Hyperion

Book 1 of the Hyperion Cantos series
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An experience, this novel feels like 6 books in one.

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The premise is that seven disparate people have been invited by the clergy of the Church of the Shrike to go on a pilgrimage to see the monster at the center of their religion, the Lord of Pain, so they can ask him to grant a very personal wish. Only one person ever returns from a pilgrimage to see the Shrike.

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As this group of people journeys toward the Valley of the Time Tombs, through space, over water, across mountains, and in a boat crossing a sea of grass, one by one they tell their stories. They hope that in sharing how it is they are connected to the Shrike, they will find some usable information that will help them survive the experience.

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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.

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Among the pilgrims, there is a clergy man who is addicted to morphine because he’s in tremendous pain. There is a private detective warrior woman who fell in love with a robot. There’s an annoyingly boisterous poet who has lived for centuries and who, long, long ago, was among the first people ever to reside on Hyperion.

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His face was all angles: shadows, planes, and facets. Not gaunt like Father Hoyt’s, merely carved from cold stone. A thin line of beard along his jawline served to accent the sharpness of his countenance as surely as blood on a knife blade.

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The author is able to show off his chops in various writing styles as each story is completely different in tone and content; some are extremely vivid and curious and live on in the mind of the reader long after reading.

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Watching twelve hundred armored horses charging directly at him created internal sensations which Kassad found a bit unnerving. The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body.

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When the book ends with the telling of the final persons’s story, we still don’t yet understand how the people are connected, but by the time they have arrived to the Valley of the Time Tombs, home of the Shrike, a new layer of complexity has been added.

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The world in which this story takes place is well-built. There is a technology in place among the conglomeration of planets within the Hegemony called telecasters which allows people to simply step into them and be whisked off to another Hegemony planet in seconds. This allows for very interesting chase scenes and for the easy take-over by the Hegemony of planets not interested in joining the Hegemony.

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Other forces at work in the galaxy are the TechnoCore, the civilization of AIs, and the space-ship residing Outsters, who fled from Earth as it was burning. These two civilizations began a war just above the surface of Hyperion as our group of pilgrims reaches their destination.

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This is very good science-fiction. I look forward to book 2!

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