Book Review: The Uplift War

The Uplift War

David Brin

1987

Awards: Hugo, Locus
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Uplift War re-enters the universe of Brin’s earlier novel Startide Rising. Both books are set in the future, at a time when spacefaring humans have joined thousands of alien races across the known Five Galaxies in subscribing to a common set of principles governing diplomacy, trade, colonization, and combat.

                                       

One of the most important of these principles is that of “Uplift.” The idea behind Uplift is that no modern species developed intelligence on their own. Every existing sapient race was “uplifted” by an earlier patron race that saw their potential, selectively bred them, educated them, made whatever biological changes they thought were necessary, and eventually, after thousands of years, declared them fully “uplifted,” free of guardianship and able to be a patron race in their own right.

Every existing sapient species was uplifted this way, that is, except humans. Humans appear to have inexplicably uplifted themselves.

Uplift is a system of respect, hierarchy, and propriety that keeps younger client races in line and obedient (some might say enslaved) to their master patrons. Many patron species therefore believe that anything that challenges Uplift is a tremendous threat. This means that many of the other sapient races in the universe are at least skeptical of, and at worst lethally hostile towards, humans. Humans constantly have to defend themselves, both politically and militarily, against aliens that want to destroy them for what they represent.

To make matters worse, the upstart humans have already just about finished the process of uplift on two client races of their own: dolphins and chimpanzees. And they allow their two client races to have horrifyingly high levels of freedom and initiative.

The Uplift War takes place on the planet Garth, a planet leased to Earth after it was all but destroyed by its previous owners. Humans and chimpanzees have been living on Garth for many years, settling towns and cultivating farms and setting up libraries and building science labs. And secretly uplifting a third client race, gorillas, without permission.

                                                                             

At the beginning of the book, the residents of Garth hear of the exploits of Streaker, the Earth ship central to the plot of Startide Rising. On its last mission, Streaker found a mysterious something that is so important and desirable that it has several alien races chasing the dolphin-captained spaceship at top speed across the universe as it flees desperately home.

                                            

One of the pursuing alien races, the bird-like Gubru, decide to hold Garth hostage in case they are unable to capture Streaker. So they send an invasion force to the planet to take it over and quarantine all the humans onto islands off the coast of the capital city. The Gubru then impose martial law on the chimpanzees left in town, thinking that, since the chimps are just a client race of somewhat suspect patrons, they pose relatively little threat.

                                             

Luckily, however, the human planetary governor and her ally, the Tymbrimi ambassador, are able to send their children (son Robert and daughter Athaclena, respectively) off into the safety of the inland mountains. There they meet up with Fiben, a chimpanzee fighter pilot who was shot down early in the invasion, and the three of them join with other refugee chimpanzees and the semi-sentient gorillas to form a resistance movement.

What follows is a long, involved guerilla war between the resistance in the mountains and the Gubru invaders in the city. The story focuses primarily on Fiben, and to a lesser extent on Athaclena and Robert, as they each adapt to a wartime lifestyle and learn things about themselves and each other that make them into strong, capable adults of their respective species. And, rest assured, the possibilities for jokes about gorillas as guerillas are anything but ignored.

I very much like the motivation behind this book. I appreciate the empathy and perhaps even love that Brin has for our fellow Earth sapients and semi-sapients. I admire his efforts to incorporate them into a future universe that recognizes their abilities. I love the idea of finding out what dolphins, chimpanzees, and gorillas would be like if we were able to communicate with them.

                                                                   

But I didn’t have the patience for the story. It was short on action and long on the agonized internal monologues of the main characters and the minutiae of the negotiations and plans of the Gubru leadership.

And I found most of the main characters really tiresome. Fiben the chimpanzee was my least favorite. He was crass and often abrasive, with a less than subtle sense of humor. He was constantly getting himself into scrapes and getting out only by luck or reversion to primeval chimp rain dances, and he protested just a little too much whenever his comrades wanted to reward him for his heroism. The story dwelt for what seemed like an incredibly long time on Fiben’s stint in a Gubru jail, while there were plenty of other chimps out and about that I would have preferred to follow.

                                                                     

The humor was also often very forced. There were times when certain jokes or puns, such as the ones about the gorilla guerillas, would have been cute if they hadn’t been being forced down our throats (usually in the form of hilariously guffawing chimpanzees).

Book Review: Startide Rising

David Brin
1983
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Startide Rising takes place in the future, at a time when the now regularly space-faring humans have made contact with the Galactics, an inter-galactic federation of alien species.

The Galactics are governed by the laws of “Uplift.” Uplift is a process in which a “patron” race of advanced, sentient beings takes on the responsibility for educating, mentoring, and, on occasion, physically modifying “client” races of less advanced, pre-sentient beings. The goal is for the clients to become sentient and space-faring and, in turn, to become patrons for client races of their own.

Uplift is the polar opposite of the Prime Directive. What it means is that as soon as you find a promising pre-sentient race, you need to swoop in and declare them to be your clients before anyone else does.

Every single sentient Galactic species alive was uplifted by another, more advanced species. The chain of patrons and clients extends back millions of years to the revered, semi-mythical “Progenitors,” the first race and the only race to have ever uplifted themselves.

The only race to have uplifted themselves, that is, besides humans.

The apparently “orphan” humans are almost universally hated. They are seen as impudent upstarts. And, just by existing, they call the whole system of uplift into question; how could humans have uplifted themselves when no species more intelligent and sophisticated was able to?

Anyway, once exposed to the idea of uplift, the humans quickly took on two client races of their own – chimpanzees and dolphins.

The plot of Startide centers on the maiden voyage of the Earth spaceship Streaker, which is captained and primarily crewed by dolphins with a small contingent of humans and one chimpanzee.

Streaker’s original mission is to test the fitness of dolphins as a space-faring race. But that quickly changes when they stumble across a derelict ghost fleet abandoned in a remote corner of the universe – a fleet that may actually be related to the Progenitors. And they are able to retrieve a corpse from the wreckage.

As soon as the rest of the universe hears about the ghost fleet, they all rush in to fight the Earthlings and each other over what the Earthlings have found. Streaker is damaged in the conflict but is temporarily able to escape, limping away and crash-landing on a semi-hospitable planet nearby.

The rest of the book takes place on this planet, with the Earthlings trying to repair their ship and get back home with their discoveries before the Galactics finish fighting each other and catch up to them.

The story is basically okay, but it does feel a bit like a contrived vehicle for illustrating the uplift concept rather than a story that arose on its own because it was inherently riveting.

Uplift is an interesting idea, and Brin creates a coherent set of laws supporting it. The other client and patron races in the book are varied and show how different patron species treat their clients very differently; some see clients as servants while others genuinely do try to make them self-sufficient.

But uplift also makes me uncomfortable. For one thing, the genetic manipulation that patron races use to speed the process – altering a dolphin’s blowhole to make human language sounds, for example, or gradually turning fins into hands – seems wrong. It leaves a lot of room for error and evil (as is borne out in the story).

For another thing, I was skeptical of the overpowering awe in which clients hold their patrons. The dolphins and chimps are capable pilots, scientists, and doctors but they humble themselves to even the lowliest human. They drop everything to aid a human in distress, even over another chimp or dolphin or their own safety. If I was a member of a client species, I don’t know if I would be so universally deferential.

This is the second novel of six that Brin set in his Uplift universe. I generally enjoyed this one and the third, The Uplift War (which I read because it was also a Hugo winner), but feel no need to read the other four.


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

The Process of Bewitchment

Jo Walton describes the process by which one person can bewitch another, gradually, over time. 

“They buy his clothes. They buy his shoes. They buy him glasses and whisky. They own the house and the furniture. He wants to drink the whisky, and the chair wants that and the glass, and of course nothing could be easier than making him drink so much he can’t get up to drive me to the station…Probably over the years they’ve done more and more little things, not meant to hurt him, but never letting him go, binding him up in spider-strands of magic so that he stays, does what they want, he has no will. It would take something very strong to get through that.”

-- Mori, describing how her aunts have bewitched her father (p. 182, Among Others)

Book Review: Among Others

Among Others

Jo Walton

2010

Awards: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Among Others is the poignant but never too mushy story of Mori, a fifteen-year-old Welsh girl coming to grips with the recent death of her identical twin sister, the malicious madness of her mother, her reintroduction to her alcoholic, absentee father, and her new, obnoxious private girls’ school.

The book is written in the form of Mori’s diary, and it is well done; the daily entries give very little explanatory background, as would be true if she really had written them for herself alone. Anything you learn about her history, like how her sister died, or how she became permanently disabled so she walks with a cane and constant pain, or how her mother really is an evil, malign witch bent on controlling her, you find out almost incidentally as she records events in her present life. It makes her past all the more intriguing and ominous.

Two interests pervade Mori’s world and help to ground her as she navigates the shoals of her life. One is magic and the other is books.

                                                               

Like her mother, Mori has the ability to perceive and influence magic in the world around her. Magic is everywhere for her. Sometimes it is evil and she must avoid it or defend herself from it, and sometimes it is helpful and soothing, but it is always more or less there.

Mori explains that magic doesn’t really work the way it is supposed to in books. Real magic is subtle, slow-moving and sometimes anticlimactic. It doesn’t work instantly; it works by shifting things around so that what you want to have happen does happen, eventually, but you’re never really sure whether it was the magic that did it or if it would have happened anyway. For example, there was a Phurnacite factory near the home where she grew up. She and her sister performed a ritual to make it go away, and it did, but it took the form not of the factory immediately disappearing in a puff of smoke, but of the factory the next day announcing it was running out of money and was laying off its employees. She never really knew if her actions had made it go bankrupt and leave.

                                                                                                  

Mori can also sense when objects contain magic. Objects are imbued with magic by how a person uses them—with evil or with fondness. Mori’s Grampar’s chair is only truly comfortable and settled when Grampar is sitting in it. Mori’s aunt has a knife that she cut her hand on once, and the knife has had a hankering for blood ever since.

And, perhaps most importantly, Mori is able to see faeries. She can communicate with them, after a fashion, and they often ask her to do practical things for them that they, in their insubstantial form, cannot do. The faeries, too, aren’t what they are supposed to be in books. They don’t always look like people; sometimes they look like dogs or gnarled stumps or combinations of creatures. They speak vaguely and unclearly in unspecific terms without many nouns, and they are very skittish.

Mori is comfortable with her more passive powers, like sensing the magic in objects or communicating with faeries. But she has a moral dilemma about doing active magic. Over the course of the book, she starts to feel that it is morally wrong because it is all about manipulating other people to get what you want. It turns everyone into puppets. Are her friends really her friends because they truly like her, or because she magicked them to like her? What if everything she does and thinks is because of someone doing magic on her in the future? It’s an original perspective that fits perfectly with Mori’s heightened self-awareness.

The other pervasive element in Mori’s life is books—particularly science fiction. She reads a LOT. It is the main thing she shares with her father, and it is the way she eventually makes friends (through an after-school SF book club that she may or may not have magicked into being).

On the one hand, it is fun that she is so voracious and so steeped in the genre. But on the other hand, the constant references to specific books, particularly the now more obscure ones by authors of the ‘60s and ‘70s, started almost immediately to seem like ostentatious and exclusive. Mori would often use them to illustrate something going on in her real life, with little helpful context. I could see it getting pretty annoying if you hadn’t read all the same books she had. She would say, for example, “I named the dramroads after places in The Lord of the Rings when I should have recognised that they were from The Chrysalids,” with little explanation of either book or what that comparison means. It’s like a Victorian novel where the author sprinkles Latin and German sayings in the text without translating them.

I felt like Mori was also a little too breathily in love with SF books of any stripe. She loves practically everything she reads, with hardly anything critical to say about any of them (with the occasional exception of Philip K. Dick and some questions about character motivation). Just because a book is science fiction, that doesn’t mean it’s automatically “brill.”

Also, if I could descend a little bit myself into the name-dropping foible, I don’t understand Mori’s gushing admiration for certain authors in particular. I mean, yes, I completely agree that Lord of the Rings is head and shoulders above almost everything else. And I agree with how obnoxious it is when other books compare themselves to Tolkien on their jackets. And I’m in complete agreement with her assessment of Zelazny as a brilliant stylist and idea man. But Delany and Heinlein are two of her absolute favorites. A couple people do call Mori on her passion for Heinlein and how contradictory it is with her passion for Zelazny and LeGuin. She defends herself by saying that Heinlein is not about fascism or authoritarianism, but about loyalty, and duty, and revolution against authority, and taking care of yourself. Which is true in some cases, but certainly not all, and I don’t know how she, of all people, could overlook his misogyny.

Sci-fi knowledge showing-off aside, though, I really enjoyed this book. Walton’s writing is clean and smart and accessible. She uses some parenthetical asides and side stories unrelated to the main plot, but they add color and are not distracting or annoying the way they were in Mr. Norrell.

And Mori is a very appealing main character. Her relationship with her boyfriend does get a little lovey-dovey, but in general she is very independent-minded and realistic (even about the faeries). She deals impressively well with her distant father and her terrifying, controlling witch mother even though she gets very little support from either peers or adults. The lesson she learns, in the end, is that none of us is perfect and handles everything right all the time, but you only grow by facing your fears and dealing with them head on as well as you can.

Book Review: Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein
1959
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I was surprised that I liked this book as much as I did, given all the controversy about it.

It is set in the future, at a time when Earth is at war with an alien race, the hive-minded Bugs. The overly-idealistic citizen governments of Earth collapsed sometime back in the late twentieth century and the world is now governed by a (some would say fascist) military Federation. Becoming a soldier is very difficult, and only a small number of people even try, much less make it – but it alone earns you the right to vote.

You ride along with one of the tiny pawns in the Bug war, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, as he changes from a green recruit into a hard, professional soldier. Johnnie is in the Mobile Infantry, the grunts, the front line of combat against the Bugs. He is part of an epic war that will determine the fate of the human race, but he has no time to worry about higher levels of politics and strategy – his life revolves completely around getting enough sack time, not getting in trouble with the lieutenant, and keeping himself and the other members of his platoon alive.

Johnnie isn’t someone I would necessarily want to be, or even be friends with, but he is colorful and an appropriate guide to his time. Heinlein also creates a creative and consistent, if scary and hostile, world around his main character – both on the large scale (the Bugs, the state of Earth and its colonies, military and government structure) and on the small scale (boot camp, combat drops, everyday details of military life both in and out of battle).

For example - the mantra of the soldiers is to always be “on the bounce!” This comes from the heavily armored suits they wear in combat on other planets, which allow them to jump long distances and perform several tasks while in midair.

Yes, this book does glorify the military. And Heinlein does inject his tiresome personal-responsibility philosophy into the story, chiefly through Johnnie’s high school History and Moral Philosophy teacher Mr. Dubois. But the libertarian preaching wasn't as intertwined with the plot as in some of his other books, so I could skim those sections without losing much of the story. Plus, Johnnie doesn’t have an opportunity to have a lot of interaction with women, so Heinlein’s misogynistic tendencies stay mostly under cover (or, when they come out, at least they fit his rough-and-ready warrior characters).

The book was much better than Paul Verhoeven's movie, which was more war-action-oriented and didn’t go into much of the detail of the preparation and hardening of the soldiers, which was what about three-quarters of the book was about. The movie also invented characters that didn’t exist in the book and drastically altered the roles of others, to its detriment.

I think it is important to stress that I appreciated this book as a character study. I do not recommend it as a guide to attitudes about the military and government. Two excellent books already reviewed here and on Cheeze Blog were written at least partly in reaction to Troopers, and both would help in maintaining some perspective on war after reading it:

* Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
* The Forever War by Joe Haldeman 


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

Book Review: No Enemy but Time

Michael Bishop
1982
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

I do so love a good time-travel story.

In this one, a top-secret 1980s U.S. Air Force experiment sends the main character, Joshua Kampa, back to Paleolithic East Africa – the time and place of his lifelong recurring dreams.

The book is told in two alternating streams. One stream is Joshua’s back story, which fills you in on his birth in Spain, abandonment by his birth mother, adoption by USAF personnel, and education in the United States, right up to the point where he gets chosen for his time-traveling mission. The other stream is the story of Joshua’s present, in which he is sent two million years back in time, meets up with a group of Homo habilis and lives with them for almost two years.

To get the negatives out of the way first: I did find the last part of the novel a little unsatisfying (from the time Joshua decides he wants to leave the Paleolithic on through to the end of the book). It suddenly picks up tremendous speed and then stops with a whump. I was expecting either more resolution of outstanding issues or fewer new outstanding issues raised so close to the end. But this end section is a very small portion of the book.

The ending also has a little bit of deus ex machina to it. But, to Bishop’s credit, he comes right out and admits as much to the reader.

I also had a little bit of a problem buying Bishop’s mechanism for time travel. The idea is that a tiny number of people in the world have the gift (or curse) of extremely visceral recurring dreams about a single particular place and time, like pre-Columbian South Dakota or Dachau in the 1940s. Often they have had this dream “attunement” since childhood. A scientist in the Air Force has developed a machine that will tap into the unconscious of these dreamers and allow them to physically appear in the place and time of their vision. I realize that time travelling is thin in and of itself, but having the vehicle be driven by the chrononaut's dreaming ability seemed a bit thinner than thin.

If you can get over these drawbacks, which really are minor, you’re in for a very good read. The way Bishop writes it, life in the African savannah two million years ago was scary and brutal but also beautiful. The details of early hominid group behavior were completely believable to me. I liked how Joshua changed as he learned more about the individual "habilines" in his group, was accepted by them, and grew to love them. As with the characters in The Doomsday Book, I grew to have a lot of respect for Joshua’s Paleolithic friends and the way they dealt with the world without 21st-century knowledge and technology. By the end I felt like his present-day family and co-workers were less sympathetic, less sensitive, and less interesting than the prehistoric ones (which I think Joshua would have agreed with).

And the aforementioned dreamer-as-pilot setup did provide an excellent way around the Grandfather Paradox – the chance that you could change something in the past that would royally screw up the present. Because the Earth moves around the sun, and our solar system moves within its galaxy, and our galaxy moves within the universe, the location of Earth as it was in the past is somewhere far, far away in space. With Bishop’s mode of time-travel, the chrononaut is sent back to the time and geographical location of his attunement, but not back to its spatial location. So Joshua is sent back in time to the paleolithic but remains in the same spatial location as his present Earth – making it technically a different past, a “simulacrum” of the actual Paleolithic. That way, there is no danger of him going back in time and stepping on a butterfly or killing his own grandfather or any of the other innumerable paradoxes one could imagine.


This review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.

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Book Review: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clark

2004

Awards: Hugo
Nominations: Nebula

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

In the ever-expanding pantheon of novels about English magicians, this book stands somewhere just below the tolerable middle.

Its characters, settings, and central plot are good. But it is dragged down by self-conscious, tiresome drollery and by uninteresting, irrelevant footnotes and side stories. If a strong editorial hand had just removed even half of the non-contributing chatter from its nearly 800 pages, what a tighter, more fun reading experience it would have been.

The book is an alternate history that takes place in the early 1800s. Dr. Gilbert Norrell and his student, Jonathan Strange, are English magicians whose goal is to bring magic back to their country.

Yes, back to England. Because, you see, a long time ago, in the eleventh century or so, a wizard king named John Uskglass, a.k.a. The Raven King, came to power in the north of England. He was human but had been raised in the magical land of Faerie, and the very rocks and trees and rivers were his allies and servants. It was a time of magic and wonder. The Raven King ruled for about 300 years and then disappeared, but the people and the land are still hoping for his return.

Dr. Norrell is the first real magician to practice in England since the Raven King’s reign. He is a stuffy, almost sociophobic academic. He repudiates the Raven King’s legacy, saying his traditions are unnecessary for modern magicians and it is better not to invoke him. 

Norrell is also extremely possessive of his magical knowledge. He says that he wants to bring magic back to England, but he seems to think that no one is fit to practice it but him. He buys up any books on magic he finds and keeps them in his own library so no one else can read them. He is urged to write books and take on more students, and says he will, but he never does.

                                                                   

Jonathan Strange is the only pupil Norrell is willing to have. Strange admires Norrell’s ability but becomes increasingly frustrated by his reclusiveness. Strange really does want to spread magic to all of England, feeling that everyone and anyone who wants to practice magic should do so.

Early in the story, the young wife of one of Dr. Norrell’s associates falls ill and dies. Norrell is persuaded to bring her back to life. To do so, however, Norrell secretly has to stoop to using black magic, invoking a faerie to help him. This malicious faerie continues to exact painful tributes from Norrell's friends far after the magic has been performed, growing more and more dangerous and lethal over the years.

At the same time, Norrell and Strange are enlisted by the English government to assist (magically) in the Napoleonic wars. Norrell wages his war behind the lines, in England, cloistered with government ministers. Strange, instead, goes to Spain to fight alongside the front-line soldiers, working his way up and eventually becoming a trusted advisor to the Duke of Wellington.

Strange’s wartime experiences give him the boost of status and self-confidence he needs to start breaking his ties of dependency with Norrell. He begins practicing his own expansive and generous brand of magic, becoming more and more estranged from his tutor and taking on students of his own.

Eventually, however, Strange and Norrell have to try to reconcile their differences and unite to destroy the malicious faerie—if they can.

Strange, Norrell, and their immediate associates are quirky, interesting characters. And their primary challenges—Napoleon’s armies, the malicious faerie, the Raven King’s legacy—have great entertainment potential. But these positive elements are diluted by page upon page of semi-relevant asides, tangents, and secondary stories that contribute nothing to the main plot. It is as if the author’s prodigious ideaphoria was completely unfettered by editorial discipline.

The longest side stories usually came in the form of footnotes. If a specific parable about the Raven King was mentioned in passing by one of the characters, for example, there was sure to be an extensive footnote telling the entire parable. These footnotes themselves often sprang off into still other, even more tangential stories. It would have been fine if the footnotes had added to the story, or at least been clever and fun. But instead they felt like a disruptive waste of time, leaving me a bit frustrated when the footnote ended and I had to remind myself where I was and what was happening in the main story. 

Sometimes these footnotes took up more room on the page than did the actual text of the story, and they occasionally spilled over onto subsequent pages. Picking my way through the distractions to get through to the central story line began to get exhausting. I began to dread the appearance of each new footnote. By the time the story finally really kicked into gear around page 600, I was too tired to care much what happened.

A lesser, but contributory, problem is Clarke’s often clunky efforts to achieve a Jane-Austen-like droll wittiness in her writing. She tried very hard, with her descriptions of overly fussy aristocratic women and befuddled, head-in-the-clouds society gentlemen who mess up situations with their indecision and their focus on irrelevant details, but it fell flat for me. This kind of humor can be hilarious in the right hands, but here the overt self-consciousness of it made it unfunny.

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.”