It often makes me break out in sweat when I hear my parents giving my room out as a guestroom to relatives with grubby-handed brats. I've invested a small fortune here. Many of these books had carried me through some of the most miserable years of my life.
This trip back, I decided to dig out Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and its sequel The Fall of Hyperion.
Like I said before, Hyperion is by far the best sci-fi I've ever read. It has everything. Murder mysteries. Lovecraftian horror. Starship trooper action. Space battles. Time travelling. Several amazing love stories. Detective fiction. Cyperpunk. Rambo II chain-gun action. Monsters. Poetry. Comedy. Tragedy.
But, it's not a sci-fi that I will recommend to the uninitiated. You need a solid grounding in Geek, or phrases like time-debt, AU, FTL travel, singularities will all be Greek to you. Otherwise, better to start with kindergarten stuff like Robotech.
You'll need to know some astronomy to understand what the author meant when he wrote, "Hyperion is afflicted with its Deep Ice Ages, although here the periodicity is spread to thirty-seven million years by the long ellipse of the currently absent binary dwarf."
You don't need to be Einstein to understand the effects of time-dilation in Faster Than Light travel, but it helps.
A useful primer perhaps, will be Bill Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything, which will give you the solid grounding in real sciences before you can understand the speculated science.
And this is part of the appeal of Hyperion.
But if you just want to machette through the science stuff and just revel in the characters' stories, I suppose that's good too.
The story begins with seven pilgrims arriving at Hyperion, a planet on the border of known space. A planet also under threat from an Ouster invasion, a tribe of barbarians (read 'hippie communists') who had left the web worlds of cultured capitalists several centuries ago.
The planet is distinguished by the existence of the Time Tombs, an archeological find of great mystery. A mystery protected by the Shrike, a four-armed, metallic personification of bladed death. And that's where the pilgrims are headed, to petition the Shrike to grant a wish. One will receive his/her wish, the others will die.
On the pilgrimage, each of the pilgrims tell their tale, to prepare each other for the mysteries ahead. Sounds like The Canterbury Tales, no?
Yeah, I've bought that book, but I won't pretend that I've read it. It's a headache....
A lovyere and a lusty bacheler;WTF?!
With lokkes crulle, as they were leyd in presse.
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.
... Digressing again...
The story of the pilgrims began with the Priest's Tale.
The story of how an archaeologist from the Catholic church was exiled to Hyperion, where he undertook to study a lost race in the most inaccesible part the planet. How he discovered the village of 70 inhabitants, all mentally as capbable as Down's children, but who respect the burden of the cruciform. A mystery that will not be revealed in its entire horror until the next book.
The Soldier's Tale.
A passionate tale of a decorated soldier's hallucination of a lover in the virtual combat simulations, a love affair with a ghost in the machine, and ultimately meeting this lover in the flesh on Hyperion.
This tale is the author's vehicle to build up the history of his universe. Introducing the Ouster threat into the plot. And revealing the stark horrors of how wars will be fought in the future.
The group went out into the cool evening air, shielding their eyes from the staggering display of silent explosions which filled the sky: pure white fusion bursts expanding like explosive ripples across a lapis pond; smaller, brighter plasma implosions in blue and yellow and brightest red, curling inward like flowers folding for the night: the lightning dance of gigantic hellwhip displays, beams the size of small worlds cutting their swath across light-hours and being contorted by the riptides of defensive singularities: the aurora shimmer of defense fields leaping and dying under the assault of terrible energies only to be reborn nanoseconds later. Amid it all, the blue-white fusion tails of torchships and larger warships slicing perfectly true lines across the sky like diamond scratches on blue glass.
The Poet's Tale.
The story of a poet who discovers that the Shrike's horrific slaughter of innocents on Hyperion is the muse for his epic cantos, told in the dark sardonic humor of a delusional neurotic.
The funniest part was when the poet suffered a stroke during cryogenic sleep which destroyed the language part of his brain.
For the record, here is my entire vocabluary of manageable words: f*ck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherf*cker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo. A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. my new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased. All in all, it was enough.
The Scholar's Tale.
This is by far my favourite love story. I have re-read this tale more than twice.
Those who watched Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates will recognise many of the elements.
A young archaeologist is cursed with Merlin's sickness while investigating the time tombs. She begins to age backwards. Every morning she awakens, she becomes a day younger, and her memories regress by a day.
Like Drew in the movie, she weeps in denial every morning, finally catching up with her forgotten days and finding acceptance later in the day, only to forget it all and begin the process anew the next morning. Until the day she tells her father not to let her remember anymore.
So the scholar carries the burden of lying to his beloved daughter every day of her life as she grows younger and younger. Until he arrives at the Time Tombs with a five day old babe.
The Captain's Tale.
This is not told cos he may have been shredded by the Shrike before his turn to tell his tale.
The Detective's Tale.
Here, the cyberpunk element of the future is introduced, of how the AI's co-exist with humanity, and of their own conspiracies for the fate of Hyperion.
The Consul's Tale.
This is a Shakespearean tale. Of a pair of true 'star-crossed lovers', but who shared a hundred days more together than R+J. A space-boy who fell in love with an island girl. Every journey he makes across the stars means his island lover gains another 11 years of age over him. Blame Einstein for the paradox.
All meshed together, these tales create an incredibly detailed and imaginative universe brimming with endless possibilities. The delivery just blew my mind the first time I read it.
This book earned its rightful place in the very short list of books that I read twice. Right there with Tolkien. But not quite there with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I read three or more times.
And thankfully, also one of the very few books that will get such a lengthy review from me.
2 comments:
Can't really recall how my train of thought brought me to this blog, but indeed Hyperion is a book that deserves a space on every sci-fi lovers' shelf.
I hope you've read the other three books in the Hyperion universe. I must say that while I love the original Hyperion book, my favourite would be Endymion and the Fall of Endymion.
Endymion certainly had the most original FTL travel ever seen in a sci-fi. A horror to match the corruption of a religion when 'eternal life' can be had on earth rather than in heaven.
Endymion is another fantastic love story.
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