Hyperion barely moves, and it is still one of the great science fiction novels. Seven strangers board a ship for a world at the edge of a war nobody expects to survive, bound for a valley of tombs that are traveling backward through time and guarded by a thing called the Shrike. On the way they agree to tell each other why they came. That is the whole structure. Simmons lifted it from Chaucer and never pretended otherwise, and what he gets is six novellas standing in a circle, each in a different genre, each handing you a piece of a world nobody ever explains directly.
Start with the Priest's Tale, because it is where the book announces how far it will go. A Jesuit archaeologist goes hunting a lost tribe on Hyperion and finds a parasite shaped like a cross grown into every member of it. The parasite does not kill you. That is the horror. It brings you back, a little more ruined each time, for as long as your body will take it, and the village has been cycling through that process so long that nobody in it can finish a sentence anymore. Simmons refuses to let the idea stay an idea. He gives you a priest who grasps the theology of the thing perfectly, then spends seven years trying to engineer a death it cannot undo. His journal is the most frightening ninety pages in the book.
The Scholar's Tale is the one that flattens people, and it works the same way: a rule, then the cost of living inside it. Sol Weintraub's grown daughter is hurt near the Time Tombs and begins aging backward, one day per day, losing a day of memory every night she sleeps. So he becomes a father twice, in reverse. He reads a picture book aloud to a woman who used to hold a doctorate. He keeps a ledger on his own child, year after year, toward a birthday that ends with an infant nobody remembers being an adult. Simmons plays none of it for effect, which is exactly why people press this book on strangers.
The other four tales vary, and I will not pretend otherwise. Kassad's soldier story is a battlefield fever dream with a lover who keeps appearing inside his combat simulations. Martin Silenus narrates a filthy, funny, self-lacerating account of writing a bestseller by accident and a masterpiece by compulsion. Brawne Lamia's is hardboiled detective fiction with a resurrected John Keats as her client, and it is the one I have heard ranked last most often. The tonal swerves between them are enormous and entirely deliberate. You close a story about a dying child and open a sex farce.
Why you should read
- Great if The Canterbury Tales rebuilt in deep space appeals
- Great if you want space opera with real literary ambition
- Great if one devastating story matters more than a tidy plot
- Great if theology and body horror belong together in your reading
What to expect
- Six self-contained novellas held inside one frame story
- Huge tonal swings, from grief to bawdy comedy
- A frame plot that advances almost not at all
- An ending that stops mid-stride and needs the sequel
- Keats references that reward attention without demanding it
Then there is the ending, or the lack of one. The pilgrims reach the valley, the Tombs are opening, and the book stops. Simmons wrote the second half as a separate novel, The Fall of Hyperion, so this volume leaves its central mystery roughly where it found it. Have the sequel in the house before you start. What stays with me is the Shrike itself, standing in that valley: four arms, a body of mirrored chrome, a steel tree behind it hung with everyone it has collected, patient in both directions along time. Six people explain why they walked toward that. None of the answers agree, and the book is far too smart to pick one.
