The Fall of Hyperion.

Dan Simmons’ Hugo-winning novel Hyperion is one of my favorite science fiction novels ever, a totally unexpected epic story that creates a new universe in a distant hyper connected future and gives the reader five absolutely fascinating character backstories … but doesn’t give the reader any kind of resolution. The five people in question have all traveled to the world of Hyperion, a planet at the edges of the dominant galactic federation, about to be threatened by the invading Ousters, to journey to a portion of Hyperion inhabited by a mysterious and deadly creature known as the Shrike, who lives among the Time Tombs where entropy goes through the roof and time itself moves in inexplicable ways. The nature of the Shrike, the outcome of their journeys, the potential for war between the global confederation and the Ousters – these are all left hanging at the end of Hyperion. It’s still so powerfully written, with erudite prose and meticulously and thoughtfully crafted characters that I could easily recommend the book as a one-off read, even with its cliffhanger ending; but I concede I still wanted to know what would happen to some of those characters and what on earth the Shrike was.

Simmons returned to the story in The Fall of Hyperion, which breaks the plot up into multiple threads, one of which is narrated by a ‘cybrid’ who is the reincarnated consciousness of the poet John Keats, but also provides the reader with a more conventional finish to the story. The series of novels in this universe continues, but you can read these two book as a diptych and get a complete self-contained story. And I think that might be enough for me for now; Simmons’ writing is wonderful, but I’m not driven to get back to this universe the way I have been with some others.

The five pilgrims on Hyperion are as we left them, running out of time, stymied by the very forces who helped them reach the Time Tombs, and in perpetual fear of the bizarre creature who stalks them but whose intentions are entirely unclear. The pilgrims have a purpose in the passion play at work here – the Keats cybrid is a rather obvious Christ surrogate – but that purpose, beyond the sheer opening of the Time Tombs, is unknown to all of them. Simmons layers on top of this the greater question of war between the federation of humanity, aided by the sentient and independent artificial intelligence unit called the Core, and the Ousters, whose goal is also unknown beyond mere territorial conquest. The CEO of the ‘good guys’ is Meina Gladstone, a woman surrounded by men who doubt her, with scarcely any support from the politicians below her, and with her own personal interest in the movements of the pilgrims.

That combination of stories along with the need to just wrap the dang thing up meant that The Fall of Hyperion didn’t have the same sort of narrative greed as its predecessor, even though the prose remains superb, replete with references to 19th and early 20th century English poetry, because of the fractured nature of the narrative itself. Only in the last few chapters does Simmons spend more time in each location before shifting focus, and that’s because by that point in the book the stories are converging. The most riveting of the pilgrims’ stories, that of Sol Weintraub and his daughter Rachel, who is aging in reverse after her visit to the Time Tombs, remains so – but it’s also fairly easy to see what her role in the greater drama will be, and that she’s not going to die even though Sol and the other pilgrims, who all become emotionally invested in her survival in a beautiful flourish of writing from Simmons, believe she may.

Saying that The Fall of Hyperion doesn’t live up to its predecessor is not a criticism, or even necessarily a measure of disappointment. I wanted to finish the stories given in the first book, and I truly enjoy Simmons’ writing, so I had little doubt I’d find the sequel a great read. The first book was such an immersive read, one that reminded me of getting lost in Jonathan Strange or the Harry Potter novels, that no second book was going to live up to it.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Men Without Women.