Book Review: Hyperion

Dan Simmons

1989

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

SPOILER ALERT

The Story

  

Hyperion is the first book in what eventually became a four-part series called the Hyperion Cantos. It is set in the distant future, at a time when humans have settled far and wide throughout the galaxy.

The most powerful political entity in the universe of Hyperion is the Hegemony, which governs a large number of technologically advanced member planets. Hegemony worlds are connected by faster-than-light communication and space travel, as well as instantaneous Star-Trek-transporter-like portals called “farcasters.” This planetary information and transportation network is referred to as the “WorldWeb.”

Outside the Hegemony are a number of remote, inhabited planets that aren’t connected to the others by farcaster. Even with FTL travel it still takes years to get to them, which discourages visitors, colonists, and commerce. Some of the inhabitants of these planets like it this way.

One of these remote planets is called Hyperion. Hyperion is home only to a small number of indigenous people, archaeologists, exiles, and missionaries. It is sparsely populated not only because it is physically distant and technologically isolated, but also because it is the home of the Shrike: a terrifyingly huge homicidal monster, basically humanoid in form except that it has four arms and metallic spikes poking out all over its body.

Most people are terrified of the Shrike. Some have formed a religion around it and the places it frequents—particularly the mysterious Time Tombs of Hyperion.

As the book opens, fleets of battleships from the Hegemony and their primary enemies, the “Ousters,” are headed to Hyperion to battle for control of the planet. Knowing that Hyperion will be changed forever no matter who wins, the Church of the Shrike invites seven people to go on what will probably be the final pilgrimage to the Time Tombs. The novel tells the story of the pilgrims’ journey to the Tombs and intertwines that main story with their individual back stories, which they tell each other on the way.

The strange thing is that it turns out that none of the pilgrims are members of the Shrike church. And they come from a weird range of professions: priest, poet, scholar, soldier, detective, ship captain, diplomat. But their stories reveal that they each have a strong reason for being on the pilgrimage and for confronting the Shrike.

Respect for the Past

Hyperion is consciously modeled on the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s novel about pilgrims telling stories to each other on the way to Canterbury Cathedral, which I have to admit I didn’t really like when I read it in school. But the tales told by the Hyperion pilgrims are really good. They are varied and unique, and several are told in radically different styles, reflecting the very different voices of their tellers.

The scholar’s story, for example, is very sad. His beloved only daughter was an accomplished archaeologist working on her dream site in the Time Tombs on Hyperion. But during an accident in the Tombs she caught an affliction that caused her to age backwards. The scholar has had to watch her regress painfully from brilliant scientist back to childhood; by the time he is picked to go on the pilgrimage, she is an infant. His story moves all the other pilgrims, and he uses it to raise bigger existential questions, almost like a bible lesson or philosophical exercise.

This stands in contrast to the detective’s story, which is like a gritty noir mystery except with the gender roles reversed. The scotch-drinking (female) detective is world-wise and tough, ogling the beautiful (male) client who walks into her office one day to hire her. Her story is almost a mini Neuromancer, a cyber-piracy adventure involving artificial intelligence and cyber-cowboys and a heady trip through the virtual “DataSphere.” It pays deliberate homage mainly to Raymond Chandler and William Gibson, but also to Philip K. Dick, Aldus Huxley, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Creativity and Foresight for the Future

 

Simmons is aware of his predecessors, and overtly (and respectfully) draws from their earlier works. But, at the same time, he also creates some really inventive new elements for each of the sub-stories in his novel. He thinks up new technologies, both large and small, for war and entertainment and commerce. His worlds often have striking scenery (like the Sea of Grass on Hyperion) and original and sometimes oddball biota (like the migrating, floating islands of Maui-Covenant).

And, unlike Vernor Vinge, he really explores his ideas, fully integrates them into his story, and then wraps them up nicely before moving on to the next, so you don’t feel like you’re being blasted with an undeveloped-idea firehose.

One of my favorite of Simmons’ environmental inventions is the flame forest of Hyperion. This forest is full of tall mushroom-shaped trees that, under the proper conditions, become giant lightning rods bursting with lethal zaps of electricity, turning everything in their entire area into smoldering cinders. This deadly forest is used to great effect both at the beginning and the end of the priest’s tale.

 

Simmons also appears to be pretty foresighted in certain areas. In the poet’s story, for example, he experiences the sense of hopelessness and ennui that can come from being constantly plugged in to political minutiae through intrusive, omnipresent communication technology that we didn't even have yet in 1989.

The poet is also disappointed when the TechnoCore (the collection of artificial intelligences in the Hegemony) loves his latest epic poem, but doesn’t buy any copies, and his agent points out that “copyright means nothing when dealing with silicon.” She says that the first AI who read it probably downloaded it and shared it instantly with all the others via the WorldWeb network. I don’t know how many other people were thinking about this on such a big scale back then.

And keep in mind, also, that Simmons was writing about his “WorldWeb” network of cyber-connected planets and computers at a time when the World Wide Web was barely a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye.

The Down Side

 

There are some down sides to this novel, unfortunately. For one thing, there is only one female character of any importance, and she is deliberately modeled after male predecessors. The other women who show up in the book are dominatrices, character-less wives, or idealized lovers waiting patiently for their men to return.

Simmons’ writing also has a tendency to get overly long, romantic, dreamy, and obscure. I’ll have to admit I skipped some of the more overwritten parts and that I found the consul’s story—one of the most important ones for the Shrike story—pretty confusing.

But I still think I want to read the next one (Fall of Hyperion) to find out what happens to some of the characters. And to see what more new cool landscapes and life forms Simmons will invent.

Prescient Description of an Internet Obsession from 1989

From the poet's tale in Hyperion (1989):

“For the first and only 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. Someone once estimated that the All Thing deals with about a hundred active pieces of Hegemony legislation per day, and during my months spent screwed into the sensorium I missed none of them. My voice and name became well known on the debate channels. No bill was too small, no issue too simple or too complex for my input. The simple act of voting every few minutes gave me a false 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 millions of other slugs around the Web.”

Book Review: Doomsday Book

Connie Willis
1992
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

SPOILER ALERT

There are many books I have enjoyed a lot. There are a few books that rise into a special category where I am completely sucked into the world of the book; where while I’m taking a break from reading it, at work or whatever, I’m still thinking about the characters and what just happened and what will happen next; and where I read more and more slowly because I don’t want it to end. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was like that for me, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Doomsday Book was one of these too. I just loved this book.

This book has some of the same characters as Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog. It is also a time-travel story set in England and involves some of the same Oxford historians, but takes place several years later.

Kivrin, a graduate student of medieval history at Oxford, goes back in time to the 14th century to do research. Unfortunately, as part of her preparation for the trip, Kivrin helped out an archaeologist digging up one of the medieval tombs near Oxford and caught a 14th-century flu from the buried remains. By the time she arrives in the 14th century, she is delirious with fever. She is taken in by the family of the local lord and they nurse her back to health; she grows attached to them and becomes a governess to their two children.

Kivrin was supposed to be sent back to the 1320s, before the bubonic plague got to England. But there was an unusually large amount of time slippage on the drop and she ended up arriving the year the plague arrived. At first everything goes okay but then, after the appearance of some out-of-town visitors, everyone around her starts dying of the plague.

Meanwhile, before Kivrin had gone back in time, she had already given the flu to several people in current-day Oxford. There is no cure for the flu in the present so the government shuts down all university operations and quarantines the town and Kivrin’s advisor is unable to get to the time lab and rescue Kivrin from the past.

Kivrin’s advisor’s struggles to get to the lab to find her and the small-time bureaucracies he has to deal with are funny in the same way the situations in To Say Nothing of the Dog were. And, at the same time, the plague striking Kivrin’s 14th-century family is horrific. The book was an expert combination of frustratingly funny situations and genuinely moving loss and sadness.

It was the small things about Kivrin’s experiences in the past that made them believable (and made the book particularly great). Her clothing is too bright and too finely woven and her fingernails and teeth are in far too good shape for the Middle Ages. The Old English dialect she had studied turned out to be wrong for the town she ended up in so the first person she is able to communicate with is the town priest, who understands her spoken Latin. The ringing of local church bells is, at first, a way of marking time during the day but gradually becomes a way to communicate how the plague is decimating the surrounding towns.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

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Book Review: A Deepness in the Sky

Vernor Vinge
1999
Awards: Hugo, Campbell
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ - - - -

This book is a mile wide and an inch deep. And way, way too long.

It seems like Vinge has fun introducing new people, places, accents, terms, and technologies, and then is happy to abandon them, superficially outlined, when he gets bored or thinks of new ones.

To attempt to summarize the plot: two space-faring human fleets, the Qeng Ho (over-the-top free-market traders) and the Emergents (cult-like slaver-megalomaniacs) fly simultaneously to the mysterious OnOff star system which has one planet, Arachna. Arachna is populated with beings called Spiders who are on the verge of developing nuclear weapons and spaceflight. Upon arriving at Arachna, the Qeng Ho and the Emergents battle; the Emergents win and enslave many of the Qeng Ho traders with a kind of mind control. Then all parties sit and wait for the Spiders to advance enough for their purposes – for the Emergents, to use Spider technology to repair their ships and then enslave them, and for the Qeng Ho, to use Spider technology to free themselves and then to profit off them.

The story had about eight million characters and place names, none of which I cared about and many of which I confused with each other. Many of the characters had flashbacks which did little to explain their motivation and which in turn introduced still more characters and place names.

Just as one of the many story lines in the book would appear to be getting interesting, it would disappear into vagueness and switch to a different story. You never hear the guts of anyone’s ideas. For example, when Pham Nuwen (one of the many main characters) is talking about what he wants for his Qeng Ho fleet in the future, Vinge only gives us Pham’s introduction and conclusion and glosses over the content in the middle of his speech, saying only that his “words flowed.” This type of thing happens over and over.

As in his earlier book, A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge does the best job with the aliens (in this case, the Spiders). The Spider characters were more understandable, likeable, and consistent than most of the humans.

There were several typos (e.g. “precentage”) and incorrectly-used words (e.g. “runway” instead of “runaway”) in the edition I read, especially towards the end, which made me think that perhaps the editor was having a tough time that deep into the book as well.

It appears, however, that I am the only one who officially feels this way about this book. All the reviewers and two of Vinge’s cronies – David Brin and Gregory Benford, both of whom I like a lot – raved about the book like it was the next Foundation series. Asimov’s Foundation universe is just as grand in scope, if not more so. But I cared about Asimov’s characters and he described worlds and ships well enough that their names meant something to me. Anytime he introduced new technology, I felt like I understood it enough to see its import.

I think if Vinge had focused on any one (or three) (or five) of the places, characters, incidents, and/or technologies in this book and explored them more deeply, it would have made for a pretty good book.


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: Neuromancer

William Gibson
1984
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I am of two minds about this book.

On the one hand, I very much appreciate it. It is the very best in cyberpunk writing. It was groundbreaking and radical when it came out in 1984, and it still reads like a fresh, contemporary story today.

Gibson is great at taking abstract technical concepts like computer viruses, hacking, ROM constructs, and artificial intelligence and describing them so that you can picture them; so that they seem physically real. He does this for many things that were brand-new and almost inconceivable to most people at the time.

He also coined the term “cyberspace” and used the word “matrix” to describe the virtual environment of the internet, even though the internet didn’t really exist fully yet for most people.

Neuromancer is fast-paced and slick. People go swinging around the matrix at the speed of light and also zip around physical space very quickly as well; it’s no big deal to go from one end of the BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis) to the other, even just for dinner.

Its characters have talents and body modifications adapted to this new environment. The protagonist, Case, is a cyber cowboy with an enhanced nervous system whose trade involves jacking into the matrix and hacking around stealing information. Case meets up with a number of colorful people, including Molly, a sort of mercenary who has retractable razor blades implanted under her fingernails (like Wolverine, although Wolverine actually came first) and high-tech mirrored lenses embedded over her eyes that give her access to all kinds of real-time information.

On the other hand, I don’t really like this world. It’s hostile. Everyone seems high on something most of the time. No one can trust anyone else and no one is sure if they’re on the right side. You can't ever be sure if what you’re looking at is real or a hologram. No one has a home; Case just rents various “coffins” (cheap tiny hotel spaces) to spend the night.

I don’t like Case or Molly or any of the people they run into (with the possible exception of Wintermute, who is actually an artificial intelligence and not a person).

I also don’t understand anyone’s motivation for doing what they’re doing (with, again, the exception of Wintermute).

The premise of the story is that Case used to be one of the best cyber cowboys out there, but he made the mistake of stealing a piece of information from an employer, who then fried his nervous system so he couldn’t jack into the matrix anymore. When a mysterious new employer needs someone to do the most dangerous, complex hacking job ever, they hire him to do it and are willing to pay for the extremely expensive operations required to fix him. Yet I didn’t think that Case ever really proved why he was so good (like, for example, Ender Wiggin proved over and over).

Case develops a romantic relationship with Molly, who has been hired by the same mysterious employer to be the muscle on the hack job. But they seem to get together just because they’re in the same place at the same time, not because they really are interested in each other.

Neil Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which came out in 1992, draws a lot from Neuromancer, both in its atmosphere and in its story line. But I liked the characters and the world of Snow Crash much more. 


An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

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