I didn't know that Dan Simmons's Hyperion was essentially the first half of a story that was split into two sections for publishing purposes (per the author, anyway) up until close to the end, and I wish I'd been aware of that going in - it would have helped me perhaps get a better sense of the structure of this strange, ambitious tale. Inspired by the storytelling pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales, Hyperion is the story of seven people chosen to go on a pilgrimage to the ruined, haunted world of Hyperion, to see the Shrike - a mythical, deadly figure which is said to grant a wish under certain circumstances, though no one seems to come back alive from this pilgrimage. As our pilgrims make their way, each tells their own tale of how they came to be on this journey, and in doing so, Simmons gets to let his imagination roam freely, giving us one found narrative of an explorer who finds a doomed tribe, another a hard-boiled detective tale, a third an action-packed military story, and so forth. During our seven narratives, Simmons carefully gives us clues and ideas about the nature of the Shrike, how this world came to be, and a sense of the larger galactic picture - all of which comes together by the end of the book, as lots of small details snap into place and we get a sense of maybe how the Shrike came to be, the role this pilgrimage is playing, and what the larger stakes are. Hyperion ends at a climactic point, one that works as a nicely ambiguous ending even as it's clear that there's a second part to come; thankfully, the second book is long since published, so I can see where the story goes from here, because I was completely fascinated by this dense, rich narrative. The characterization provided through each story, the rich range of imagination across the sprawling saga, the careful and thoughtful worldbuilding - Hyperion sucked me in pretty early on and never let go (even though the first couple of pages are a pretty bad example of XKCD's Fiction Rule of Thumb). I have no idea where this tale goes from here, but that's okay - with something this fascinating, I'm glad for the unpredictability.
Josh Mauthe
Brian Seiler