Hyperion

I read Hyperion the way I imagine most people do, seven strangers on a pilgrimage toward a monster called the Shrike, each one telling their own story on the way, and it took me most of the first tale to notice what Simmons was actually doing structurally. Each pilgrim’s story is told in the style of a different science fiction or fantasy great, and a real chunk of the fun, once you clock it, is playing spot-the-influence across the book, which writer is being channeled this chapter and why that choice fits the character telling it.

The Canterbury Tales comparison gets made constantly, and it’s mostly right about the skeleton, a frame narrative built around a collection of separate stories, but the tone doesn’t actually match Chaucer’s bawdy morality tales much at all. What Hyperion borrows is the structure, not the spirit, and what it adds is something closer to a portrait of an entire universe assembled one testimony at a time, each pilgrim’s tale layering in a new piece of the Shrike’s mystery and the coming war none of them can stop. The individual stories vary in how much they land, but the best of them, the scholar’s story of a daughter aging backward in time, is as good as anything I’ve read in the genre, full stop.

Here’s my one real complaint, and it’s the same one a lot of other readers land on: this does not resolve. It ends abruptly, mid-momentum, clearly built as the first half of a longer story rather than a complete novel in its own right, and depending on your patience for that structure it either reads as a bold choice or as padding two hundred pages that should’ve been three hundred and fifty. I don’t think it’s cheating exactly, plenty of great books are openly the first movement of something larger, but I understand the frustration from readers who want their books to actually end.

I’m glad I had the sequel ready to go the moment I finished, because this isn’t a book you want to sit with unresolved for long. Read it as one half of a whole, and it’s excellent. Read it expecting closure, and you’ll be annoyed.