HYPERION - DAN SIMMONS

I picked this up at a book exchange event here in Tokyo, after having heard about it for a few years. I would say this series has a fairly exalted status in SciFi world. I’m not deep into SciFi but I know about it, which would maybe place it in the tier below something like the Foundation series or Dune or the Solar Cycle. Plus, it has a cool-ass cover. Anyway, I’m glad I picked it up, it’s a quick fun read. The structure is also quite good, it’s more of a collection of short stories set in the same world than a novel as such. The set-up is quite similar to the Canterbury Tales, where a number of folks from different walks of life share stories during a religious journey. Through the stories we get a fairly good and interesting picture of the world. The pilgrimage here is to the Time Tombs on a far-out world called Hyperion where they will attempt to meet up with the mysterious monster known as The Shrike, about whom we know almost nothing, except that he’s given to impaling folks on his “Tree of Pain” and, like the Tombs themselves, he has some strange relationship with time. He might be from a distant future and moving backwards, though this was never made totally clear. All the pilgrims’ stories are fascinating and solid short stories in their own right, they each illustrate something weird and cool about the world of the book. There is a human, interstellar society that can transport between worlds, another group of former humans who have adapted to live in space, an AI race and various populations on hundreds of planets. There are weird parasites and space militaries. There are several space religions and governmental structures. All very cool and engaging. Simmons really paints a cool world. The only drawback is that this book, being part one of a series, has very little happen in it. We get everyone’s story but that’s basically it, the book ends as they finish the journey. It’s basically all set up for the later volumes. That being said, the world he evokes is quite interesting and he leaves enough tantalizing threads open that I’m really interested to see where it goes. Can he fulfill the promise of this book? Did he shoot his load, so to speak, and will the subsequent volumes lack the originality and coherence of this one? Time will tell.