Catalog entry: "Hyperion," by Dan Simmons
Thoughts
As music majors primarily concerned with the cloud, my wife and I spent very little personal time reading in college, outside of the requisite music history textbooks and what have you. That habit (or lack thereof) continued well into our professional lives, but I'm happy to say we've both managed to reignite that interest as of late. My wife likely has Sarah J. Maas to thank, and I, Dan Simmons. I casually worked through a few1 books between graduating college in 2014 and 2023, and while I enjoyed them, I never made it a priority. All of that changed once I picked up Hyperion. Here was the novel that snowballed me back into a true habit of reading.
Hyperion is ostensibly a work of science fiction, though the tapestry it weaves throughout it and its immediate sequel The Fall of Hyperion is leaps and bounds beyond any sort of serial space-age pulp that might be conjured up when one thinks of "sci-fi" at this point in our culture2. Simmons's first novel in the series is, for the most part, made up of seven strangers sharing their stories with one another. These strangers were called together to embark on an interplanetary pilgrimage to a far-away planet, and while none of them know why exactly the seven of them were chosen, they share out about the days, weeks, months, and sometimes lifetimes that may have led to them being on this ship together.
I have no intention of turning these entries into in-depth reviews (though I fear I've lost the plot on that already), so I'll close this section with one other musing: I have, and I would imagine many others have, fallen victim to immediately associating the phrase "science fiction" with Star Wars. I don't think we should do that. I'm not a whole-cloth Star Wars hater, but I do think that holding it up as the figurehead of sci-fi is at best, misleading, and at worse, downright doing the genre a disservice. Star Wars, even the original trilogy, is a lot closer to a stereotypical action, even fantasy/action, film with a sci-fi coat of paint. The newer extended-universe stuff builds out from this a lot more, and I'm not well-versed in any of it to speak to it. But I bring this up to illustrate a single point - if you think you don't like sci-fi just because you don't gel with Star Wars, you should give proper science fiction another shot.
Similar titles
The Bas-Lag trilogy by China Miéville, its most notable entry being Perdido Street Station. Ironically, given my previous paragraph, Miéville's universe actually feels a lot more like a fantasy world that went through an industrial revolution, but I think that a lot of the themes central to a typical sci-fi novel, Hyperion included, still resonate here, such as reliance on technology, the definition of what it means to be human (or even "a" human), class disparity, the works.
An additional plug for this novel's immediate sequel, The Fall of Hyperion. Simmons also wrote two more novels in this universe, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. Those two novels take place in the same universe and contain several shared characters and places, but they are not immediately related to the same storyline. Hyperion and Fall, however, are directly related, and one should read the sequel to get the full story. That said, the format of the two novels are not similar at all, and Fall is a lot weirder of a book if I'm being honest. I still enjoyed it though, and it's a great conclusion to the storylines and characters established in the first entry.
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1like, literally, three
2see my note in my closing thoughts re: Star Wars and its effect on how we perceive sci-fi anymore