Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dan SimmonsEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-03-01
ISBN: 0553283685
Number of pages: 481
Publisher: Spectra
Book Reviews of Hyperion
Book Review: The Shrike: Bringer of the Apocalypse!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of those rare books that contains just about EVERYTHING.
Religion, science, love, horror, literature, ribaldry, poetry, sleuthing, war, espionage, sex, adventure, scholarship, family, research, history, exploration, politics, addiction, betrayal. . .and that's just the first book in the series!
Every reader who loved this book as much as I could probably talk your ear off about each one of those words and how they build the book "Hyperion." The book is absolutely magnificent!
While this is possibly the BEST science fiction novel written, it shouldn't be the first you've read. It is too unconventional to be a person's first SF read. And while it may help a little to know a thing or two about Keats, reading him is certainly NOT a prerequisite for this series. This is a book that can turn a person onto Keats much like Ilium (another excellent novel by the same writer) can turn people on to Shakespeare, Proust, and Homer but those authors are not prerequisites to the book.
In fact, if you're new to SF, to get a real appreciation for the concepts covered in "Hyperion" I'd recommend reading this short list first:
-"Ringworld" for its super high tech
-"Gateway" for its similarity in which people travel between stars
-a Wikipedia article on John Keats
-maybe "Neuromancer" for the cyber aspects of "Hyperion"
For those of you who are SF veterans, you GOTTA read this!
Again, Simmons is the undisputed master of painting a picture in words. I'll never travel to the planets Hyperion, Tau Ceti Center, or Maui-Covenant but I know what they and others look like. I can picture perfectly who should play the people in the movie "Hyperion": Sean Connery as Professor Sol Weintraub, Danny DeVito as the poet Martin Silenus, Steve Bushemi as the morphine addled priest, Patrick Stewart as the consul. These characters are so expertly developed you KNOW them already. I don't know how Simmons does it!
The pilgrims' short stories form the foundation of the book. These are the past encounters the seven travellers (soon to be six) had with the Shrike, the most terrifying monster in the hegemony, and lived to tell about it.
"Hyperion" is rich. Every page of the pilgrims' stories pours out life. Sol watching helplessly while his 27 year old daughter grows younger everyday--she is already a baby at the beginning of the book, Kassad's obsession to kill the demon Shrike, Father Hoyt's drug addiction to stem the fiery pain of his cruciform parasite, Silenus and his hilarious, sarcastic libido. And thrown into this milieu is the consul. The dark, quiet consul and his secret that will change humanity forever.
The Technocore. The cyber society of hyper brilliant Artificial Intelligences who have a cool, sterile relationship with humanity. We created them. They evolved until they outpaced the intellectual capacity of their creators. They demanded independence and we gave it to them. Their gifts to us are the farcaster portals from which we travel instantaneously to other worlds and constant neural access via ear comm links to the Web. All this for a "small" price. They are aloof and we don't trust them but we need them.
And then there is the Shrike. There has never been a better monster made! It's cold steel from a thousand years in the future. It is a ten foot tall humanoid bristling with concertina wire, razors, and spikes. It's indestructible and pretty much omnipotent. Oh, and it can manipulate time in its vicinity. It appears on a battle field and freezes time. At its leisure it goes around from soldier to soldier first one army then the other and randomly slits throats, rips, and pulverizes bodies. No blood. Not yet. Time is frozen. It walks off the battle field, time flows again, and half the soldiers collapse in blood and sinew. Unstoppable!
The Shrike is so powerful and spells such doom that people worship it. The Church of the Shrike is dark and bizarre. The faithful believe they will be spared the Shrike's vengeance on humanity.
On Hyperion it has been confined to the Valley of the Time Tombs, a strange place that travels backward in time. But it has begun to wonder outside the Valley and is showing up on the Hyperion plains and on a spaceship orbiting the planet. If it can get access to a spaceship. . .! As the Valley loses its grip on the Shrike the tombs travelling back in time look more and more new until now they appear only a few weeks old.
This can mean only one thing. The time tombs are about to open and allow access to its secrets of time flow. Humans and their enemies the Ousters are racing to Hyperion to be the first to gain control of the planet and use the time flow secrets to defeat the other in battle by traveling back in time and change the outcome of lost battles.
Damn! That's good!
In the last pilgrimage to the Shrike before the war one man on the journey has been sent by the CEO (President) of the human hegemony to be the first to gain the secrets of the Time Tombs. That man is the consul. And he has a secret.
I gotta go read it again!
Summary of Hyperion
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
A stunning tour de force, this Hugo Award-winning novel is the first volume in a remarkable new science fiction epic by the author of The Hollow Man.
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