Simmons has lived with this material for a very long time, even longer than its publication history might suggest. Over twenty-five years ago, during the course of his earlier career as an elementary school teacher and director of programs for academically talented children, Simmons entertained his students with a serialized narrative featuring fantastic adventures on an imaginary world called Hyperion, many of whose elements--a killing machine called the Shrike, a young hero named Raul, an endless plain called The Sea of Grass--were eventually incorporated into the radically altered world of the novels. (Simmons provides a fictionalized account of this early storytelling process in his 1990 novella, "The Death of the Centaur," available in his collection Prayers to Broken Stones.) Later, in 1983, Simmons published a lovely little novella called "Remembering Siri," a story of love and rebellion set against the backdrop of that voracious, ever-expanding entity, The Hegemony. This story found its way, virtually intact, into the complex nexus of narratives which would eventually be published as Hyperion. That title, along with most of the other titles in the sequence, comes directly from the poetry of John Keats, a gifted and tragic figure who died of consumption at the age of twenty-five, and who believed, up to the moment of his death, that his name had been "writ in water." Keats is a pervasive presence throughout these novels, providing not only titles, but primary sources of inspiration and a formidable array of historical and literary allusions. In a very real sense, he is the patron saint of this vast enterprise, the avatar whose fundamental principles-creativity, love of beauty, spiritual and philosophical adventurousness-inform the very fabric of these books.
Two lengthy Keats fragments provide Simmons with thematic starting points for his first two volumes. Both "Hyperion" (1818) and "The Fall of Hyperion" (1819) are ambitious, incomplete attempts to create epic poems around a classical theme: the overthrow of the race of Titans--among them Saturn, Uranus, and the sun god Hyperion--by the gods of ancient Greek mythology (Apollo, Zeus, etc.). Simmons appropriates that basic concept-the struggle for primacy between powerful opposing forces-then elaborates on it to a huge degree, recasting its basic elements, and setting them in motion against a varied, enormously detailed intergalactic backdrop whose locus is the planet called Hyperion.
The narrative opens with the arrival on Hyperion of seven travelers, "pilgrims" chosen by the Hegemony Council and The Church of the Shrike to visit the planet at a critical moment in its, and the Hegemony's, history. The circumstances, past and present, that provide the context for this pilgrimage emerge slowly, gradually assembling themselves into a coherent portrait of the centuries of complex human history that precede the current, critical state of affairs. Here, briefly, is the deep background of the tale:
In the year 2038, some seven hundred years before the story begins, Old Earth was destroyed by what legend now calls "The Great Mistake," the creation of a black hole which destroyed the planet from within. In the resulting Hegira, mankind slowly colonized the stars via seedships, dividing, over time, into two distinct groups. The first group remained recognizably "human," settling the interconnected web of planets through ships equipped with the faster-than-light Hawking Drive. They also developed an ongoing, symbiotic relationship with an evolving race of AIs known as the Techno Core. The Core, in turn, presented their human cohorts with the results of their phenomenally accurate predictive capabilities and with two miraculous examples of quantum technology: the FTL, or "fatline," which allows virtually instant communication over light years of distance; and the Farcasters, portals carved from the fabric of the quantum universe, as a result of which travel between immeasurably distant planets becomes as simple as stepping through a doorway. These devices, developed, maintained and understood only by the ubiquitous and invisible Techno Core, tied the colonized planets together into a literal World Web which made the existence of The Hegemony of Man possible.
The second group, commonly called The Ousters, are a breed of space-adapted humans who have resisted the urge to settle, terraform, and dominate, and instead chosen a different evolutionary path. They travel the spaces between the stars in groups called swarms, have enhanced their adaptive capabilities through genetic engineering, and have utterly rejected the offerings of the Techno Core. In the increasingly xenophobic viewpoint of most humans, the Ousters are the bogeymen, the archetypal Enemy. By the time the present narrative begins, the Ousters have begun to mount an armed invasion of Hegemony space in order to seize control of Hyperion. The reasons behind this act of war, which involve the machinations of both the Hegemony, under the leadership of CEO Meina Gladstone, and the shadowy figures of the Techno Core, are many and varied. But at the heart of all these acts of manipulation and provocation is the desire to possess the answers to the anomalies and unresolved mysteries of Hyperion. Hyperion is one of nine Labyrinthine worlds, worlds containing ancient underground labyrinths whose origin and purpose are completely unknown. It is also the home of a malign entity called The Shrike, a giant, four-armed killing machine whose metal carapace is covered with spikes, blades, razor-wire, and thorns, and which The Church of the Shrike believes to be an instrument of universal atonement, a harbinger of the final days. Most centrally, Hyperion contains a series of pyramid-like artifacts called Time Tombs, which are surrounded by "anti-entropic fields" and which appear to be traveling backward in time from some unknown future era. As the story begins-as war looms and the seven pilgrims make their way toward Hyperion-the Time Tombs are beginning to open.
That's a lot of backstory, and there is a good deal more to come. Most of it concerns the seven members of the so-called "Shrike pilgrimage," each of whom has been chosen because the predictive element of the Core-which is unable to factor the "Hyperion Variable" into their usually reliable prognostications-believes that these seven are somehow central to the outcome of events; and because each one has a secret-a story-that connects him or her to the mysteries surrounding Hyperion. In what may be the longest prologue in the history of the novel, we will hear all but one of their stories. Only then, at the end of Volume One, will the story be allowed to proceed to the first of its multiple conclusions.
Hyperion, then, is constructed as a kind of far-future Canterbury Tales. The tales that these particular pilgrims tell embody a variety of moral and personal dilemmas, illustrate different aspects of Hyperion and Hegemony history, and employ a number of narrative modes ranging from mainstream to state-of-the-art cyberpunk. "The Priest's Tale" combines theology with cultural anthropology in its account of a young priest (Lenar Hoyt) who goes in search of another priest (Father Paul DurŽ) lost years before in the Hyperion outback. This story is notable for its introduction of the Cruciform, a cross-shaped parasite which attaches itself to the human body and condemns its host to an endless cycle of sexless, increasingly mindless resurrections. "The Soldier's Tale" recounts Colonel Fedmahn Kassad's lifelong erotic obsession with Moneta, a woman from the future who is connected in some mysterious way with the Shrike. In "The Poet's Tale," Martin Silenus, author of an incomplete poem cycle called The Hyperion Cantos, describes his life from the last days of Old Earth through his career as the Hegemony's most successful poet, a career which culminates with his return to the homeworld of his elusive Muse, the Shrike. "The Consul's Tale" recounts the duplicitous career of a nameless Hegemony functionary known simply as the Consul. The Consul is a career diplomat who, for very personal reasons, has betrayed both sides in the ongoing conflict between Ouster and Hegemony societies. Having accomplished this betrayal, the defining act of his life, he has come to Hyperion to die. ("The Consul's Tale," incidentally, incorporates the earliest published fragment of the Hyperion saga, "Remembering Siri," a story that does much to illuminate the reasons behind the choices the Consul has made.)
Two of the pilgrims' tales are, it seems to me, of particular dramatic and thematic significance to the series as a whole. "The Scholar's Tale," which is subtitled "The River Lethe's Taste Is Bitter," focuses on Sol Weintraub, a scholar and specialist in the arcane field of "ethical evolution." Sol's only daughter, Rachel, travels to Hyperion with a group of archaeologists and researchers to investigate the phenomenon of the Time Tombs. Once there, she is infected by the anti-entropic forces that surround the Tombs, and begins, like T. H. White's Merlin, to age backward. By the beginning of the pilgrimage, she is a week-old infant on the verge of an incomprehensible extinction. Sol's efforts to find a cure for his daughter parallel his efforts to understand the moral nature of a Creator who allows disease and suffering to proliferate, a Creator who once commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son. His stubborn attempts to locate an ethical center in the surrounding chaos, together with his intuitive understanding of the primal importance of empathy and love, both in the conduct of human affairs and in the essential nature of the universe itself, stand at the heart of the visionary impulse which animates this book.
The remaining story, "The Detective's Tale," is appropriately subtitled "The Long Good-bye," and features an effective merger of Chandleresque tough-guy prose with the classic iconography of cyberpunk: data rustlers, monolithic artificial intelligences, and dangerous incursions into cyberspace (referred to here as "datumplane"). The pilgrim/narrator is Brawne Lamia (a name derived from Keats's poem "The Lamia" and from the surname of the great love of Keats's short life, Fanny Brawne.) Brawne is a female P.I. hired by a cybrid-an AI construct housed within a living human body-to track down his own murderer. The cybrid is named Johnny, and his persona is based, as closely as available data will allow, on the personality of John Keats. Through Johnny, we receive our first real glimpse into the inner workings of the Techno Core, with its factions, its uneasy relationship to the human world, its essentially parasitic nature, and its obsession with the creation of an Ultimate Intelligence capable of factoring all existing variables and predicting, quite literally, everything. By the end of the story, Johnny has indeed been murdered and Brawne finds herself doubly pregnant: she is carrying both Johnny's child and his encoded personality, the latter by way of a neural shunt hard-wired into her cranium. There are hints, in addition, that a special but unspecified destiny awaits her child. All of these elements will assume increasing significance as the narrative slowly unfolds.
Having delivered itself of this clutch of stories, the novel proper is ready to begin. The Fall of Hyperion opens by introducing us to a new narrator who calls himself Joseph Severn (after Keats' deathbed companion) but who is, in fact, another recreation (a back-up copy, if you will) of the John Keats persona. Keats/Severn is uniquely placed to report on all aspects of the narrative. He is physically present at the Hegemony war councils led by Meina Gladstone, and shares an empathic connection with the seven pilgrims on Hyperion, monitoring their progress in his dreams. In what is probably the knottiest, most convoluted volume in the entire series, Simmons counterpoints the story of the pilgrims and their attempts to understand and achieve their individual destinies with the larger story of the imperiled destiny of the Hegemony of Man. Along the way, hidden political agendas are revealed, the shadowy purposes of the Techno Core are amplified, if not clarified, and the story-the stories-begin to reveal unexpected theological ramifications. Slowly, over the course of the complex narrative, the tales of the Hyperion pilgrims progress toward various degrees of closure. Fedmahn Kassad achieves a warrior's apotheosis in the world of the future. Lenar Hoyt enters into the cycle of Cruciform-generated resurrections. The Consul submits to the life-or-death judgment of the Ousters. And Martin Silenus once again meets his Muse, and lives to regret it. Brawne Lamia once again visits the realm of the Techno Core, and returns with some startling news: the Ultimate Intelligence project-a very literal deus ex machina-has been/will be successfully created, and exists in one of the possible branches of the future, where it meets and does battle with another UI which has evolved, not from machines, but from human beings. This newly discovered human deity is triune in nature, composed of one part Intellect, one part Empathy, and one part The Void That Binds (i.e. the essential quantum structure underlying the universe). The Empathic element of that trinity, unable to stomach the horrors of that far-future war with the Core UI, has fled to the past, where it thus far remains hidden from the Core, the Shrike, and the various instruments of the machine-based UI.
In the aftermath of this revelation, Sol Weintraub, who has spent his life investigating questions of ethical and moral responsibility, comes to the following conclusion:
If God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy, toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion.
Empathy, he also realizes, is inseparable from love, and love is "as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity." This deceptively simple perception is absolutely central to the meaning of these novels, and underlies almost everything that follows.
Meanwhile, in the larger world of the Hegemony, the war continues, and it is not going well. The Ousters have begun to overrun the Hyperion system, and other sectors of the World Web suddenly find themselves under attack, apparently-but only apparently-by Ouster forces. The last third or so of The Fall of Hyperion is centered around Meina Gladstone's gradual realization that the Techno Core, rather than the Ousters, are manipulating events for purposes of their own and that humanity's relationship with the Core represents a kind of Faustian compact which will inevitably lead to the subjugation of the human race. After tracking the Core's physical elements to their elusive lairs in the areas of quantum space between the Farcaster portals, she authorizes the simultaneous destruction of those same portals, shattering the connections that hold the World Web together, bringing the Hegemony, and the novel, to a sudden and spectacular end.
And that, in profoundly reduced form, is the story that the first two volumes, published together as The Hyperion Cantos, tell. Some six years later-a period that saw the publication of several successful horror novels, including the loosely linked Summer of Night, Children of Night, and Fires of Eden, as well as an underappreciated cross-genre experiment called The Hollow Man, Simmons returned to the Hyperion universe with another ambitious, multi-volume elaboration of Keatsian themes. Endymion (which is loosely inspired by the Keats poem about a mortal man in love with a goddess) and its sequel, The Rise of Endymion, (the only one of these novels whose title is not taken directly from Keats) are set more than 270 years after the fall of the Farcasters, in a universe at once familiar and radically reconfigured.
In Endymion, the worlds of the now defunct Hegemony exist in a not quite balkanized state, connected only by ships equipped with the faster than light Hawking Drive. The events described in the earlier volumes have been immortalized by Martin Silenus in his now proscribed Cantos, and have come to assume a legendary, almost mythical, status. The TechnoCore is still very much involved in the management of human affairs, but has disappeared completely from public view, and is believed by most to have been destroyed along with the Farcasters. The power vacuum created by the collapse of the ruling Hegemony has been filled, for the most part, by the once nearly moribund Catholic Church, under the leadership of the former Hyperion pilgrim, Lenar Hoyt. The Church, in conjunction with its civil, military, and mercantile arm-known simply as the Pax-has gained this ascendancy by controlling the distribution of an enhanced version of the Cruciform discovered in Volume One. Resurrection by Cruciform no longer carries with it the threat of sexlessness or incipient idiocy, offering instead a guaranteed form of immortality whose underlying principle is the endless preservation of the status quo. As Endymion opens, a twelve-year-old girl named Aenea--daughter of Brawne Lamia and the cybrid reincarnation of John Keats--is about to step through the portal of the Time Tombs and into this not-so-brave new world. Her mission: to redirect the evolution of the human species.
The Endymion novels, like their predecessors, are formidably complex books, but their complexity is of an entirely different order. There are fewer competing narratives and therefore fewer narrative convolutions in these later novels, which focus less on the furious, often Byzantine, interplay of character and event and more on the gradual unveiling of an elaborate, all-encompassing world view. They are also deeply revisionist books, frequently reinterpreting, and often contradicting, key elements of the earlier books, many of which prove to be the products of lies, guesswork, and an incomplete understanding of events. Both Endymion and particularly The Rise of Endymion cut through these various fallacies and inaccuracies, moving the huge narrative in the direction of a final, unimpeachable Meaning.
The plot, which proves surprisingly amenable to summary, goes like this: Raul Endymion, who narrates the story from his death cell, a Schršdinger's Cat box orbiting the planet Armaghast, is saved from an earlier death sentence by the intervention of the ancient, stubbornly surviving poet, Martin Silenus. Raul, a hunting guide who has never set foot off his home planet of Hyperion, is charged by Silenus with the following responsibilities: to rescue Aenea from the massed Pax forces awaiting her arrival through the Time Tombs, and to protect her until she matures enough to assume her role as The One Who Teaches, the Messianic embodiment of pure Empathy hinted at in earlier books. At the same time, Silenus encourages Raul to perform a few ancillary tasks along the way: to rediscover Old Earth, subvert the long range plans of the Techno Core, destroy the Pax, and topple the power structure of the Catholic Church. And that, in essence, is what happens.
Aided by the chaos that results from the sudden reappearance of the Shrike, Raul meets Aenea as she steps through the Time Tombs, and carries her to safety on a kind of flying carpet called a Hawking mat first seen in Hyperion. Closely pursued by some surprisingly sympathetic Pax military personnel led by Father Captain Federico de Soya, the two then move from world to world via Farcaster portals that only Aenea is capable of activating. De Soya follows obsessively in a ship powered by a lethally fast piece of Core technology called the Gideon Drive. These alternating accounts of flight and pursuit give Simmons the opportunity to demonstrate an impressive capacity for detailed world-building. Mostly together, occasionally apart, Raul and Aenea visit the desert planet of Hebron, the oceanic world of Mare Infinitus, a planet of unremittingly Arctic conditions called Sol Draconi Septem, and many other worlds, including a lovingly recreated version of Earth in which Aenea studies the principles of architecture under the guidance of a cybrid reconstruction of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Years pass during the course of this intergalactic journey. Over time, the nature of the relationship between Raul and Aenea changes, and they become lovers. At the same time, Aenea's sense of her own peculiar destiny, and her awareness of the universal principles which will form the basis of her teachings, deepens and matures. All of this is played out against the increasingly desperate efforts of the Core-dominated Catholic Church to maintain and extend its power. To this end, the Church has resurrected the long defunct Office of the Inquisition; has initiated a Holy Crusade against the migratory swarms of Ousters (an action described, at one point, as a "final solution" to the Ouster problem); and has dispatched a quartet of soulless, cybrid-like killing machines to track down Aenea and destroy her.
With the combined assistance of Raul, of the Shrike (who has been "tamed" by Aenea and comes to her aid at a number of critical moments), and of an enigmatic android named A. Bettik, Aenea survives long enough to establish a ministry centered on the Buddhist planet of T'ien Shan, a ministry based on the principle of Empathy; devoted to the belief that the base matter of the universe--The Void That Binds--is itself a vital, sentient, and empathic thing; and held together by the sacramental dispensation of Aenea's own blood. In the end, at the preordained time, she herself travels to the Catholic stronghold of Pacem and offers herself up to the forces of the Inquisition. Her suffering and death are then transmuted into another kind of sacrament: the Shared Moment in which the masses of humankind are permitted to share the actual experience of her passion and death. This Shared Moment represent the ultimate triumph of Empathy over the narrow, self-centered concerns of the entrenched pseudo-Catholic ruling class.
In keeping with Simmons' belief in the value--the necessity--of change, the Hyperion novels have, by this point, evolved from flamboyant Space Operas to unapologetically didactic reflections on the most fundamental questions. Through Aenea, who functions both as a credible character and as the vehicle for Simmons's more visionary speculations, the narrative and didactic elements come coherently together. Through Aenea, the most transcendental aspects of these novels are given a voice.
Aenea, direct descendent of a human and a cybrid, is something new in the universe, a point of contact between disparate forms of existence. Educated in the essential mysteries of the sentient universe while still in the womb, she enters the world with a single, pre-ordained purpose: to become "an instrument of reconciliation between... humankind and otherkind." To this end, she accepts her Messianic destiny, offers both her accumulated wisdom and her physical substance (the blood she dispenses is in fact an extremely contagious viral agent designed to undermine the power of the Cruciforms, as well as a medium through which all mankind can access The Void Which Binds) to a growing legion of followers, and submits to her own personal Golgotha in order to bring her "complex but terribly straightforward message" to the world.
In delivering this message, Simmons takes a number of narrative risks, most of which succeed through the sheer force of his belief in the animating ideas that underlie these books. From time to time, for example, the action is suspended for extended periods to allow Aenea to offer a series of lectures on subjects as varied as the autonomous development of artificial intelligence, the parasitic nature of the TechnoCore, the "physics of love" that governs the physical world, the nature and direction of evolution, etc. As The Rise of Endymion makes clear, Simmons is after nothing less than the Ultimate Meaning Of It All, and his stubborn attempts to fathom both the nature of the universe and the nature of our role in that universe-what Keats called "the meanings of all motions, shapes, and sounds"-is audacious and admirable.
Briefly stated, the Hyperion novels invite us to consider the universe, not simply as the embodiment of Empathy, but as a vital, vulnerable, powerfully sentient arena designed to accommodate an infinite variety of living forms. "Life likes life," Aenea tells us, and the direction that evolution takes is always "toward more life." Within this universe, stagnation-the unwillingness or inability to change-is the greatest sin, while complexity, diversity, and constant transformation are aspects of the greatest good. The underlying political and religious conflicts that dominate these narratives all arise from this dichotomy.
The Church described in these novels is dominated and defined by the power of the Cruciform, that Core-created artifact that allows its wearers an endless series of resurrections by recreating, with great precision, the stored essence of its individual hosts. The result is a kind of pseudo-immortality founded on the principle of repetition without change, and is therefore a violation of the most fundamental rule of life. In this world, children are no longer necessary to the continuation of the species, and have even become a liability. Nothing in this world ever really changes. Nothing new appears. This is the condition that Aenea has been chosen to oppose.
The essence of her opposition is succinctly expressed in her constant, two-word admonition: Choose again. Through Aenea, Simmons repeatedly rejects the temptation of homogeneity, choosing, again and again, an alternative world filled with "chaos, clutter, and wonderful, unseen options." If mortality is the price to be paid for the chaos and clutter, so be it. Here, addressing this issue, is Raul, briefly imprisoned on a planet called Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, and forced to contemplate the prospect of his imminent death:
The sunlight was different here than on worlds I had known well... but it was beautiful. There was no arguing that. I looked at the cobalt sky, streaked with violet clouds, at the butter rich light falling on pink adobe and the wooden sill; I listened to the sound of children playing in the alley, to...soft conversation...to sudden soft laughter...and I thought-To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea's voice saying, To lose all this forever is the essence of being human...
Simmons' attempts to understand and articulate this essence, and to place it in the larger context of a universe that is itself the by-product of countless other forms of sentient life, stand at the heart of his grand design. All of the convoluted interplay of characters, issues, and events leads, in the end, to a single enormous question: Will humankind, under the domination of the Cruciform, remain one species forever, or will the universal tendency toward a diversity of forms be permitted to continue?
Over the course of his career, Simmons has consistently demonstrated his own affinity for the various and the unpredictable. He is, to the best of my knowledge, the only contemporary novelist who has established himself as a major figure in both horror and science fiction, and the majority of his novels, even those that belong fairly clearly to specific marketing categories, move freely across the boundaries of genre. Carrion Comfort is a major horror novel that gracefully incorporates elements of SF and mainstream thriller. Fires of Eden successfully mixes horror with humor. Phases of Gravity is a mainstream novel set in the aftermath of the American space program. The Hollow Man, his fictional elaboration on themes by Eliot and Dante, defies all attempts at genre categorization. This versatility has made Simmons one of the most notable practitioners of modern popular fiction. It has also, I suspect, done him relatively little good in the marketplace, where the tendency to subvert fixed expectations is rarely welcomed. To his credit, he persists in this course. As he himself once said,
the wonderful thing about being a writer is the freedom to explore all venues, the luxury...no, the responsibility...to work with the dreams the Muse sends you, to shape them to the best of your ability and to send them along whether a guaranteed readership is waiting or not.
The Hyperion books are particularly striking examples of Simmons' ability to assimilate and make use of a wide variety of literary and intellectual sources. Writers and thinkers of every stripe lurk just below the surface of these books, adding their own large and small touches of local color to the imaginative landscape. Science fiction writers (Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, J.G. Ballard, C.S. Lewis, William Gibson); poets (Keats, of course, and Chaucer, along with William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound); mainstream literary figures (Hemingway, Harper Lee, Lawrence Durrell); philosophers and theologians (Blaise Pascal and Teilhard de Chardin); classical literary figures (Twain, Melville, Dante, Vergil, and Homer)-all of these, and no doubt many more, are part of the fabric of this novel in much the same way that the living and dead voices of all sentient beings are woven into the fabric of The Void That Binds.
In Simmons' vision, the universe of the Word and that other universe of matter reflect each other in fundamental ways. Early in Hyperion, Martin Silenus quotes novelist and philosopher William H. Gass' statement that "Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things." Hundreds of pages later, describing the essential characteristics of The Void, Aenea tells us that it, too, is "a minded thing... that comes from minded things-many of whom were, in turn, created by minded things." The notion of a relationship between the Word and the World is, of course, as old as the opening sentence of Genesis, but Simmons makes that notion seem new and fresh. His four Hyperion novels, with their physical and emotional range, their endless inventiveness, their conceptual grandeur, and their implicit sense of the sacred nature of all created things are, in the fullest sense of the word, minded objects: fully realized novels that are as vivid, vital, empathic, and diverse as the universe they so thoroughly explore.
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