January 2023
Matt Hartley | 15 Minute Read | Volume 2. Issue 1.
Matt Hartley
15 Minute Read
Volume 2. Issue 1.
The dark metallic figure jumped off the cover of the book. Steel thorns projected from its head, shoulders, and legs. What was it exactly? It looked like some sort of monster, robot-thing. I couldn't tell if it was a malevolent or benevolent character (or if it was a character at all). The creature stood from a prominent position and looked out on a 1600s-era ship navigating through a sea of grass. I thumbed over the worn paperback, entranced by the mysterious image. It was…strange. My mind struggled to imagine what sort of story this was—it looked far different than the spaceship crowded, Star Wars-knock offs I normally saw in the science fiction section. Hyperion by Dan Simmons— “THE HUGO AWARD WINNING NOVEL” a sticker on the front exclaimed. It looks a little too weird, I thought and placed it back on the shelf.
I continued to meander through the bookstore, exploring the history section, and leafing through biographies of familiar names. But I wasn’t really reading them, my mind still fixated on the enigma of the dark tinman from the cover of Hyperion. I was near the door, ready to exit, already running late for my next class at the University of Washington, but Hyperion pulled like gravity. Then I was at the cash-register. I purchased the book and quickly stuffed it into my backpack (weirdly embarrassed by the strangeness of the cover). I jogged off to the lecture hall through the dark, cold, rainy season of Seattle’s February. All the while I felt the weight of Hyperion bouncing in my bag.
I endured a lecture on Middle Eastern conflict, barely registering the professor’s dull ruminations on Israeli and Palestinian crimes while I counted the minutes until release. Class ended and I raced home, up to my room, closed the door, then ripped out the book and began to read.
“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.”
“Among us we represent islands of time as well as separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion.”
1
3
“For those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.”
- The Poet’s Tale
Hyperion is perhaps the most creative book I’ve ever encountered. The book’s concepts and ideas are so unique that each time I read it I come away asking, how did Simmons come up with this?
Simmons wrote the roughly 250,000 words of the Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion and its second part, The Fall of Hyperion, two halves of one singular story) in 18 months. The book is packed with well-researched information inserted subtly enough to enrich his universe without overwhelming the story. It’s also filled with literary references which play varying roles of significance throughout the novel. At different points Simmons alludes to the writings of William Shakespeare, T.S. Elliot, Robert Frost, and others. It would take a truly elite knowledge of literature to recognize them all on a first reading.
But the truth is Simmons didn’t construct his epic in 18 months. Instead, Hyperion drew on ideas that were forming in his mind for years, possibly going back to his childhood. The dozens of literary references alone mean each of those works he’d read over his lifetime played some role in forming the concepts of the novel.
Before his writing career, Simmons was an elementary school teacher. He first envisioned the Shrike in an epic poem he wrote in 1971 (18 years before the release of Hyperion). The next year, he cemented the concept in a fantasy story he told his fourth-grade students. He would further expand on the idea in another class where he extended the story and told it a half hour a day for 182 days. And through that telling, he found his students were most fascinated with the Shrike character.
In her book on creativity, The Artist’s Way, author Julia Cameron describes the creative process as a pond with fish. To cultivate a productive imagination, an artist must stock their pond. Cameron explains that a pond is stocked by seeking sensory experiences, conducting disciplines such as reading and writing, and taking other actions that fill the mind with new observations.
For 18 years Simmons’ stocked his pond during his elementary school class and through his voracious reading. And two of the biggest fish to populate his pond were the writings of Gregory Chaucer and the romantic poet John Keats. Chaucer, quoted at different points throughout the novel, is most evident in Hyperion’s structural imitation of The Canterbury Tales. Keats however, plays a far more significant role in the story.
The title of the book is taken from a John Keats poem about the war between the Titans and the Olympians. In the poem, the recently defeated Titans bemoan their fall from power and contemplate fighting again against the usurpers. The poem is only a fragment however and was never fully completed.
In Dan Simmons' novel, John Keats plays a key role both in the nomenclature of various locations and appearing as a “cybrid” character—an AI creation made to replicate a human historical figure (flashes of Chat-GPT’s imitations of famous authors anyone?). The novel also reflects the poem's plot of divine conflict in various ways.
Having read both the novel and John Keats’ poem, I can see Simmons’ imagination at work and how one helped birth the other. There’s a deep truth about the act of creating in this lineage of art. And that is that no one can purely create. All creation is dependent on the fish of Cameron’s metaphorical pond. Simmons was inspired by Keats who was inspired by Milton who was inspired by Dante who was inspired by Virgil who was inspired by Homer and so on. The concept of the muse (discussed throughout the novel) in many ways articulates a similar truth. All creation must begin outside of oneself.
What’s the point? If I ever want to ascend that tall peak Dan Simmons is sitting on, I better get busy stocking my pond. And not just stocking it with any fish I find but with the best fish. In writing Hyperion, Simmons pulled inspiration from not just any books but some of the best books in the western canon. In an interview, Simmons encapsulated this point:
“Anyone who spends his or her life reading inside just one genre is an idiot. (Imagine a baby who will eat only strained carrots and who grows up to be an adult, still eating strained carrots. Very, very sad.) The biggest problem I find with young would-be writers is the limited scope of their education and ambition.”
In other words, you’re not just what you eat. You’re also what you read.
4
“Sol! Take your daughter, your only daughter Rachel, whom you love, and go to the world called Hyperion and offer her there as a burnt offering at one of the places which I shall tell you.”
- The Scholar’s Tale
I discovered Hyperion in the winter of my senior year of college. It was dark, it was cold, and the distraction of college football had disappeared with the sunlight. I had the weight of a future career as a Marine on my shoulders. I was excited but also nervous, anticipating the various challenges of training I’d go through over the next 12 months. And then there were the daily struggles of life we all battle through. The monotony of class, navigating romantic prospects (which weren’t great then), working a side job at a campus catering company. Amidst this tedium, Hyperion lifted me above it and transported my mind someplace else. And that’s why I love reading, it breeds contentment no matter the circumstance.
But stories are also important because they contain truth. Cultures around the world have used them since the beginning of history to convey principles and wisdom. They’re created from real world observations and reflections but packaged in narratives, which makes them palatable and memorable in a way that a university textbook or a Wikipedia entry isn’t. And sometimes the strangest stories contain the most truth. Sometimes, we’re so entrenched in our daily rhythms that it takes something utterly different to shake us out of our fragile mental constructs of routine to consider the wider implications of the universe. Why do we exist? Is there a God? What’s the meaning of death? Good, strange fiction causes us to face these questions head on instead of avoiding them through the daily sameness that blocks out such contemplation. To quote Neil Gaiman, “…the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming.”
But increasingly, I’m troubled by the way we ingest stories. Netflix (or your streaming platform of choice) has become the dominant medium of story consumption. 2021 statistics from Netflix found their subscribers spent an average of 3.2 hours per day watching content on their platform. But what I find when I observe my mind after watching television is that I’m not stimulated very well. TV lulls me into a passive trance like a person inundated with tryptophan after a Thanksgiving feast. I’m not any sharper after watching a movie. This doesn’t mean TV is all bad, movies and series are valuable works of art, but I find (to bring it back to Julia Cameron’s concepts) it doesn’t stock my creative pond the way reading does.
When I read, I can feel my synapses firing. Connections start to form in my mind between different ideas and concepts, like the literary references of Simmons’ novel. Reading by its nature is linear and as a result, the act of reading develops a focused, linear thought process. The kind of thought process that’s able to think logically, consider the veracity of a written statement and its implications, and as a result, critically evaluate truth. In doing so, readers cultivate wisdom and improve their ability to make decisions.
That’s reading in general, but reading fiction requires the use of your imagination. And imagination, perhaps more than ever, is desperately needed in our society. Imagination breeds ideas, which breeds initiative, which breeds production and creation and ultimately widespread benefit. When we read, we strengthen the mental capacity to imagine and envision things that don’t exist yet.
One of the things that I like to imagine is what a group of well-read individuals might accomplish. We might look at the founding of the United States for inspiration. For all our flaws as a people, the design of our government ranks among the greatest achievements in human history. And it occurred because the founding fathers had the mental capacity, cultivated through reading, to both envision such a design and implement it. The type of people, according to Neil Postman, that came from an environment “…as dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know.” In other words, readers founded and designed the United States government. And because of their reading, they understood human nature's flaws, and how to create a government designed to withstand those flaws without dominating their citizens in the process. That’s what a group of readers might accomplish.
To cultivate a similar class of such thinkers, we need to get people to read more. And the best way to do that is by giving them a great story. One that’s so good they can’t put it down. That causes them to pass it along to others. That leads them to more stories and books and concepts and ideas, just as Hyperion did for me.
“The night and storm passed. Another stormfront raced ahead of the approaching dawn. Gymnosperms two hundred meters tall bent and whipped before the coming torrent. Just before first light, the Consul’s ebony spaceship rose on a tail of blue plasma and punched through thickening clouds as it climbed toward space and rendezvous.”
Author's Notes:
-
The Hyperion Cantos is one complete story consisting of two books due to the realities of publishing: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.
-
There’s a sequel pair of books called Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. I didn't like these as much and found they (sadly) lessened the original two for me.
-
Hyperion is at times crude with some graphic sexual scenes. You’ve been warned.
And from that moment on it had me. Dan Simmon’s prose sucked me into the future universe of the Techno Core, farcaster portals, and of course that looming monster from the book cover, the Shrike. Six pilgrims headed to a world called Hyperion to face the mysterious creature who guarded a territory known as the time tombs. The book imitated the structure of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with each pilgrim telling a story to explain why they were travelling to Hyperion. And as the characters told their tales each formed a piece of the larger puzzle.
The next day I found a comfy corner of the Suzzallo Library, positioning myself near a window and settling in for a day of reading. Rain streaked down the glass pane worsening my view, but my mind was soon elsewhere. The story gripped me, and I skipped my classes to continue reading, only emerging for a quick lunch and the occasional bathroom break. By the end of the day, I had finished the book and knew I had read something utterly unique and original. All thanks to that strange book cover.
Hyperion both enamored and depressed me. It was unlike anything I’d encountered—mysterious, imaginative, and deeply embedded in the wider literary dialogue of the romantic poets and mainstays of classical education. It showed me what was possible in a story. And in doing so, it revealed the massive mountain of talent, practice, and knowledge an author must have to write at an elite level. I wanted to write like Dan Simmons. The problem was that I sat at the bottom of the writing mountain without so much as a climbing rope, looking upwards at the steep peak where Dan Simmons sat, wishing to somehow join him.
How did he do it? I’ve re-read the novel multiple times trying to find out. I’ve listened to it on audio, studied the writing, and read some of the poems and literature alluded to throughout the work. Each reading I see something new and discover another connection or reference Simmons has hidden in the pages. And in doing so I see the genius of his writing.
Sometimes when I pick up Hyperion, I’m hit with a tinge of sadness knowing I can never again experience the mystery and the wonder of that first reading. I’ve spent years trying to recapture that feeling. I’ve read Frank Herbert’s Dune, Issac Asimov’s Foundation, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. All are excellent, but none quite match the wonder of Hyperion.
It’s the 28th century. Mankind has long since departed Earth and colonized the wider galaxy. An expansive government known as the Hegemony manages a large swath of civilizations called the world-web—a network of planets connected by teleportation gates named farcasters. These gates come in various sizes, large and small. They can be massive to facilitate a spaceship or the size of a door for a person. Imagine if your front door transported you to your grandmother’s kitchen. You could look through it from your home and see her baking as if in an adjacent room even though physically she’s two hundred miles away—that’s the farcaster concept in a nutshell. In between this transportation network lies the vast, empty regions of space, in which poor travelers who are unable to afford the farcaster network incur time debts from the years spent navigating the stars. Also within this abyss exists a mysterious and ominous group of barbarians known as the Ousters—nomadic humans that live outside of the Hegemony’s governance and thus threaten their control.
Hyperion is filled with concepts both familiar and different. There are recognizable institutions like the Catholic Church and strange ones like the Techno Core, a separate government of AI who advise mankind as partners but not subjects. There’s an internet-like medium known as the “All Thing” which serves as an information system across the world-web, a prescient invention considering the novel was written in 1989 and the modern internet didn’t truly take form until the 90s.
And that’s just the view from 10,000 feet (or maybe a billion, however big space is). There are planets that resemble American college towns like Barnard’s World, a strange and isolated Hyperion tribe called the Bikura, and a kilometer long spaceship in the form of a giant tree. Such is the scope and vividness of the universe Dan Simmons creates. Inventions lurk around every page, and Simmons’ beautiful prose makes each bar, city, and world feel as if it exists and has a history.
And that’s partly because his constructs are rooted in real things, though exaggerated and warped like a funhouse mirror reflection. Take this description of citizen participation in the Hegemony’s political system and information network (the All Thing):
“For the first time in my life I became political. Days and nights would pass with me monitoring the Senate on farcaster cable or lying tapped into the All Thing . . . No bill was too small, no issue too simple or complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a sense of having accomplished something. I finally gave up the political obsession only after I realized that accessing the All Thing regularly meant either staying home or turning into a walking zombie. A person constantly busy accessing on his implants makes a pitiful sight in public and it didn’t take Helenda’s derision to make me realize that if I stayed home I would turn into an All Thing sponge like so many slugs around the Web.”
– The Poet’s Tale, Martin Silenus
“Warfare had been thrown back to the twentieth or twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns fought through the brick dust of ruined cities over the corpses of civilians.”
- The Soldier’s Tale
2
It's not hard to spot the parallel to our own society’s sideline spectators, enslaved to their social media channels, obsessively commenting on every political post they take issue with, feeling that same sense of accomplishment Martin Sileneus does in the story (once again, Hyperion was published in 1989, far before social media or the modern internet).
The main arc of the novel follows a group of six pilgrims—the priest, the soldier, the poet, the scholar, the detective, and the consul—travelling to Hyperion, a cryptic outback world not connected to the farcaster network.
As a result, the travellers can only access the planet by traditional space travel, during which each pilgrim gives their testimony on why they’ve journeyed to visit the Shrike, a mythical creature of unknown origin with ambiguous motivations. Each chapter operates as a short story and the characters listen to each other in hopes of unravelling the Shrike enigma, a creation unique in literature:
“There was nothing human about this particular quicksilver-over-chrome construct. Kassad dreamily noted the four arms, retractable fingerblades, the profusion of thornspikes on throat, forehead, wrists, knees, and body, but not once did his gaze leave the two thousand-faceted eyes which burned with a red flame that paled sunlight and dimmed the day to blood shadows.
The Shrike, thought Kassad.
‘The Lord of Pain,’ whispered Moneta.”
- The Soldier’s Tale
Hyperion’s structure and style is almost biblical. Like the great library of the Christian religion, each tale employs different genre styles that are enjoyable and profound on a singular level. “The Priests Tale” is a riveting and mysterious horror story. “The Detective’s Tale” reflects Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s mixed with William Gibson’s innovative cyberpunk genre. “The Scholar’s Tale” takes on the weighty issues of life, death, and God. You can read each chapter alone and find them fascinating simply as short stories. But together, the beautiful mosaic of Hyperion emerges, gradually at first then gaining speed as the novel advances. Dan Simmons acts as part-orchestra conductor, part-magician as he unveils the larger connections and quandaries at hand. No detail is irrelevant. In this way it lends itself to multiple readings, offering new nuggets the more it’s digested.
But that’s only one reason why I’ve returned to the novel again and again.
More from
The Hart & The Cur
