Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos) by Dan Simmons (5 stars)

"The English advance halted. Kassad estimated that his battle line was about two hundred and fifty meters from the French. He knew from the experience of the past week that this was within longbow range, but he also knew that he would have to pull his arm half out of its socket to hold the pull."

That's an excerpt from Kassad's story as he goes through immersive virtual reality military training by actually fighting in all the major battles of human history. That one was his experience as an English archer at the battle of Agincourt. Cool stuff.

Kassad is one of seven people converging on a mysterious, deadly, and seemingly infinitely powerful creature called the Shrike, located on the world of Hyperion. Simmons breaks the novel into one story for each traveller, a structure that annoyed me at first since it turned the novel into a collection of seven novellas.

It's a difficult structure to pull off. Character development and scene-setting needs to be done in a compressed timeframe, and drawing all the threads together for a meaningful conclusion is tough. Simmons delivers an astonishing collection of short stories - I kept thinking he couldn't top the last one, and that the next one was going to be boring, but he delivered on every single one. In fact, they were so ingenious that each could easily stand on their own as a novel.

Of course I don't get to judge him on the joining-the-threads piece, since it ends on a cliffhanger once we've heard all the individual stories. The strength of the rest of the series will depend on how the subsequent books tie those threads together.

Kassad's story was brilliant, and reminded me a lot of the training scenes in Ender's Game. My hunch was that his in-simulation lover was just a tool to keep cadets interested in training, and a pretty effective one at that, but it seems it was something more mysterious. I loved the idea that the universe's civilian population was so fed up with military leaders getting entire civilisations killed, that warfare devolved to:

...Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed-upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.

Although we later find out that neither the Shrike nor the Ousters play by such rules.

When we got to Martin Silenus' story, I started to get worried that Simmons was about to let out his inner, wordy self that inspired him to reference Keats so heavily in the first place:

From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be-should be-a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying beauty all about breathed its last breath in me and commanded that I be doomed to play with words the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our race's thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So what the hell; I became a poet.

But amazingly, Silenus' story is one of the best, full of irony, and downright funny in places. After his mother puts him in cryogenic fugue on a spaceship journey for 167 years to make him rich on bank deposit interest, which incidentally doesn't work, Silenus wakes up brain-damaged with a vocabulary consisting of 9 swearwords, the least bad of which are "asshole, peepee, and poopoo". He makes the best of the situation though:

A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for devine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased. All in all, it was enough.

Silenus is a great character, with some brilliant moments:

Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Sol Weintraub's story was deeply philosophical. When AIs are almost infinitely powerful, what differentiates them from Gods?

After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

The image of Father Paul Dure self-crucifying himself to a Tesla tree and being kept alive by the parasitic cruciform is one that will stick with me for a very long time.

Simmons' world is fantastic, and full of innovative ideas. AIs have given humans the ability to teleport (farcast) seemingly infinite distances instantaneously. Imagine what humans living day-to-day could, and would, do with that technology. Simmons has:

My home has thirty-eight rooms on thirty-six worlds...The huge sleeping room Helenda and I share rocks gently in the boughs of a three-hundred-meter Worldtree on the Templar world of God's Grove and connects to a solarium which sits alone on the arid saltflats of Hebron.

This review is way too long. Just go read it. 5 stars.