“Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.”
~ Sol Weintraub in Hyperion¹

Short Summary

Hyperion, the novel, starts in the future (2900 AD) at a time when humans have become inter-planetary species, and the worlds are connected via the WorldWeb. People are able to not only talk but also travel across planets almost instantaneously. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly developed and has its own civilization named the “AllThing,” and they assist humans. The worlds are governed by the “Hegemony of Man”, a coalition of representatives from humans (Senate) and AllThing. In addition to this, there is a group of humans called Ousters who broke away from the rest of humanity since they disapproved of the dependence on AI.

The novel’s setting is a war between the Outsters and the Hegemony to gain control of a planet named Hyperion. What makes Hyperion unique is that it contains structures that move back in time called the “Time Tombs”. They are guarded by a mysterious four-armed creature named “The Shrike”, with a body full of curved steel blades. The creature is a legend since most people have no idea how it looks or if it even exists. People take a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs and The Shrike temple, never to return.

For the first time, the Time Tombs are opening, and there may never be a pilgrimage again. Seven people are selected to take the final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs, and what they find might decide the fate of the galaxy. They don’t know each other, nor how they were chosen, but they have some connection with the Shrike.

Each of the seven pilgrims tells their stories to understand what connects them and how their past is helpful to the future of humanity. The book ends with stories from all of them except one (since that person goes missing), and they embark on their journey into the valley of the time tombs. So the end is actually the beginning! I liked the ending.

It kind of reminded me of “Raised by Wolves”² Season 1, where a flying snake is born at the end of the season, and that sets the stage for the real beginning. Or even in “Game of Thrones”³ Season 1, after an entire season of eventful happenings, at the very end, the dragons are born, signaling that the story is just about to start.

Of course, I read part 2 of the book - “The Fall of Hyperion”⁴ to get to know what happens to the pilgrims.

in medias res⁵

I love stories that start in the midst of things, and the past is revealed slowly as the story progresses. If you think of it, once you’re an adult, most people you meet always have some fascinating history that you get to know slowly as you get to know them in the present.

Thinking of flashbacks, the first thing that comes to mind is “The Arrow”⁶ TV series. I saw the first couple of seasons of the show a few years ago, and the way the show presented the two parallel timelines was incredible. It was like watching two movies in parallel.

In fact, there are many stories that start in the middle, and that’s what makes them intriguing. There are so many, but a few come to mind right now. ‘The Odyssey’⁷ doesn’t immediately begin after the Trojan War but many years later. We get to know of the events prior to the start of the book (Ulysses being held captive by the goddess Calypso) at a later point. ‘Paradise Lost’⁸ begins after Satan, and his followers are defeated. The backstory of the reason and the war are told as the story progresses. Coming back to TV series’, GOT³ is a good example. It starts 15 years after the rebellion, which dethroned the Targaryens, who had ruled Westeros for 300 years. As the series progresses, we get to know a lot of the backstory and mythology about Westeros. ‘The Blacklist’⁹ is an example of a story where the backstory has so many twists and turns!

List of stories

As I mentioned earlier, the book is effectively a collection of short stories by the pilgrims - Catholic priest Father Lenar Hoyt, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, poet Martin Silenus, scholar Sol Weintraub, detective Brawne Lamia and the Hegemony Consul. The Templar Het Masteen does not tell his story since he goes missing. Father Hoyt starts with another priest’s (Paul Duré) account. So in a way, Father Hoyt says two stories - his and Duré’s. So there are actually seven stories. If you strictly count the number of pilgrims, it is not seven but eight. Sol has a baby with him.

• The Priest’s Tale: “The Man Who Cried God” - Told during dinnertime when the pilgrims are on the treeship Yggdrasil on their way to Hyperion.
• The Soldier’s Tale: “The War Lovers” - Told after they land on Keats and start their journey upriver on a ship named Benares.
• The Poet’s Tale: “Hyperion Cantos” - Told on the ship during dinner time while traveling further north to the Shrike temple.
• The Scholar’s Tale: “The River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter” - Told on the windwagon that would take them across the sea of grass.
• The Detective’s Tale: “The Long Good-Bye” - Told on the tramcar between the mountains.
• The Consul’s Tale: “Remembering Siri” - Told after they reach Chronos Keep.

The first story gives you a jolt and makes you think, especially about resurrection. Sol’s story is sad and helps explain the presence of the baby. Brawne’s story reminded me of Snowcrash¹⁰. The story that I liked best was Martin the poet’s tale. There were so many quotable passages that I re-read a few of them.

Though the genre is sci-fi and the backdrop is war, the presence of John Keats¹¹ looms large. There are references to Keats everywhere. The capital city of Hyperion is named Keats. Several of the poems get mentioned throughout the story. Searched for Keat’s poems and found the list of 10 Greatest Poems by John Keats by Annabelle Fuller quite good. In the comments section someone mentioned an article about Keats’ Great Odes and the Sublime and that set me thinking about the Submlime in Westworld.

In Westworld¹², The Sublime, is a virtual world, a heaven, for the hosts. They can upload their consciousness into the Sublime and leave their robot bodies behind. Watching the hosts gleefully jump into the sublime through the door in the ‘Valley Beyond’ was one of the iconic scenes in Westworld.

Back to Silenus, here are a few quotes from his tale.

Quotes from the poet’s tale

“There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.”

“My early poetry was execrable. As with most bad poets, I was unaware of this fact, secure in my arrogance that the very act of creating gave some worth to the worthless abortions I was spawning.”

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality … and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

“The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.”

“Reworked experience is the stuff of all true poetry and raw experience was the birthing gift of my new life.”

“Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.”

“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.”

“As long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.”

“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.”

“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

“Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.”

“Words are the only bullets in truth’s bandolier. And poets are the snipers.”

“Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.”

“The difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.”

“Sometimes took an hour or a day for a word to come to me, for a concept to sink its roots into the firm soil of language.”

“For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from somewhere else.”