina Gladstone proposed a bill to quickly incorporate Hyperion into the WorldWeb). Her client is a "cybrid" (a cloned human body which is controlled through its electronic implants by a TechnoCore intelligence) named "Johnny", who wishes to hire her to investigate the murder of his self. This cybrid is the genetic clone of famous Romantic poet John Keats
, and the AI controlling it was programmed to have the personality and memories of Keats as best as could be reconstructed from surviving materials and the 'Core's finest extrapolations.
Unlike most "retrieved personalities", which are of insufficient fidelity to maintain sanity, this Johnny functions quite well (though he disclaims poetic talent). His AI self was murdered in the TechnoCore and a backup could not be brought online for a full minute, with the loss of five days' worth of data and memory; this limited amnesia was the apparent goal of the assault. Lamia sets out to discover what Johnny had learned or done in those five days to prompt such an assault; initially, all she discovers is that it is somehow related to Hyperion: Johnny should have heard of such a place, permeated as it is with tributes to the poet he is supposed to be, but he has not; such an absence of knowledge in an AI of his ability smacks of deception.
She and Johnny are forcibly farcast to a planet that seems to be a perfect imitation of Old Earth, located somewhere in the Hercules cluster
, into a portion of Italy, set around the time-period the real Keats died of tuberculosis
there.
After a few troublesome actions, hunts and rides through the WorldWeb and the TechnoCore the main information is this: the 'Core is not as monolithic as it appears; it is fiercely divided into at least three groups which eminently fight each other.
At the end, pregnant by the meanwhile dead Johnny, carrying parts of his consciousness in an implant and revered by the Church of The Shrike as "the mother of our salvation", Lamia joins the pilgrims.
(where Simmons mentions that this story provided the seed around which the Hyperion universe was created).
The Consul's grandparents had been Merin Aspic (of Lusus) and Siri (of the lush ocean-planet Maui-Covenant). Aspic had signed a long-term contract to engage in several voyages aboard a spinship (with all the years lost to relativistic time dilation that that implies), which would make multiple trips to Maui-Covenant to build a farcaster portal, thereby connecting Maui-Covenant to the waiting voracious hordes of Hegemony tourists. Eventually he falls in love with the beautiful girl named Siri. However, his best friend is killed by a Covenanter who disagrees violently with Maui-Covenant joining the WorldWeb (the events parallel those of Romeo and Juliet
).
Siri and Merin meet six more times, but each time Merin – due to the relativistic time delation of his journeys – is only a little older, while Siri ages at the usual rate, a difference which grows ever more pronounced until the eighth visit (Seventh Reunion), in which Merin returns to find Siri dead of old age, and the farcaster about to be activated. The flood of Hegemony visitors and the induction of Maui-Covenant fully into the WorldWeb would, as prophesied, utterly ruin the ecology and all the dolphin, human, and motile isle settlers hold dear. Faced with this bleak reality, Merin chooses to sabotage the farcaster, beginning "Siri's War", a hopeless resistance against the Hegemony.
In crushing the rebellion, the military destroys the ecology as thoroughly as the tourists would have, but far more violently: many dolphins die, as does a large proportion of the original Maui-Covenant colonists. The latter Consul was forbidden by Merin to join in the fighting, and so he survived to thrive with distinction in the Hegemony diplomatic corps. There he aids the Hegemony in destroying whatever resistance the Hegemony encounters. He bides his time, waiting for a chance to betray the Hegemony and achieve revenge.
When he is sent as an agent to the ousters he becomes their agent, but betrays them too when he prematurely activates mysterious Ouster devices intended to release the Shrike from the Time Tombs when it would have a chance to enter the WorldWeb. He knows of the many deaths this action will cause and was driven to this by the Ouster's irrefutable evidence that the Big Mistake that destroyed Earth was deliberately planned by elements of the TechnoCore and the Hegemony, and that the Hegemony was deliberately killing off any species which might become a rival to man in order to maintain its place, and that the 'Core feared Ousters who were out of their control, and sought to use the Hyperion system as bait in order to eliminate them.
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...
-winning 1989 science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel by American writer Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....
. It is the first book of his Hyperion Cantos
Hyperion Cantos
The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction novels by Dan Simmons. Set in the far future, and focusing more on plot and story development than technical detail, it falls into the soft science fiction category...
, and is the only book in it to extensively employ the literary device of the frame story
Frame story
A frame story is a literary technique that sometimes serves as a companion piece to a story within a story, whereby an introductory or main narrative is presented, at least in part, for the purpose of setting the stage either for a more emphasized second narrative or for a set of shorter stories...
. The plot of the novel features multiple time-lines and characters. This book is succeeded by the 1990 science fiction novel The Fall of Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion
The Fall of Hyperion is the second science fiction novel by Dan Simmons in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe. The novel was written in 1990, and won both the British Science Fiction and a Locus Awards in 1991...
of the same writer.
Background
In the 28th century, humanity has spread across the galaxy, first aboard "HawkingStephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity...
drive" ships and then through "farcasters", which permit nigh instantaneous travel between them regardless of the distances. The farcaster network (the "WorldWeb") is the infrastructural and economical basis of the Hegemony of Man and thus determines the whole culture and society. Also flowing across these portals are the structures of the datasphere (a network reminiscent of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
in design, but far more advanced). In that lurks the powerful, knowledgeable, and utterly inscrutable TechnoCore — the vast agglomeration of millions of AI
Ai
AI, A.I., Ai, or ai may refer to:- Computers :* Artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science* Ad impression, in online advertising* .ai, the ISO Internet 2-letter country code for Anguilla...
s who run almost every piece of high technology of mankind. The unthinking hubris of man resulted in the death of the home-world (Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
), and this arrogant philosophy was carried forth to the stars, for centuries.
The Hegemony itself is a largely decadent society, relying on its military to incorporate into the WorldWeb the colony planets, even unwillingly, and also to defend the Hegemony from attacks by the Ousters
Ousters
In Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, Ousters are the branch of humanity that left the Worldweb and the Hegemony, and chose instead to travel among the stars, adapting away from planetary life and the influence of the TechnoCore....
, "interstellar barbarians" who dwell free of and beyond the bounds of the Hegemony and shun all the works of the TechnoCore (especially farcasters). The political head of the Hegemony is an executive advised by the TechnoCore advisory council. All the 'Core's advice and predictions are confounded by the mysterious structures of the Time Tombs and a creature called the Shrike
The Shrike
The Shrike is a character from Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, set far in humanity's future.The Shrike appears in all of the Hyperion books and is something of an enigma; its true purpose isn't 'revealed' until the second book, but even then it is left a malleable purpose. In fact, this explanation...
on the remote colony world Hyperion (named after John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
' poem). Even worse, the Ousters have long been obsessed with Hyperion, and their invasion there is imminent.
Into this evolving crisis come seven pilgrims to make the journey to the Time Tombs and the Shrike, that seems to guard the Time Tombs, there to ask one wish of it. The Shrike is the object of a cult, the Church of the Final Atonement. Occasionally the church sends a prime-number of pilgrims to the Time Tombs; there is a legend that all but one are slaughtered and the remaining pilgrim gets his request granted. Aboard a treeship the pilgrims finally meet after being revived out of their cryogenic storage state; they decide they each will tell their tale to enliven the long trip to the Tombs and to get to know each other. Simmons uses this device to unfold the panorama of this universe, its history and conflicts. The story opens in medias res
In medias res
In medias res or medias in res is a Latin phrase denoting the literary and artistic narrative technique wherein the relation of a story begins either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning In medias res or medias in res (into the middle of things) is a Latin phrase...
.
Part One, The Priest's Tale: "The Man who Cried God"
As a young priest, Father Lenar Hoyt was assigned to escort Father Paul Duré, a JesuitSociety of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...
theologian, archaeologist, ethnologist, and follower of Teilhard de Chardin into exile on the planet of Hyperion. Father Duré planned to set up an ethnological research station along Hyperion's Cleft, where rumors place an isolated civilization called the Bikura.
He discovered the Bikura which arrived on Hyperion on one of the early seedships and were infected by parasites called cruciforms which populate a part of Hyperion's labyrinth system. These cruciforms resemble crosses that are irreversibly encrusted into the victim's chest. They store all of the information that makes up the infected individual including their memory, which allows them to be healed and to live forever, even reconstructing the body of a person after their corpse has been almost totally destroyed. But information is progressively lost and after a number of cycles the individual becomes sexless and retarded. Therefore the Bikura can be described as a society of 70 immortal genderless simpletons. As Father Duré slowly discovers the truth about them, they lead him into Hyperion's labyrinth system where he encounters the Shrike, and a cruciform is placed on his chest.
The cruciform does not allow anyone to escape the place where the Bikura live and so, to save his body from being reborn as a mindless automaton, Duré crucifies himself to an electricity-conducting Tesla tree. It is here that Father Hoyt finds him seven years later, continually being electrocuted and reborn, but not losing his mind because the pain caused by the electricity keeps the cruciform from returning him to the village, while still keeping him alive. Hoyt takes Duré's cruciform into himself and also has a cruciform implanted for his own reincarnation.
Part Two, The Soldier's Tale: "The War Lovers"
Colonel Fedmahn Kassad begins his tale with a flashback to his days training in the FORCE academy on MarsMars in fiction
Fictional representations of Mars have been popular for over a century. Interest in Mars has been stimulated by the planet's dramatic red color, by early scientific speculations that its surface conditions might be capable of supporting life, and by the possibility that Mars could be colonized by...
, when he was immersed in a detailed simulation of the Battle of Agincourt
Battle of Agincourt
The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory against a numerically superior French army in the Hundred Years' War. The battle occurred on Friday, 25 October 1415 , near modern-day Azincourt, in northern France...
. During the battle, Kassad is saved from a French knight by the mysterious Mnemosyne/Moneta, who becomes his lover there, and who comes from "outside". They meet repeatedly in further simulations, until Kassad's final year in the Academy. After he graduates from the Academy the young Martian man becomes a FORCE officer.
Kassad accomplishes various missions against terrorists, rebels, resistance groups etc. After being injured Kassad strands on Hyperion near the vicinity of the Time Tombs. There Moneta and the Shrike (re-)appear and Kassad learns that Moneta and the Shrike wish to use him to spark an interstellar war in which billions will die. He is eventually rescued and returned to the WorldWeb, where he resigns from FORCE and becomes an anti-war activist. His purpose on the pilgrimage is to track down Moneta and the Shrike, and to kill them.
Part Three, The Poet's Tale: "Hyperion Cantos"
Martin Silenus was born as a wealthy scion of an ancient dying North American house, growing up in the time around the "Big Mistake", which led to the destruction of Earth. Silenus trained as a poet, but his training was interrupted when the Kiev Team's black hole "ate" the Earth; his mother dispatched her son aboard a slower-than-light flight to a nearby system, calculating that the shrunken family fortune would accumulate enough in compound interestCompound interest
Compound interest arises when interest is added to the principal, so that from that moment on, the interest that has been added also itself earns interest. This addition of interest to the principal is called compounding...
over the century the voyage would take that the family's debt would be paid off and enough left over for Martin to live on for a time.
Unfortunately, the accounts were nationalized by the Hegemony, and Silenus suffered brain damage during the voyage. Deep in penury, Silenus had to work as a common laborer. The back-breaking toil forces Silenus's mind to flee to higher planes, and as he recovers his use of language, he starts work on his Hyperion Cantos, a work he began as a parody of John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
' famous poem, but which evolved into a dual account of Silenus's life and an epic account of the Titanomachia, in which the Hegemony of Man takes the part of the Titans and the TechnoCore the Olympians. His Dying Earth (as it is called, in an explicit reference to Jack Vance
Jack Vance
John Holbrook Vance is an American mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. Most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance. Vance has published 11 mysteries as John Holbrook Vance and 3 as Ellery Queen...
's Dying Earth series) becomes an enormous hit, selling billions and making him a multi-millionaire.
Eventually he falls into debt again and in an attempt to produce another hit has a larger unabridged version of his cantos published, which is predicted to fail by his publisher. The work is a terrible flop, selling few copies and not recouping the money he was advanced. In order to pay his debt, Silenus is forced to produce further hackwork for his "Dying Earth" series, a misery many artists face. One day he realizes that his Cantos, his greatest work, has not been added to for years; his muse
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
had fled. Silenus leaves his lifestyle, liquidates his assets, and signs on with Sad King Billy.
Billy is an aristocrat of the planet Asquith, descended from the House of Windsor
House of Windsor
The House of Windsor is the royal house of the Commonwealth realms. It was founded by King George V by royal proclamation on the 17 July 1917, when he changed the name of his family from the German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the English Windsor, due to the anti-German sentiment in the United Kingdom...
, and an intelligent and sensitive lover and critic of the arts. Fearful of the FORCE General Horace Glennon-Height's rebellion against the Hegemony, Billy decides to relocate to Hyperion and create a new Renaissance by establishing a kingdom of artists. He chooses for his capital a location near the Time Tombs on the then-even less inhabited Hyperion, reasoning that their presence will give the proper ambience for the creation of great art.
For ten years, all goes well until people begin vanishing, with no abductors ever seen. At the same time, Silenus' muse returns, and he continues work on the Cantos. Soon, the culprit is discovered to be the Shrike. At this time, Silenus becomes convinced that it is the Shrike who is his muse, who, in some occult way, his poem had brought into existence. The murders continue until only Silenus is left living in the City of Poets. He writes the last line on the day that the last murder occurs.
One day, Sad King Billy returns to the deserted city. Martin is gone on a trip to the Time Tombs seeking the Shrike, and when he returns to his quarters Billy is confronting him with the fact that his writing is dependent on cold-blooded murder, and that it will need more murdering if it is to ever be completed. Billy burns his manuscript. After Billy is being taken away by the Shrike, Silenus recopies his poem as well as possible. Eventually he leaves Hyperion. In the centuries since, he has been waiting to return to Hyperion to finish the poem.
Part Four, The Scholar's Tale: "The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter"
Sol Weintraub, a Jewish academic, had been a professor of ethics on Barnard's World, the second colony founded from Old Earth. He and his wife, Sarai, had been happy when their only daughter, Rachel, was born forty years ago. She eventually became an archaeologist, and while in her post-graduate studies went on an expedition to study the Time Tombs of Hyperion.While mapping the so-called Sphinx for hidden passages or rooms, something happens to Rachel: all the instruments and equipment fail, and the Shrike appears in the Sphinx amidst a massive surge of "anti-entropic
Entropy
Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...
fields". Rachel is returned to the WorldWeb where her parents learn of the novel disease she has contracted, dubbed the "Merlin sickness" (after T.H. White's The Once and Future King
The Once and Future King
The Once and Future King is an Arthurian fantasy novel written by T. H. White. It was first published in 1958 and is mostly a composite of earlier works written in a period between 1938 and 1941....
), in which every time Rachel goes to sleep, she ages backwards two days (for a net loss of one day per day), losing her memories and in fact physically becoming younger; there is no sign that the condition will reverse itself when she ages backwards to her birth. Rachel's life is shattered by her slow retrogression into the past, shattering her links with the present; her parents devote their lives to caring for Rachel and trying to cure her. Meanwhile, Sol wrestles with his dreams, in which he is ordered to go to Hyperion and sacrifice Rachel, in a replay of the Binding of Isaac
Binding of Isaac
The Binding of Isaac Akedah or Akeidat Yitzchak in Hebrew and Dhabih in Arabic, is a story from the Hebrew Bible in which God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah...
. Weintraub becomes increasingly fascinated with the ethical problem that the Binding presents.
He also worries about what will happen when Rachel reaches her birthday (which will be very soon), and so he decides to become a pilgrim and to implore the Shrike for a treatment.
Part Five, The Detective's Tale: "The Long Good-Bye"
Brawne Lamia tells her noirHardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
-ish tale, which is presumably a parody take on The Long Goodbye
The Long Goodbye (novel)
The Long Goodbye is a 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler, centered on his famous detective Philip Marlowe. While some critics consider it inferior to The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, others rank it as the best of his work...
, Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
's rather well-known Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep published in 1939...
detective novel of the same name.
Brawne Lamia, the daughter of a senator of Lusus, eschewed politics for the life of a private investigator
Private investigator
A private investigator , private detective or inquiry agent, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigatory law services. Private detectives/investigators often work for attorneys in civil cases. Many work for insurance companies to investigate suspicious claims...
after her father's apparent suicide (which occurred shortly after he and the then junior senator Meina Gladstone proposed a bill to quickly incorporate Hyperion into the WorldWeb). Her client is a "cybrid" (a cloned human body which is controlled through its electronic implants by a TechnoCore intelligence) named "Johnny", who wishes to hire her to investigate the murder of his self. This cybrid is the genetic clone of famous Romantic poet John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, and the AI controlling it was programmed to have the personality and memories of Keats as best as could be reconstructed from surviving materials and the 'Core's finest extrapolations.
Unlike most "retrieved personalities", which are of insufficient fidelity to maintain sanity, this Johnny functions quite well (though he disclaims poetic talent). His AI self was murdered in the TechnoCore and a backup could not be brought online for a full minute, with the loss of five days' worth of data and memory; this limited amnesia was the apparent goal of the assault. Lamia sets out to discover what Johnny had learned or done in those five days to prompt such an assault; initially, all she discovers is that it is somehow related to Hyperion: Johnny should have heard of such a place, permeated as it is with tributes to the poet he is supposed to be, but he has not; such an absence of knowledge in an AI of his ability smacks of deception.
She and Johnny are forcibly farcast to a planet that seems to be a perfect imitation of Old Earth, located somewhere in the Hercules cluster
Hercules Cluster
The Hercules Cluster is a cluster of about 100 galaxies some 650 million light-years distant in the constellation Hercules. It is rich in spiral galaxies and shows many interacting galaxies...
, into a portion of Italy, set around the time-period the real Keats died of tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
there.
After a few troublesome actions, hunts and rides through the WorldWeb and the TechnoCore the main information is this: the 'Core is not as monolithic as it appears; it is fiercely divided into at least three groups which eminently fight each other.
- The Stables. They are the oldest faction, and count some of the very first AIs among their ranks. Their central thesis is that humanity and the TechnoCore need each other, and that the 'Core should continue in the symbiosis. They are also opposing to the UI project (creation of a goddish Ultimate Intelligence): the UI would need the resources that the current AIs use, and they do not wish to die. (In Silenus's Cantos, the Stables are identified with the TitanTitan (mythology)In Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of powerful deities, descendants of Gaia and Uranus, that ruled during the legendary Golden Age....
s, who did not wish to yield to their Olympian successors). They have for decades been subtly working to help the Hegemony in its fight against the Volatiles, quietly seeking to bring Hyperion into the WorldWeb, on the chance that its unpredictability will help them. - The Volatiles. They generally support the UI project, and they believe that humanity has outlived its usefulness to the 'Core, and that it actually now poses a real danger, and therefore should be eradicated. They are behind many events, but they fear the planet of Hyperion, because it is a "random variable": it could tip the scales against the 'Core; the effects of Hyperion are impossible for them to analyze.
- The Ultimates. They care only for the UI project. They are quite willing to sacrifice their lives to the UI, believing that the value of its existence far outweighs their own. Previously they had been aligned with the Stables against the Volatiles, as humanity (and especially the cybrid retrieval projects) still posed some puzzles which when solved would help in the UI project, but it is implied that they feel they've gathered enough data, and have re-aligned now with the Volatiles to get rid of human kind.
At the end, pregnant by the meanwhile dead Johnny, carrying parts of his consciousness in an implant and revered by the Church of The Shrike as "the mother of our salvation", Lamia joins the pilgrims.
Part Six, The Consul's Tale: "Remembering Siri"
Like Father Hoyt, the Consul tells another tale before his own. This is entitled "Remembering Siri", and is a largely unmodified version of the short story of the same name in Prayers to Broken StonesPrayers to Broken Stones
Prayers to Broken Stones is a short story anthology by the American author Dan Simmons. It includes 13 of his earlier works, along with an introduction by Harlan Ellison in which the latter relates how he "discovered" Dan Simmons at the Colorado Mountain College's "Writers' Conference in the...
(where Simmons mentions that this story provided the seed around which the Hyperion universe was created).
The Consul's grandparents had been Merin Aspic (of Lusus) and Siri (of the lush ocean-planet Maui-Covenant). Aspic had signed a long-term contract to engage in several voyages aboard a spinship (with all the years lost to relativistic time dilation that that implies), which would make multiple trips to Maui-Covenant to build a farcaster portal, thereby connecting Maui-Covenant to the waiting voracious hordes of Hegemony tourists. Eventually he falls in love with the beautiful girl named Siri. However, his best friend is killed by a Covenanter who disagrees violently with Maui-Covenant joining the WorldWeb (the events parallel those of Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
).
Siri and Merin meet six more times, but each time Merin – due to the relativistic time delation of his journeys – is only a little older, while Siri ages at the usual rate, a difference which grows ever more pronounced until the eighth visit (Seventh Reunion), in which Merin returns to find Siri dead of old age, and the farcaster about to be activated. The flood of Hegemony visitors and the induction of Maui-Covenant fully into the WorldWeb would, as prophesied, utterly ruin the ecology and all the dolphin, human, and motile isle settlers hold dear. Faced with this bleak reality, Merin chooses to sabotage the farcaster, beginning "Siri's War", a hopeless resistance against the Hegemony.
In crushing the rebellion, the military destroys the ecology as thoroughly as the tourists would have, but far more violently: many dolphins die, as does a large proportion of the original Maui-Covenant colonists. The latter Consul was forbidden by Merin to join in the fighting, and so he survived to thrive with distinction in the Hegemony diplomatic corps. There he aids the Hegemony in destroying whatever resistance the Hegemony encounters. He bides his time, waiting for a chance to betray the Hegemony and achieve revenge.
When he is sent as an agent to the ousters he becomes their agent, but betrays them too when he prematurely activates mysterious Ouster devices intended to release the Shrike from the Time Tombs when it would have a chance to enter the WorldWeb. He knows of the many deaths this action will cause and was driven to this by the Ouster's irrefutable evidence that the Big Mistake that destroyed Earth was deliberately planned by elements of the TechnoCore and the Hegemony, and that the Hegemony was deliberately killing off any species which might become a rival to man in order to maintain its place, and that the 'Core feared Ousters who were out of their control, and sought to use the Hyperion system as bait in order to eliminate them.
Major characters
- The ShrikeThe ShrikeThe Shrike is a character from Dan Simmons' Hyperion universe, set far in humanity's future.The Shrike appears in all of the Hyperion books and is something of an enigma; its true purpose isn't 'revealed' until the second book, but even then it is left a malleable purpose. In fact, this explanation...
is the monster and anti-hero of the novel. It is known for impaling people on a massive tree made of metal, whose branches are massive thorns. It is named after the "ShrikeShrikeShrikes are passerine birds of the family Laniidae. The family is composed of thirty-one species in three genera. The family name, and that of the largest genus, Lanius, is derived from the Latin word for "butcher", and some shrikes were also known as "butcher birds" because of their feeding habits...
" bird which impales insects and small animals on the thorns of a tree. - The Consul is the former planetary governor of Hyperion. He is for much of the first novel enigmatic, observing and recording the stories of the other Shrike Pilgrims but reluctant to record his own. He is one of the few dozens of people amongst the hundred and fifty billion of Hegemony citizens to own his own private starshipStarshipA starship or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between the stars, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel....
. - Meina Gladstone is the CEO of the Hegemony of Man and Commander in Chief, former senator, residing on Tau CetiTau Ceti in fictionTau Ceti is the closest single Sun-like star to the Sun, making it a popular setting or reference in science fiction media.Isaac Asimov set the planet "Aurora" and its two asteroidal satellites around Tau Ceti in the Robot and Foundation novels. In Robert A...
Center - Lenar Hoyt is a Roman Catholic priest in his early 30's, in a universe where Catholicism has shrunk to a shadow of its former self, claiming only a few thousand followers.
- Fedmahn Kassad is a colonel in the Hegemony of Man's FORCE military, of PalestinianPalestinian peopleThe Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
descent from MarsMarsMars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
. - Brawne Lamia is a private detective. Her name likely derives from a combination of Fanny BrawneFanny BrawneFrances Brawne Lindon is most known for her betrothal to 19th-Century English Romantic poet John Keats, a fact largely unknown until 1878, when Keats' letters to her were published...
, the unrequited love of John KeatsJohn KeatsJohn Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, and the eponymous creature of his Lamia and Other PoemsLamia and Other Poems"Lamia" is a narrative poem written by English poet John Keats.Believing himself a failure as a poet, Keats asked for his tombstone to read "Here lies one whose name was writ in water"...
. Brawne is the daughter of Senator Byron Lamia, once a friend of CEO Meina Gladstone's, who "apparently" committed suicide when Brawne was a child. - Het Masteen is the most mysterious of all seven pilgrims. He is a Templar—a nature priest of sorts—who captains the Treeship Yggdrasil that brings the pilgrims to Hyperion.
- Treeships are living treeDyson treeA Dyson tree is a hypothetical genetically-engineered plant, capable of growing in a comet, suggested by the physicist Freeman Dyson...
s that are propelled by ergErg HyperionIn Dan Simmons' Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel Hyperion, the first in the Hyperion Cantos series, Ergs are quasi-telepathic sentient silicon-based life forms discovered around planet Aldebaran which generate and control extreme force-fields.In the same series, Ergs are used to propel...
s (an alien being that emits force fields) through space. The ergs also generate the containment fields (force fields) around the tree that keep its atmosphere intact. There are only four treeships in existence including the Yggdrasil.
- Treeships are living tree
- Martin Silenus is a foul-mouthed poet. Born on Earth before its destruction, he is incredibly old. Like KeatsJohn KeatsJohn Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, he is working on an unfinished epic poem. - Sol Weintraub is a Jewish scholar. His daughter was afflicted with an illness dubbed the "Merlin Sickness" that caused her to age backwards: she gets younger as time progresses.
Recognition
- Hugo Award winner, 1990
- Locus Award winner, 1990
- British Science Fiction Award nominee, 1990
- Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, 1992
External links
- Hyperion at Worlds Without End