Throwback Thursday: The Mind-Altering Scope of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos

Dan Simmons is an expert at playing the field. The author crosses genres more often than a chicken crosses the road, jumping from horror, to fantasy, to sci-fi, to mystery, to historical fiction with every other release.
His latest, The Fifth Heart, about the decidedly fictional Sherlock Holmes investigating a case alongside the decidedly non-fictional Henry James, blends a few of them. You never know what the next book will give you, but you know you’ll enjoy it. Man, can that guy reel you into a story, any story.
Maybe even all the stories at once: Simmons is best-known in sci-fi circles for 1989’s Hyperion, and its other half, 1990’s The Fall of Hyperion, the first two volumes of The Hyperion Cantos. The first book is written as a frame story, stuffing six separate, ultimately related tales inside one unifying narrative, while the second is a more traditionally told wrap-up to a story that only grows in scope to the final pages. Twenty-five years after they were published, they remain vital, impressive works of science fiction.

Only better, because instead of trudging to a boring old cathedral, the pilgrims of Hyperion are headed to another planet to do cool science-y things and maybe get murdered by a fearsome, many-bladed robot. Didn’t think about adding that to your little book, did you Chaucer?
In the 28th century, humanity has spread across the galaxy, populating a number of disparate worlds with the aid of the WorldWeb, which allows for instantaneous travel between planets. The WorldWeb is run by the TechnoCore, an aggregation of AI machines that controls nearly all of mankind’s technology, and lately, relations between man and thinking machine have been less than cordial. Turning up the heat on this simmering conflict are the Time Tombs, mysterious structures that move backwards in time, and a half-mechanical, half-supernatural being known as the Shrike that moves with them. No one knows quite what will happen when the tombs open, but everyone wants to be the first to find out. I’ll give you one guess where the Time Tombs are located. Hint: it starts with H, and kinda rhymes with Lowperion.

The book uses the struggle between humans and machines as a backdrop for the real meat of the story: a group of travelers are heading to the tombs, each with a hidden agendas and secret, angst-ridden history. The frame structure allows each one to fill us in on the details as the group makes its long pilgrimage across a deserted planet. Simmons uses the stories to develop the universe well beyond immediate events, allowing us glimpses of distant worlds and tense battles across decades of time. Each character’s life takes place in its own little microcosm. In one, a priest suffers the consequences of first contact with a truly alien species, while another follows a man losing his timesick, backwards-aging daughter day-by-day. The tales don’t seem to have much in common after the first read. But as the pilgrims progress in their intercantos adventure, Simmons gently turns up the serendipity until a dozen “wow” moments hit your noggin’ one after another.

The Hyperion Cantos would be a prize piece of science fiction for its world-building alone, but it’s Simmons’ ability to prop his world up with characters you come to care deeply about that keeps you hooked. Their emotional struggles are so integral to the plot, the two become inseparable. Mankind’s quest for survival is mirrored dozens of different ways in the drama, from our desire to protect our children, to the pursuit of love, adventure, and art, or the simple fight to stay alive. That there’s a time monster and space travel doesn’t make it any less real.
The first Hyperion book ends on a whopper of a cliffhanger, so make sure you’ve got a copy of The Fall of Hyperion handy when you start the series. Endymion and The Rise of Endymion jump ahead nearly 300 years with a doozy of a plot hook: farcasting singularities have been destroyed to protect humans from the TechnoCore, but without instantaneous travel, most civilizations are doomed. Some of the characters from earlier books are still kicking around, too, allowing the character development threads and tidy metaphors to persist across the centuries.
Hyperion is also among sci-fi’s most award-winning series. Across four books, they’ve earned Simmons three Hugo nominations (and one win), two Locus awards, and a Nebula nomination. Well-deserved, all.