Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion
Dan Simmons
482, 517 pages
published in 1989 & 1990
No book, whether fiction or non-fiction is truly neutral or can truly stand on its own. Like it or not we always judge a book in the context of when you read it, what you know about it and its author, what others have told you about either. It’s rare that you get into a book truly knowing nothing about it or its writer; even then what you have read before will partially determine how you will respond to it. Especially in SFF we tend to pretend that context shouldn’t matter and we should evaluate a novel on its merits without taking in account its writer’s politics and opinions, but it doesn’t work that way in reality. Knowing that Roald Dahl was an antisemitic arsehole made me never want to read any of his books again even though I loved James and the Giant Peach as a child even if his antisemitism didn’t impact his novels. Not to say good art cannot be created by bad people, nor even that good art cannot be made in service to evil causes (Ezra Pound’s poetry springs to mind). Just that your enjoyment of such art can be indelibly tainted by this knowledge even when the creator’s awfulness has no impact on their art. Often though a creator’s bad opinions or politics do bleed through into their art and knowing about them can retroactively spoil their work.
All of which is to say that I reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion after realising how much of a raging islamophobe Dan Simmons really is and it completely ruined any enjoyment I had of these two novels. They were mind blowing when I first read them from my local library in the early nineties, the first modern space opera I had read. Dependent on said library as I was growing up, most of its science fiction was either Golden Age stuff by the usual subjects like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, or seventies New Wave and literary minded novels. In that context Hyperion was a revelation. Not just space opera, but aspiring to be literature at the same time, being deliberately structured like the The Canterbury Tales and with the resurrected Romantic poet John Keats as one of the main characters. For a teenager with little interest in proper literature this was heady stuff.
But that was before Dan Simmons wrote this:
“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”
“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.
“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”
“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”
“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”
Almost twentyfive years on it’s hard to understand how deeply 9/11 and the following War On Terror fried the brains of a lot of Americans, Simmons being one of them. The 9/11 attacks angered and upset America like nothing else had done since Pearl Harbour and it’s not hyperbole to say the nation lost its mind for a few years. In retrospect, Simmons already had an xenophobic streak in him, most noticable in his horror novels like Children of the Night (set in Romania) and Song of Kali (India), but 9/11 put it in overdrive. And once it was out in the open it became noticable in his Hyperion novels too.
I had originally wanting to reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion because reading Excession had put me the mood for a similar but different book, not necessarily another Banks one. Hyperion came closest to what I was looking for. Part of the the space opera revival of the late eighties I talked about in my review of Eternal Light to which you could see Excession as a capstone, it won the Hugo Award for best novel the year after it came out. Despite now knowing about Simmons politics I wasn’t sure it would impact my reading, but sadly it did. There were certain plot elements that looked a lot more sinister now in context: the background detail that Israel had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust and the description of a Shite uprising on one of the colony worlds and how Fedmahn Kassad, a Palestinina soldier had put it down.
But even before I got to them Hyperon disappointed me with its opening chapter, in which the Consul, the nominal protagonist, sits in his spaceship on a primitive planet playing Rachmaninov on his Steinway piano while outside a thunderstorm rages and dinosaurs bellow. It’s such an overwrought, b-movie villain cliche it made me laugh rereading it. Completely destroyed any respect I had for Hyperion as a novel. Some of which had already been lost by the late nineties, much dumber sequels to the series, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, neither of which had been necessary nor good. Reading that silly prologue set the tone for me. Any goodwill I had for the series was definitely lost by it.
As said, the plot of Hyperion is structured like that of The Canterbury Tales. Seven pilgrims on their way to the so-called Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, outside of civilised space, where the monstrous Shrike stands guard. During their journey each of the pilgrims in turn tells how they are connected to the Tombs and the Shrike. Meanwhile Hyperion is under threat of invasion by the Ousters, barbarian hordes from interstellar space who exists outside civilisation as represented by the Hegemony, who control the Farcaster teleportation network binding true civilisation together. While Hyperion tells the stories of each of the individual pilgrims as they journey to the Tombs, The Fall of Hyperion details what happens once they arrive. This is much more of a conventional space opera as all the various back stories and plot lines come together.
Even though I was very hostile going in, I could still see what had first appealed to me in these two novels. He may have nasty politics and a tendency for the purple prose, but once he got going, he still sucked me into the story. The world he created in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion has fascinated and inspired me ever since I first read them; at some level these are still what I judge any new space opera stories I read on.
Fun fact: I started writing this review in 2006, after I had finished rereading both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. For various reasons I never completed them, even though I tried again in 2014. It’s only thanks to Sean Eric Fagan’s Bluesky post about Simmons and the short discussion of Hyperion there that I got a handle on how to finally complete this post.
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