Hyperion

Some time in 1992, during my sophomore year of high school, Westwood released their landmark real-time simulator video game Dune II. After many hours in-game, I wanted to get into the lore of the universe.

I picked up a tattered copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at the library.

It was the promotional paperback tied to the 1984 film complete with stills of Kyle MacLachlan and Sting and cocaine on the back.

A few hundred pages in, I was convinced: this was my favorite science-fiction book ever, and probably always would be.

Challengers came and went. Foundation fizzles quickly after the first book and Asimov never could write a believable woman or believable sex. And The Martian Chronicles are like poetry or epigrams, they’re too sad or too beautiful or too perfect for this world. They’re not meant to be your favorite sci-fi book. Recent entrants like The Southern Reach were too confused or undisciplined to be my favorite. It remained Dune — for thirty years, no challenger came close.

Hyperion is the first book that has made me genuinely wonder.

I might have resisted the narrative framing: a sci-fi Canterbury Tales with pilgrims trading stories on their way through ghastly circumstance. I might have bristled at the cover — a nightmare creature made entirely of blades, looming over a pastoral landscape. I might have discounted the possibility that a book with those strikes against it could be this good. But after reading it, those elements all contribute to Dan Simmons’s majestic storytelling.

The Canterbury Tales Conceit: Wrong to Dismiss It

I almost did not read this book. The structure of pilgrims each recounting a story on their way to a shrine sounded contrived. It felt like a gimmick to get people to say “it’s a Canterbury tales in space!” and sell copies.

I was completely wrong.

The frame is far richer than Chaucer’s, and every pilgrim’s tale is in service of a single larger meta-narrative. More importantly, Simmons uses the conceit to do something genuinely impressive: each tale is written in a different voice and a different literary register. He is not writing one genre of fiction; he is working in several simultaneously. Lastly it helps avoid the exposition-heavy lopsidedness that happens so often in sci-fi where a whole biology/society/economic system has to be laid out before you can get to the narrative proper (see Dune movie).

The first tale, the priest’s tale, opens with the grain of the familiar. On a missionary venture, the last emissaries of a dying Catholic Church are dispatched to the isolated, indigenous humanoids who survived Hyperion’s first seeding. But to the priest’s great surprise, the creatures have already found the faith of the Cross. Imagine his elation, imagine the cries of “Hosanna!”

Then Simmons turns it. What the priest finds, and what we come to understand at a visceral level, is the body horror that orthodox Christianity has always carried inside it, glossed over by centuries of iconography and comfortable doctrine. A man died and came back. What does that actually mean? What does it feel like from the inside? What would it mean to have eternal life welded into you? It is, perhaps, a man of the cloth’s voyage into the Heart of Darkness.

By the end of the first vignette it is clear that Simmons’s Canterbury conceit is not a clever structural device for book jacket copy. It is a weapon — one he uses to send you somewhere that looks familiar, then force a genuine reckoning with what we actually believe.

The soldier’s tale is perhaps the flattest of the vignettes, but it earns its place. Think Starship Troopers crossed with something Outlanderesque — techno-fascist military expeditionism tangled up with genuine romance. What it proves, if nothing else, is that Simmons can write lust as credibly as he writes war — God knows Herbert, like Asimov, couldn’t write women or sex.

And, almost incidentally in the soldier’s tale: in the same way that Herbert never stopped the flow of the spice story to announce that humanity had only just escaped the yoke of the machines, Simmons lets you arrive, quietly, at the realization that humanity in this world has chosen to yoke itself to them. The machine Core trains the soldiers, the machine Core controls the farcasters that stitch civilization across space, and the machine Core may have the ability to manipulate human hearts.

The scholar (Sol Weintraub’s) tale is in an Ondaatje-like register; the relationships and characterizations are the point. The Shrike haunts the Time Tombs, structures that move backwards through time, and Sol’s daughter Rachel has been touched by them: she ages in reverse, forgetting day by day, the horror accumulating not in what happens but in what disappears in an “Awakenings” or “Charly-like” tale of sorrow. It is a nightmare rarely conceived of by any parent, but one that every parent would shriek away from. The line that lands hardest is not a speech or a reckoning — it is Sarai, to her husband Sol: “It’s not fair.”

The detective’s tale opens like noir, and it feels as comfortable as Sam Spade — except that Sam is now a woman, faster and stronger and more brutal, owing to a childhood on a planet with stronger-than-Earth gravity. Once again: a human story, with science fiction flourishes.

Then the genre shifts. Noir gives way to romance — an unlikely, genuinely moving love story with washes of Merchant-Ivory gauze — and then to something else entirely: cyberpunk. Hyperion was published but five years after Neuromancer, and Simmons had clearly ingested the whole of William Gibson such that he was able to write about dataspheres and “ice” and console cowboys as if he had invented the genre. In fact, Simmons’ description of cyberspace heist frankly exceeds Gibson’s in terms of clarity.

And then the closing arc arrives. First, a beautiful mystical meditation on identity and replication worthy of “Blade Runner” and then a gearing up for war that recalls anime or “The Matrix’s” final act. And then back to a love story, a lover carrying the body of their beloved on a Pilgrim’s Progress through a war zone, up a stair, into a shrine, and then into the mystical embrace of prophecy and fate.

I am going to consciously skip the poet’s tale and the consul’s tale. If the four above have not sold you on the majesty of Simmons’s approach, nothing I write here will.

The Shrike

The cover makes you think it’s a simple bogeyman. It isn’t.

An analogy: put a vial of spice or a spice harvester on the cover of Dune. Those elements aren’t the story of the Great Houses and Arrakis, but they drive it. The Shrike is the same kind of presence. It is a focusing point, a placeholder for something much larger.

What the Shrike is, I don’t yet know. But the Shrike resists the murder-robot-on-a-rampage reading the cover invites. At various points it seems merciful. Curious. Inscrutable. Incomprehensibly death-obsessed. And then merciful again. Whatever it stands for, it is a vessel for a powerful realization.

Do not let it put you off. It is not what it looks like.

Why Hyperion Displaces Dune

Hyperion Builds Through Immersion, Not Exposition

Simmons does something Dune does to a lesser degree. The story explains its world without stopping for expository devices. Dune accomplishes this to a small degree e.g. we don’t stop the world and have the Butlerian Jihad explained. However, there are multiple times when ham-handed or barely-concealed expository devices are deployed. Consider the monologues from the Reverend Mother Gaius, the lectures from Kynes, or the chapter-opening histories of Irulan. Those are not natural, you can feel the author cheating to get those concepts on the table.

In Hyperion we are never given a recap — we simply come to understand, across hundreds of pages, the cultural weight and shadow of what came before.

Hyperion Has Humanity at Its Heart

Dune is a masterwork, but it is a cold one. Herbert’s universe is populated by scheming interstellar space sociopaths. By the later books, you feel like the last person with a functioning emotional cortex in the known universe. There is grandeur, but very little warmth. Honestly, I have a hard time believing that. Will there ever be a day where humans don’t year for touch, for desire, for warmth? I find it hard to believe. Maybe it’s the lingering damage of having freshly escaped the Machines’ yoke, but why is everyone so bloodlessly clinical?

Hyperion feels like a human universe. There is emotion, genuine love, genuine tragedy, genuine beauty. In Simmons’ world the humans are still human even as they ponder and attempt to survive a galactic ecosystem as complex and politically fraught as Dune’s. Simmons makes room for the finer things, for the small and tender moments between people; there’s room for poetry, fashion, and parenting. His characters are not just pieces on a board; they bleed — and not just after meeting the Shrike.

The vignette structure deserves some credit for this. It pushed Simmons harder than a conventional novel would have. By writing small, self-standing stories whose characterization had to be full, their motivations intelligible, Simmons wound up with a richer world. Herbert could use cryptic poetry and messianic prophecy as scaffolding; Simmons had to earn each tale on its own terms, in its own register.

There is also a structural honesty in Hyperion that Dune eventually loses. The story of an interstellar Messiah requires an enormous amount of contrivance to function — bloodlines, prophecy, spice, the whole apparatus of destiny. It asks you to believe that the universe has arranged itself around one man. Isn’t that comforting — even Herbert himself thought so! Hyperion asks us to sit in this discomfort: mankind labors under the grinding millstone of inscrutable fortune, as it always has, and there are many forces quite beyond our ken that influence it.

Hyperion is a story that does not need magic to land. It just needs to be true.

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