Hyperion (1989) is Dan Simmons’s first novel in his four-part science fiction series, Hyperion Cantos. Set several hundred years in the future, Hyperion follows seven people, who have been selected to make the final pilgrimage to the terrifying Shrike creature on the mysterious Outback world of Hyperion before the Ouster invasion. On the voyage to the planet, the pilgrims tell their stories about their connection to Hyperion. This frame-story structure is based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the late 14th century.

Hyperion won a Hugo Award for best novel. This guide refers to the 2011 Random House Worlds, Kindle Edition.

Content Warning: Hyperion contains graphic descriptions of violence and references to suicidal ideation and death by suicide, which this guide refers to.

Plot Summary

In the far future, humans have left the dying Old Earth in a mass exodus known as the Hegira. At this time, humans have mastered space travel through the use of farcaster portals, which allow travelers to go immense distances in a flash of time, and ships equipped with hawking drives, which are propulsion systems that are faster than light. The resident and governing bodies of these new worlds are part of a political structure called the Hegemony. The Hegemony is advised by the AI Advisory Council, sentient artificial intelligences that have separated themselves from human control and form part of the pervasive TechnoCore, a society of sentient artificial intelligences.

Outback planets are planets beyond the Web or datasphere (the datasphere being a planet’s computers and information). As Outback planets are explored, terraformed and made to resemble Old Earth, and brought into the Hegemony, humanity expands farther into the universe. The planet Hyperion, however, remains mysterious and troubling, even four centuries after the first human settlement there.

The Church of the Shrike is a religion where humans worship a godlike entity on Hyperion called the Shrike. The All Thing is a forum for Hegemony members that works through neural implants. These two organizations have chosen seven people to be the pilgrims on the final Shrike pilgrimage. This is the last journey to Hyperion’s Time Tombs, which are six elusive structures.

The seven pilgrims are Lenar Hoyt, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad, Martin Silenus, Sol Weintraub, Het Masteen, Brawne Lamia, and the Consul. The pilgrims meet aboard the treeship Yggdrasill, a spacecraft. As their journey will be long, they decide to take turns telling their story of why they believe they were chosen for this special pilgrimage, a journey from which many never return.

Lenar Hoyt is a Jesuit priest. His story largely consists of the journals of Father Paul Duré, who did ethnographic research on the little-known Bikura people who live in a remote part of Hyperion. Duré describes the sexless, nearly featureless, and insipid-seeming Bikura; they are descendants of the original 70 colonists, pray at a millennia-old basilica in the cliffs, and follow the “cruciform,” which are parasitical entities. The priest believed this to be evidence of the pre-Earth origins of Christianity, but before he could get word out, the Bikura took him to a structure called the labyrinth where he saw the Shrike, a godlike being known as the Pain Lord.

The Bikura placed a glowing, cross-shaped organic specimen on Duré’s chest, making the cruciform part of him. The specimen burrows into a being’s body and re-creates a version of the being after they die. When Hoyt later found Duré, the older priest had staked himself to a tesla tree (a Hyperion tree) that caused him to repeatedly die and then be recreated by the cruciform. Duré died the final time when Hoyt found him, but then Hoyt himself was captured by the Bikura and given his own cruciform in addition to Duré’s. Distance from the labyrinth causes great pain in anyone with a cruciform.

Colonel Fedmahn Kassad’s connection to the Shrike dates back to when he was a FORCE cadet doing a historical war simulation (FORCE being the armed forces for the Hegemony of Man). During the simulation, he encountered a beautiful young woman who helped him defeat his foes and then made love to him. He was not certain whether she was real or part of the simulation. She then showed up periodically and even appeared in his dreams. He loved her and became obsessed with discovering who she was as he rose in ranks.

Kassad is injured after a battle with the Ousters, who are genetically self-manipulated to be better suited to life in space. Kassad awoke on a medical ship headed to Hyperion just as Ousters attacked it. Kassad barely survived but awoke on Hyperion with the mysterious woman tending him. She told him her name was Moneta or Mnemosyne, and that the Pain Lord (the Shrike) had taken care of one of the Ouster ships who followed him to the planet. She and Kassad donned special suits and joined with the Shrike, who manipulated time in order for the three of them to decimate the remaining Ousters.

Initially, Kassad felt the time-manipulation was unethical, but bloodlust took him over. Afterward, while making love with Moneta, he had visions of the death of entire planets in an interstellar war that the Shrike wanted him to incite. Horrified, he pulled back to see that Moneta had partially become the Shrike. He vows that if he sees them again, he will kill them both.

Martin Silenus is a poet born on Old Earth to a wealthy family. When it became clear that the planet was dying, his mother put him on a slow ship in a cryogenic fugue, which halts the aging process while one travels in a suspended state, to another planet. When he arrived, he was destitute and had brain damage. Doing hard labor in slop canals, Silenus started to feel poetry coming to him. He recovered his vocabulary, and some of his poems, called The Dying Earth, were published, bringing him great wealth. He pushed to have his serious poetry published, but it was a commercial failure. In debt to his publisher, he wrote a series of trite novels about Old Earth’s last days.

Frustrated, he joined Sad King Billy, the ruler of Hyperion’s official government, on the planet Asquith, where the king had created a colony for artists. Silenus had difficulty writing. King Billy relocated his people to Hyperion to create the City of Poets. Silenus still struggled with writer’s block until people started disappearing and then getting killed. The Shrike’s attacks increased and the city emptied, but Silenus stayed because he finally found his muse in the Shrike. He feels he needs to finish his Hyperion Cantos.

Historian and scholar Sol Weintraub had no interest in Hyperion until his only daughter Rachel went there on an archaeological research expedition of the Time Tombs. While there, she had an experience that left her with a condition known as Merlin’s disease, wherein she ages at the normal rate but in reverse. Every day she gets younger and loses another day of memories and skills. Weintraub traveled throughout the Web, a network of worlds, trying to find someone to help her. Eventually, her unusual condition drew too much attention to the family, and they had to move to the planet of Hebron for some peace. Both Sol and his wife had dreams of being inside a red-hued temple and hearing a voice telling them to take Rachel to Hyperion and offer her up as a sacrifice. Sol refused to do this. Now Rachel, who has de-aged to an infant, is running out of time, and Sol must confront the Shrike.

Het Masteen is supposed to be the fifth person to tell his story. However, one night while they are traveling across a vast plain on Hyperion called the Sea of Grass, he disappears. The other pilgrims find blood splattered all over his room but no body. They don’t know whether the Shrike got him or someone killed him and threw him overboard. They take his Möbius cube with them, a device that can seal in threatening objects, as it could contain something vital in facing or fighting the Shrike.

Brawne Lamia is a private investigator on Lusus. She was approached by a handsome cybrid, a being where a human body and AI are fused. The cybrid, Johnny, approached her to investigate his murder. He was an AI created as part of the persona retrieval project to be a living version of the poet John Keats. However, he was attacked, his physical form killed, and five days of his memory had been erased. Lamia learned that before his attack, he met with a Templar (a Templar being a member of the Templars, a quasi-religious group) and a man with a queue (a hairstyle that originated in China whereby the front portion of the head is shaved, and a single braid remains at the back of the head). Johnny left with the man with the queue. Lamia concocted a plan for Johnny to move through the farcasters and allow the man with the queue to follow him to God’s Grove (the Templar world) where she gave chase. Just when she was about to apprehend the man with the queue, he disintegrated into an electrical surge, meaning that he was also a cybrid.

Johnny showed her a world she had never heard about, a complete replica of Old Earth from different time periods that TechnoCore created. A visit to the Shrike Temple on the planet Lusus revealed that Johnny had been there with the man with the queue, whom he identified as his bodyguard from TechnoCore, and that he had inquired about a pilgrimage to Hyperion. Johnny, however, had no knowledge of Hyperion, which was odd, as he was part of the datasphere.

Lamia visited Meina Gladstone, who had worked with her father before his apparent suicide. Gladstone knew about the cybrids and the replica of Old Earth. She explained that the AIs are interested in the Time Tombs as part of their “Ultimate Intelligence Project,” which enables them to predict everything. Hyperion is the anomaly in that project. Johnny downloaded his consciousness into his physical body for a pilgrimage to Hyperion. However, Johnny and Lamia were attacked before they could get into the Shrike Temple on Lusus. As Johnny died, he sent his entire datasphere of information into an implant in Lamia’s head. The Shrike priests chanted around her as she recovered from her injuries, and she realized that she is pregnant with Johnny’s child.

The Consul starts his tale with a recording of a Hegemony shipman named Merin Aspic. Merin worked on installing farcasters on the planet of Maui-Covenant in order to bring it into the Hegemony Protectorate. Bored with the one isle to which they were restricted, his shipmate Mike persuaded him to go to another isle where the inhabitants were having a multi-week festival. There, Merin met a woman named Siri and fell in love. They spent time together, but then Merin left quickly after Mike was killed by Siri’s Separatist cousin, whom Merin killed in return. (A Separatist is one who rebels against Maui-Covenant joining the Hegemony Protectorate.)

A few months later, Merin was ordered back to Maui-Convenant, as his story with Siri—who gave birth to their son—had become a legend. Several years had passed, but Siri and Merin continued their relationship. She became politically powerful on her planet, while Merin still worked on the farcaster. He had a time-debt, which kept him in his twenties while Siri aged into her seventies. They had other children together. After she died, there was a ceremony to mark Maui-Covenant’s entry into the Hegemony and the opening of the farcaster, which will bring in tourists and developers. In an homage to Siri, Merin bombed the farcaster to start Siri’s Rebellion.

The Consul was Merin and Siri’s grandson. Merin forbade him from joining the rebellion but urged him instead to join the diplomatic corps of the Hegemony, where he oversaw the expansion into new worlds. His wife and son were killed in the Ouster attack on Bressia, an outback world. He was sent to negotiate with the Ousters who gave him a device to open the Time Tombs. He became the Consul of Hyperion and waited for the Ousters to contact him about their impending attack when he went to the tombs to place the device with three Ousters. They were told to wait before starting the device, but he killed them and triggered it.

While the pilgrims rest at the recently abandoned Chronos Keep, an abandoned resort and the last stop before the Time Tombs, the war between the Ousters and the Hegemony starts far off in the skies above them. Off on a distant cliff, they spy a cloaked figure and wonder if it is Het Masteen. They join hands and head off to the Time Tombs.