Hyperion

Hyperion
Dan Simmons
Hyperion Cantos #1

Hyperion Summary

We start with the Consul, a member of the Hegemony, being ordered by the Hegemony CEO Meina Gladstone to go to the planet Hyperion and go on a pilgrimage to see the Shrike. She also warns him that one of the pilgrims may be a spy. The Ousters are beginning a large scale attack and the future is uncertain. The Consul wakes up on the tree-ship Yggradsil, and meets the other pilgrims. They are: the Consul, Het Masteen (Templar of the tree-ship), Father Hoyt (A catholic priest), Martin Silenus (An old, famous poet), Colonel Kassad (Butcher of Bressia), Brawne Lamia (Private Investigator), and Sol Weintraub (Scholar) with his infant daughter Rachel.

They are going to be forced to land in Keats and travel to the Time Tombs, since there is a field around the tombs that ships can not enter. The group argues and are all very different, but agree they should all tell their stories of how they came to be here. They draw numbers for the order, and the Consul pulls number 7. Father Hoyt tells his story first, while they are still on the tree-ship.

Most of Hoyt’s story is actually the diaries of another priest, Father Paul Dure. Dure went to Hyperion to meet with a remote tribe called the Bikura and study them. It is a dangerous journey, having to navigate “tesla trees” that generate a ton of electricity. His guide is murdered when he nears the tribe, and he suspects the Bikura. When he eventually finds and meets him Dure describes them as a bunch of children with down syndrome. They seem relatively simple, and refer to themselves as a group (The three score and ten), without having individual names. They have a strict schedule and several strong taboos, one of which is no nudity. Every day they all descend into a canyon but refuse to let Dure come with. He investigates by himself while they are foraging and discovers an ancient, beautiful church with a cross in it. Later, one of the Bikura spots him bathing (without his catholic cross necklace on), and they almost kill him for “not being of the cruciform”, but instead take him down into the labyrinth of Hyperion. They find a cave full of glowing crosses on the walls, and they take one out and make Dure wear it as a necklace. The Shrike appears and Dure is terrified, but it leaves without anything happening. Dure returns to the camp, and when he awakes the cross he was wearing has fused into his body. He can not remove it, and medical scans show it is touching his brain. He tries to leave, but when he gets a certain distance away he becomes wracked with pain. He witnesses one of the Bikura die, and then be reborn by the cruciform. The crosses make the Bikura immortal but also trap them in this small area. We now return to Father Hoyt, who came searching for Dure, and found that he stabbed himself to a tesla tree in an attempt to kill himself. When Hoyt found him he was still alive, although Hoyt was able to remove the cruciform from him and he died a true death. Hoyt now is afflicted with the cruciform and must take drugs to manage the pain he feels.

They land in Keats, and the Consul is greeted by his old aide who now runs the planet. Most people are being evacuated since the Shrike has been going on a killing spree and is not constrained in area like he used to be. They find an old tavern familiar to both Silenus and the Consul, and Colonel Kassad tells his story.

Kassad was raised on the streets before joining the FORCE (military). During his training he kept meeting a woman in simulations that he fell in love with and had sex with a lot. He distinguished himself in combat by defeating some religious extremists, then was sent to Bressia to fight the Ousters. He broke many conventional rules of war and became known as the Butcher of Bressia but he won the planet. On his trip home his ship is attacked by Ousters and he is forced to fight for his life but manages to steal one of their ships and crash onto Hyperion. His mysterious woman is there when he wakes up. Her name is Moneta and she is from the ruins of the City of Poets. She explains how the Time Tombs move backwards through time, and she is doing the same. She gives him power armor suit and together with the shrike they massacre a large number of Ousters camped on the planet. Right after, in a blood-sex craze him and Moneta start to have sex, but then she turns into a thorn monster like the Shrike and Kassad thinks he is about to die. He passes out and wakes up back in Hegemony care. Nothing much happens for a while then he was invited on this pilgrimage.

Kassad says his only goal is to kill the Shrike. Time is confusing since some parts of it seem to be moving the wrong direction. They are being escorted by an android down a barge on a river. The next story to tell is Martin Silenus.

Silenus was born to a noble family on Old Earth, he was around for the creation of the World Web with the introduction of Farcasters. He was given an extensive classical education and knows a lot of Earth literature and stuff. Earth is dying due to an accidental black hole someone made, and eventually Martin is forced to leave. He is put in long-term cryogenic sleep while his mother stays behind and dies with the Earth. When he wakes up he suffered a stroke and his language is severely hindered, with him only having a 7 word vocabulary. He is forced into slave labor on Heaven’s Gate to pay off debts, and writes poetry in his free time. A rich woman reads his Cantos and gets it published and marries him. He is now rich and famous again, but struggles to sell more of his work. He eventually quits on his publisher and travels with Sad King Billy to start the City of Poets on Hyperion. He still struggles to write, but eventually is struck with inspiration. At the same time many people start being killed by the Shrike. The Shrike is his muse and he needs it to write. Billy stuns him and prepares to burn his work since he thinks it is causing the shrike attacks. The Shrike appears and takes King Billy away. Silenus only desires to finish his Hyperion Cantos.

The pilgrims arrive at the Sea of Grass, where a windwagon is supposed to be to take them across. They have to wait a while for it to show up. Windwagons look like classic earth sailing ships. They discuss their luggage, and Het Masteen has a mobius cube he thinks contains a weapon that can beat the Shrike. They board the ship and Sol Weintraub tells his story.

Sol and his wife Sarai seem to have a perfect life. They are happy together and he enjoys his job teaching at the local college. Then they have their daughter Rachel who is perfect in every way. Rachel grows up and becomes interested in alien artifacts and old ruins, and basically becomes a space archaeologist. She travels to Hyperion to investigate the Time Tombs with her partner. One night while investigating the tombs all her equipment and lights shut off, and the Shrike touches her. When Rachel wakes up she has lost part of her recent memory and doctors discover she has “Merlin’s Sickness”, she is going backwards in time. Every day she ages in reverse and can only remember what she knew at that point when growing older, not younger. Sol had recently begun having a dream where some voice tells him to take his daughter Rachel and offer her as a sacrifice on Hyperion, which he obviously refused. Rachel tries to live a normal-ish life but is eventually forced to return to living with her parents. They try to make things easy for her but every day she has to wake up and be told about her disease and condition anew. Eventually she asks her parents just to pretend he life is normal as a 16ish year old and not tell her about the disease. Sol is Jewish and struggles greatly with God about what is happening to his daughter. He also debates the Abraham Problem, because his dreams are very similar to what God asked Abraham to do with his son. The media eventually learns of Rachel's sickness and harasses her and the family whenever they are in public. Teams go back to the time tombs but learn nothing, and eventually they get closed as being too dangerous. Sol’s wife Sarai takes a short trip to see her family when Rachel is back to being very young, and is killed in a car crash. Sol is devastated and goes on TV with Rachel to plead for help, which allowed him to come on this pilgrimage to try to save his daughter.

Before they go to sleep they see a space battle happening in the sky, presumably an Ouster attack. The tree-ship ygdrassill is destroyed. Kassad and the Consul each take a watch during the night to make sure nothing happens. But in the morning Het Masteen has vanished, and they find his room full of blood. His mobius cube is unopened and they deduce it must have an Erg inside (A forcefield alien thing). They reach the base of a mountain range and prepare to take the cable cars across. Kassad has to activate them and then make a mad sprint and jump to get on the car. Masteen was supposed to tell his story next but is gone, so it is Brawne Lamia’s turn.

Brawne is from Lusus, a high gravity planet so people are short and strong. She works as a private investigator and the story begins with her getting a new client named Johnny, a Cybrid (AI human), who was “killed” and wants her help figuring out why. Someone tried to infect him with AIDS 2, which caused him to go unconscious and lose a chunk of memory. She learns that he is an AI recreation of the poet John Keats, and is a bit of an oddity for the Technocore (The separate AI body). She meets with her friend BB who tells her more about AI’s and Cybrids. She also learns Johnny was at a bar with a Templar and a short man with a ponytail. Johnny then calls her and she comes to find he was attacked, by the ponytail man. Brawne tracks down the ponytail man but when she catches him he turns out to also be a cybrid and blows himself up. She has to go into hiding so her and Johnny travel to an Earth recreation world the AI’s made. They have begun to fall in love and have sex. They are attacked by a group of men but they fight them off and learn they were sent by the Lusus Shrike temple. They meet with the Shrike Bishop and learn Johnny was supposed to go on this pilgrimage to Hyperion but had forgotten and they were going to make him go. The man with the ponytail was supposed to have been his bodyguard. In order to go to Hyperion Johnny needs to fully put his AI brain inside the cybrid body, but the AI do not seem to want that to happen. Brawne is friends with Meina Gladstone, CEO of the Hegemony and asks her some questions and learns that the AI seem scared of the Time Tombs since they can not predict them. They return to BB for help, and break into the datumplane to learn info and get Johnny entirely into his body. It works but BB is killed in the process. Johnny tells Brawne that there are 3 AI factions: the Stables who like humans, the Volatiles who hate humans, and the Ultimates, who want to perfect the Ultimate Intelligence (UI) model so they can know everything. The Shrike seems to represent two possible futures, either the AI sent it back in time to hunt humans, or humans sent it back in time to fight AI. But war seems to be coming between the two groups. Brawne and Johnny gear up and get in a huge battle trying to reach the Shrike temple, Johnny dies but manages to transfer all his memory into Brawne’s computer appendage thing before he does. She is also pregnant.

The next day they reach the church near the time tombs, and find a lot of dead bodies. There are more ships fighting in space. They spot a man that looks like Het Masteen ahead of them headed for the tombs. The Consul does not want to share his story but does anyway.

His story is also primarily someone else's. Merin Aspic was a shipworker installing a farcaster for the world of Maui Covenant. The farcaster is about to be opened but he is visiting the tomb of his beloved Siri. The story flashes between this moment and memories of how Merin and Siri fell in love and their lives. The work on a farcaster involves a lot of time debt, the universe progressing while you stay the same age, so everyone he knows will be dead when he finishes the project. Merin and his friend Mike visit the planet on some time off, and Mike brought an illegal Hawking Mat (Flying carpet). They use it to visit the main islands of the world, where Merin meets Siri. She is 16 to his 19 but they fall in love. Merin learns many on the world do not want to be members of the hegemony and World Web. Mike is killed by Siri’s cousin and Merin kills him in return. Him and Siri run away and he leaves her. We see flashes of the different times Merin was able to visit the planet, with Siri aging more each time. He visits when she is late 20’s and he is only 20. They travel the oceans and speak to the dolphins. Merin sees the beauty of this world. He meets their children, who age faster than him also. On his last trip before this one Siri was 70 and they went fishing together. Siri was very famous during her life, serving in high roles within the hegemony. She still worries that introducing her beloved world to the World Web will destroy it. When Merin reaches her tomb he finds several video recordings of Siri expressing her love for him and her hate for the Hegemony. Merin planted a bomb on the farcaster that detonates when it is activated, saving the world for a time. The Consul is Merin and Siri’s grandson. Maui Covenant was industrialized and ruined when the hegemony came in. The Consul has spent his time moving up the ranks of the Hegemony while hating them all along. He is selected to go to Hyperion and meet with the Ousters, but decides to work with the Ousters against the Hegemony instead. He is in awe of their society, and they tell him the black hole that destroyed earth was not an accident, but an intentional move by the AI and Hegemony. He returns and reports almost everything to the hegemony and is made Consul of Hyperion. He waits for years before meeting with the Ousters again, and killing their agents to take a device that could free the shrike. He activates it.

The others on the pilgrimage debate killing the Consul as a spy, but decide against it. The Consuls says something is not right, with the destruction of the tree-ship and Het Masteen’s reaction but is not sure what is going on. The next morning they all set off for the Time Tombs together, with Sol singing “We’re off to see the Wizard”. THE END.