Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.