“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

I ended up buying a used copy of Hyperion last week. Short verdict: it was enjoyable in a dark and disturbing way.

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is a science fiction novel, though not as heavily technical as some in its genre. It’s a thousand years or so into the future and humanity has lost its soul and is slowly decaying. A crisis is brewing; war seems inevitable. The story revolves around the tales of six pilgrims as they make their way to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion in search of the Shrike. There they will ask one wish of it. Each of the pilgrims has a story to tell, so on their way to the Time Tombs, these stories are told.

I found some of these stories within a story greatly disturbing, but the first one, a tale told by a Catholic priest, was especially so. Perhaps there is a fate worse than death.
The second tale is of a soldier and of love and war, and I was cringing at some of the more graphic parts. (I will admit that I didn’t buy his story all that much; there seemed to be too much gore and sex instead of actual love going on.)
The third tale is of a poet who lost his muse, and was searching for a way to finish his cantos. This was one of the more bizarre ones of the collection, and it’s interspersed with a liberal amount of literary quotes. Also, there’s a king called “Sad King Billy” who appears here and is mentioned elsewhere in the book, and that name amuses me no end.

The fourth tale was a heartbreaking one of a father searching for a cure of his daughter’s strange illness. This story probably made up for whatever there was that let me down in the book, the ending of Hyperion itself included.
The fifth tale is about a detective and a cybrid — a human controlled by AI, or some such thing — who hires her to investigate his “murder”, and a lot of stuff about John Keats. My knowledge of Romantic poets is close to nil, so I had no idea that “Hyperion” was the title of Keats’ unfinished poem. (Seriously, the only thing that comes to mind is it’s the name of Seifer’s gunblade.)

The last tale is another of those strange stories about love and relativistic time dilation: how the girl planet-side ages but the boy who travels faster than light doesn’t. It’s also, in a way, a story about progress and resistance to change, loyalties and revenge.

Of course, the narrative between the stories tell us what happens as the pilgrims approach the Time Tombs, and after the last tale is told, they gather and head out to find the Shrike . . . and the book ends. It might as well had ended with an incomplete sentence — it was that abrupt. Now I have to go to the bookstore again and hope that they do have The Fall of Hyperion in stock.