The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.



I thought I was well-read in the genre, having tackled most of the big names in the 80's and early 90's, but somehow I missed out on the saurian in the room. WOW!!! I can't remember the last time I was so amazed at a new series, instantly jumping into the next book a

[ A piece of the puzzle is removed from the Big Picture as one pilgrim disappears before he can tell his story. Was Het Masteen, the ecologist traveling in a giant treeship, kill to prevent this or was he the spy the pilgrims were warned about? The answer is left for the next volume (hide spoiler)

I thought I was well-read in the genre, having tackled most of the big names in the 80's and early 90's, but somehow I missed out on the saurian in the room. WOW!!! I can't remember the last time I was so amazed at a new series, instantly jumping into the next book after I read the last page of this one and marking it as one of my All-Time Top 5. (Actually, I vaguely remember reading the first page of the prologue back when it was first published and sneering at the florid language and at the fantasy vibes, which show what kind of pretentious punk I was back then)The Consul is interrupted from his melancholic musings by an urgent holographic message, weirdly similar in tone to the one Luke Skywalker received one day, calling him to save the Galaxy from the evil Empire. The main difference here is that the Consul is an old, disillusioned man that feels he has already done his duty for the Hegemony. But I'm getting slightly ahead of the story... Let's try to decode that message for first time readers:is the current structure controlling more than two hundred inhabited planets after humankind was forced to abandon Earth in the wake of a physical experiment gone horribly wrong. To do this, the Hegemony relies on the Hawkins drive, a FTL technology that has the drawback of stretching time for the crew and passengers, on Farcaster portals that allow instant travel between worlds previously connected, on an implant- and commlog-based galaxy-wide-web of instant communication and on the TechnoCore, an assembly of Artificial Intelligences that have emancipated themselves from human control yet continue to help the Hegemony with these technologies that make travel, commerce and communication between star systems possible.are the part of humanity that preferred to live in freefall, among 'swarms' of spaceships and asteroids, instead of colonizing new planets. They serve the role of barbarians at the gates in the economy of the novel, the military threat to the Hegemony.is where the 'gates' currently are, the nexus where the forces of the Hegemony and of the Ousters converge for the battle to control the ultimate mystery of the Galaxy. The planet is currently an independent backward piece of real estate, colonized first by agricultural settlers and next by a bunch of poets led by Sad King Billy. What makes Hyperion special are :, a series of ruins that travel back in Time !!! and, a Frankenstein monster that hunts humans for fun and impales them eternally on a tree of thorns.With only days left before the beginning of hostilities, the Hegemony petitions the local Church of the Shrike to allow a set of seven pilgrims to travel to the Time Tombs and there to petition the Shrike to grant them one wish. The catch? According to church gospel, the Shrike will only answer one and kill all the rest.What I have written so far represents only the frame story, and the first layer of meaning for the novel. Each of the pilgrims, as they travel to their doom, will tell his or her back story, hoping that it will help the others understand why they were chosen from among billions of other people, and what they expect from the Shrike. What have a catholic priest, an army colonel, a poet, a scholar, a templar/ecologist, a private investigator and a politician have in common? And who among them is a traitor to the Hegemony?With each story we learn not only about the fate of the individual pilgrim, but also more about the big picture, exactly like the puzzle referenced earlier. Yet the stories often raise more questions than they answer. For me, the key is not necessarily in the parallels to the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, although they are apt, but in the more obscure yet stronger pointers towards "The Dying Earth" by Jack Vance and the poet John Keats, who himself started an unfinished poem named 'Hyperion'The true scope of the novel is then nothing less than the survival or extinction of the whole human race. Do we deserve the stars? Can there be a God in our future, and if there is one, will it be benevolent towards our multiple sins? While this axiom may be true for a lot of other epic science-fiction series, Dan Simmons truly shines here in the combination of technology with metaphysics, of poetry mixed with character study, in the multitude of layers and literary references that are both demanding and respectful of the reader's intelligence. Hyperion is much more than just a Star Wars clone.I am tempted to leave out as many details as I can from each pilgrim's story, letting the readers make their own choices for meaning or reason for inclusion in the overall puzzle. I believe each of them represents an avatar of humanity, a personification of a potential path to redemption.As usual, the priests stand in for faith and surrender of individual will to the greater good. Yet when Fathers Paul Dure and Lenar Hoyt come to the planet Hyperion they are shaken to their very core. The crucifixion, redemption through pain and even resurrection all play a part in the drama that unfolds as they come face to face with the Shrike.Paul Dure may reference here a need for life to have a direction, a higher purpose than simply survival.Fedmahn Kassad, the next pilgrim to confess, is probably the easiest to decode. He is the belief that all problems can be solved by Force, can be blasted into oblivion. Yet during his long and bloody career in the Hegemony FORCE, he repeatedly comes face to face with a beautiful ghost, until Kassad too visits Hyperion and meets the Shrike.Martin Silenus is provocative and often obscure, but his tale is the most revealing about the original destruction of the Earth when a black hole is accidentally sent towards the planet's core.Silenus wants to know if we deserve to be saved, or at least he wants to chronicle our fall from grace. He too has previously visited Hyperion in the entourage of Sad King Billy and his long epic poem is unfinished. Will the Titans (humankind) be replaced by the Shrike (whatever that monster represents) ? Silenus gives us one of the first descriptions of the monster, even as he fails to explain his motivations other than on the allegorical plane.As a side note, Silenus talks also about the art of the novel, giving us one of the secrets for a successful epic (his own string of commercial success was a series called "The Dying Earth"):Sol Weintraub is for me an avatar of a future humanity that has no need for gods, unless you consider humanism and Reason / common sense another form of religion. A professor at a famous university on an underdeveloped agricultural planet, Weintraub is pulled into the web of the Shrike when his daughter Rachel is infected by an incurable disease while on an archeological dig at the Time Tombs. Sol is drawn back to his Jewish roots by the incident, as he tries to reason out the purpose of God in harming his daughter.Brawne Lamia is a private investigator hired by a person who claims to have been murdered before coming to her dingy office. How is that even possible? Apparently it is so, if the person is a 'cybrid' , a human clone with its brain controlled by the TechnoCore, the rogue artificial intelligences that have emancipated themselves. The fact that the genetic material for cloning comes from the same John Keats poet adds more food for thought in the growing puzzle. With the additional question of whether the AI still needs humans in order to pursue its own secret goals.The Consul is the last to take the stand, but instead of telling his own story he mesmerizes his audience with a love story to defy time and space between an astronaut spending most of his time at FTL speeds and the woman who ages rapidly as she waits for him on a planet not yet connected to the web and the Hegemony. It is also a cautionary tale about a dominant culture that destroys both the environment and the diversity of different worldviews. The planet Maui Covenant is modeled both on the geography and the fate of the original tribes of Hawaii, a lost Garden of Eden.As the pilgrims switch means of transport from a treeship to a riverboat pulled by giant manta rays, on a landship pushed by winds over an ocean of grass, then high over frozen peaks on cable cars and finally to a derelict castle in front of the Time Tombs, we are left to ponder what have learned so far? That humanity has destroyed its homeworld, and now it embarks on a war that can engulf the whole known colonized space. And that a God-like mysterious figure that may have been sent back from the future waits in judgement. Which of the pilgrims will receive the Shrike's answer?So many questions left me with no other option than to start immediately on book two (I have the omnibus edition.) As I write this review, I have already finished reading "The Fall of Hyperion" and all I have to say is : double WOW !!!