Hyperion
Dan Simmons

This book won the Hugo Award in 1990, which is how I found it. I’d never heard of Dan Simmons before, which just goes to show the 20-year gap in my SF education. After filling up as a kid on Heinlein, Asimov, Pournelle, Bear, and many others, from college onwards I had drifted toward more “serious” fiction.

Recently I’ve been getting back into sci-fi and fantasy. In the past few months I’ve also read The Left Hand of Darkness, A Canticle for Liebowitz and A Game of Thrones. Hyperion seemed like a great addition to the list. Hyperion is a surprising find – the hard SF novel that reads like a yarn, a tale, an adventure. Its format is patterned after The Canterbury Tales, with seven (well, six) interlaced stories from adventurers sharing a common experience as they prepare to confront a perplexing mystery on the far-flung and isolated planet of Hyperion. Hyperion is home to the semi-mythical menace of the Shrike, a silent-but-deadly baddie that can shift back and forth in time and who impales his prey on a huge Tree of Thorns, a futuristic Vlad the Impaler minus the bad Hungarian accent. In the background we have a scores of planets, physically linked by instantaneous “farcasting” capabilities and “fatlined” communications. Humans are tied into the Web (aka All Thing) via implants. An omnipresent artificial intelligence called The Core is manages nearly all of the human technology (for good or for ill?).

The characters are well developed, if a bit caricatured. We have the strong, silent, no-nonsense military type, the drunk Bacchus, the wise professor, the beautiful-but-deadly female detective, etc. etc. Most interesting is the cybrid character Joseph Severn / John Keats, part human and part AI and whose identity and mystery are tied up somehow with the Shrike and with Hyperion.

Several people commented that I would want to buy the second book in the series, The Fall of Hyperion, at the same time, and I’m glad I did. The one problem with the book was the relatively huge anticlimax at the end, so buy them both together and you won’t be disappointed.

Overall: great book, great story, worth a read for SF fans and dilettantes.