"Metal teeth click shut in a steel vagina."
Written: Apr 03 '07 (Updated May 02 '07)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Structurally complex. Some excellent stories. Classic cover art.
Cons: The framing narrative is weak. Some mediocre stories. Not at all a standalone.
The Bottom Line: A mixed bag, like most projects that dare to be exceptional.
|
|
|
| panguitch's Full Review: Dan Simmons - Hyperion |
Pain was his ally.
Dan Simmons's Hyperion is an ambitious novel. Perched on an overarching frame story, the narrative successively dips into the individual tales of its characters, each of which is independent but thematically connected.
The Priest's Tale is first given and most rivets my mind. A Catholic priest and would-be ethnologist sets out to study a rumored culture of colonists marooned for generations on Hyperion's southern continent. He finds a tribe of child-like intellect practicing a religion that disturbs him with the painful promise of resuscitating his own floundering Catholicism. But as it should, the role of Savior comes with a price. It's a devastating story, seething with symbolism. I admit I'm a sucker for religious themes, but I doubt I'm the only one who loves this tale best.
A moist millimeter.
Hyperion's characters are pilgrims, who in the episodic frame story make their progress through the traditional points of the Shrike Pilgrimage, as dictated by the Shrike Church, an institution reminiscent of ritualized Christianity, though the object of adoration, the Shrike, is an anti-savior.
The Soldier's Tale is no less graphic than the Priest's tale, but where the later's masochism serves its philosophy, the Soldier's story uses explicit sex as a foil for the Shrike's dance with humanity. There is in suffering an element of sanctity, and that suffering sanctifies is the core doctrine of the Shrike Church, which sees the Shrike as a messiah for its promise of random torture and murder. With the exception of the final, most graphic and most violent sexual encounter I found myself unimpressed with the sex scenes. The distracting shift to present tense in the final section was also a dissonant note.
Only the poet can expand this universe.
The pilgrims' several tales build upon each other, constructing a tableau piecemeal, even as their tellers near the frame story's destination. These parallel movements, the agglomerating stories and the frame, approach each other until intersecting at the end. However shattered to start with, it is one narrative, its themes and plot divorced but progressively reconciled.
The Poet's Tale lacks the excitement of the Soldier's tale's military action and the morbidity of its sex. In exchange it offers profanity and the navel-gazing to which all litterateurs seem prone (I too am a known offender). The Poet's musings on the divinity of the Word—"Poets are the mad midwives to reality"—and his relationship to the Shrike are interesting, but overall his tale is not, and neither is he.
His angry dialogue with a God in Whom he did not believe.
Intricately nonstandard, this hopscotching narrative mimes the creature at its crux. The Shrike and its environs, the Time Tombs, play willy-nilly with time, just as the Shrike arbitrarily slaughters, yet both seem increasingly purposeful as the novel progresses and the reader's lens clears.
The Scholar's Tale is my second favorite, trailing the Priest's by a long mile. The Scholar's daughter was a researcher camped out at the Time Tombs like a 19th century Egyptologist when the time tides reversed her aging. Now she loses a day, both of physical age and of memory, each night she sleeps. Even as she fades toward nothingness the Scholar is troubled with night visions which require him to return her to Hyperion and sacrifice her there after the pattern of Abraham.
It might indeed be for God's sake.
More is at stake than these pilgrims and their pains. The Hegemony of Man greedily gobbles up the planets of humanity's diaspora, even as its symbiosis with the AI-populated TechnoCore frays. As the pilgrims progress toward their destination, the heavens above Hyperion are illuminated by an invasion of Ousters, barbarians who inhabit the space between the stars.
The Detective's Tale adopts several tropes of the defining movement of 80s science fiction: cyberpunk. The Detective herself is of the hard-bitten type, and it's no surprise when she falls in love with her client, the human avatar of an AI on the run. This particular AI was a reconstruction of the poet John Keats, who, as one might expect from the book's title, is paid homage frequently. The mystery of his murder is wrapped up in the movements of the Hegemony, the TechnoCore, and the Ousters, as they vie for control of Hyperion and humanity's destiny. These revelations do much to reveal what might be called the macrostory of Hyperion, but the Detective's tale itself is little more successful than Simmons's ironic use of the term cyberpuke.
Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy.
Neither the interstellar crisis nor the individual arcs of the characters are resolved in Hyperion. It's fair to say that only by the end of the novel is it clear what the book is really about. The sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, is needed for any sense of completion. But each character's tale is sufficiently self-sustaining to satisfy, regardless of the lack of resolution. Much like an impressionist painting, these individual strokes form a composite, a catharsis in the absence of completion.
The Consul's Tale, like each of the others, exhibits its own complications of structure and time in imitation of Hyperion as a whole. It is two stories, beginning with the time-dilated romance of a specialist from a Hegemony quantum-leap spinship and a girl from Maui-Covenant, a paradise planet booked for assimilation. How this relates to the Consul, one-time governor of Hyperion, and exactly why he is on the pilgrimage is revealed in ten pages of italicized text, which is exactly as visually annoying as it sounds.
Epilogue
Hyperion is justly famous, but from its theo-sado-masochism to its fascination for Keats and modeling on The Canterbury Tales it's a somewhat heady specimen of science fiction. Although it won the Hugo, I'd say it's more of a Nebula type of book. We crane our necks as Dan Simmons flies beautifully above the horizon, defying tradition, nature, and good sense alike. It's a captivating, pulse-quickening sight. But the consequence of hubris is inevitable, and while Hyperion enjoys glorious moments soaring sunward, it sometimes falls in a tumble of feathers, hot wax, and flailing limbs.
It's a mess, but oh what heights it enjoys, however briefly.
– Panguitch
"A sheet-metal Grendel forged in hell," my review of The Fall of Hyperion: http://www.epinions.com/content_356383559300
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
panguitch
|
 in Magazine Subscriptions, Books |
 - Top 1000 |
|
Location: Springville, UT
Reviews written: 285
Trusted by: 223 members
About Me:
"Realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience." -Ursula K. Le Guin
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.