Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion: An Omnibus Review

Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990) are the first two of four books that together form the Hyperion Cantos. A Science Fantasy work, Simmons through great talent has created a universe entirely believable, yet simultaneously ridiculous, epitomising the Arthur C Clarke law that "any piece of technology sufficiently far-future, is indistinguishable from magic." The influences here are astonishing, drawing influence from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Dante's Inferno, taking ideas from Gibson's Neuromancer and mixing it with Military SF akin to Heinlein, all while juggling the story lines that unfold to converge again some time later, in cleverly-constructed plot convolutions. Let's begin with Hyperion.

The first volume takes the structure of The Canterbury Tales and turns it into a sic fi bonanza. A Consul to the planet Hyperion is meeting the other pilgrims accompanying him to the planet's surface in what will be the final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs. The mysterious god-figure, the Shrike, is killing at will and danger looms in the form of the Ousters' force, seeking to control and eventually destroy Hyperion. Meanwhile, the AI political faction aka the TechnoCore, is warring within itself, three factions fighting over the next political step for the human population of the Web, a galaxy of worlds all connected via Farcasters, phased singularities that allow teleportation via wormholes. The pilgrims are: The Consul; a Poet; a Soldier; a Scholar; a Detective; a Templar and a Priest. Their stories are told in succession, the Consul already aware that one of them is an Ouster spy. But who? Is it the Priest, who has witnessed the power of God first-hand? The Soldier, hiding behind his tale of love? What about the Poet, and his ode to the arts, his times of hardship and ancient history a cloak for treachery? The Detective's brush with a dead man who lives once more too extraordinary? The Scholar's tragedy of loss and gravitas too much to suspect? Or is it even the Consul himself?

Science fiction, beautifully constructed, dithers into a personal journal, proceeding to tell tales as far-reaching as the flashing rainbows of the planet they travel towards, switching to voice, to recording, to flashback and flash-forward, to the journey at hand and the conflicts that brew between them as their distinctive personalities clash frequently, and often humorously. A whodunnit, a frame story, a space opera, a political thriller and ultimately, a story of humanity meld together into an enduring work of science fiction of the modern era.

 But the ending is merely the beginning of the end. And so we enter The Fall of Hyperion, a maze of frantic sub-plots that serve to provide a staggered perspective of each character seeing events through different eyes as us, the privileged spectator. We enter a countdown to the war as worlds start to experience it's deadly spread, while each of the pilgrims experiences their own passage through Hell with the Shrike, so akin to Dante's Inferno, while the poetic mythology of the Greek Titans as summed up by John Keats takes on whole new incarnations in the robotic delivery of cyberspace-dwelling AIs. This half of the duology is considerably longer, tying together the convolutions of the previous half so effortlessly that it leaves you breathless as characters who've perished on one page are revived on another, events seemingly certain not always so, making this two-part journey a ride I'll remember for a very long time.

Indeed, for a long time now, science fiction writers have often been scientists themselves: Asimov the roboticist, Niven the mathematician and Wells the biologist spring to mind. But here is an author whose primary expertise and interest lies not in science, but in literature, in philosophy and politics, combining them with a caution-free approach to technology and science, and swapping them for ideas and environments more fantasy than SF, taking components and even names of real people (you may spot the William Gibson references!) and using them at will to exemplify the vast story components in ways that even most accomplished writers would struggle with.

In closing you may think this summation short and sparse given the two books reviewed within; but I disagree, for the Hyperion Cantos is too complex a work to be explained in detail here in order to serve it justice. And in my closing remark on both these tomes I will say read them, and read them quickly, don't put them down and leave it to stew because you will lose the pace. But at the same time don't skim, because it does no such work as this the justice it truly deserves; one needs to see those flashing rainbows, to consider what a lack of magnetic field on a planet would be like to live under, and to sense a shift along the desert floor, a ripple in time itself as a malign God draws near. And finally -to paraphrase Stephen King- I will say that I am in awe of Dan Simmons, for producing a work as original and expertly-executed as this one: A Lord of the Rings of the Science Fiction genre!          

Hyperion (1989) & The Fall of Hyperion (1990)