The Fall of Hyperion by Simmons

Ref: Dan Simmons (1990). The Fall of Hyperion. Doubleday.

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Summary (Wiki)

  • The Hegemony is an interstellar governmental entity formed by many planets, most of which are connected by instantaneous farcaster portals. Some worlds, like Hyperion, have no farcaster portals and are sparsely settled; they are known as the "Outback". The farcasters are created and managed by the TechnoCore, an AI civilization. While the Core's physical location is unknown, they interact with humans through various virtual realities.

  • The Hegemony is opposed by the Ousters, genetically modified humans that fled the Hegemony's growing influence even before Earth was destroyed. The Ousters have mutated physically, believing that they should adapt to their outer-space surroundings rather than adapt the surroundings themselves. They have rarely fought full-scale conflicts with the Hegemony but are currently launching an invasion of Hyperion.

  • Joseph Severn, the name assumed by a second John Keats AI persona, has dreams of the pilgrims on Hyperion. He reports these dreams to Hegemony CEO Meina Gladstone, allowing the government to have real-time access to information about the pilgrims.

  • Father Hoyt is killed by the Shrike. The Consul leaves to retrieve his ship from Keats. Father Hoyt's body is resurrected into Father Paul Duré. Silenus goes to the Poets' City to complete his Cantos, but is surprised by the Shrike and impaled on the Tree of Pain. Lamia is also attacked by the Shrike and loses consciousness. She awakens in one of the TechnoCore's computerized realities, in the company of Johnny. Lamia and Johnny converse with an AI named Ummon, which reveals some of the motivations of the TechnoCore and the existence of a war between human and AI ultimate intelligences. Johnny is killed by Ummon, and Lamia is released.

  • The Shrike appears and takes Col. Kassad through a portal. Moneta explains that the Shrike can be controlled by one who defeats it in single combat. Kassad agrees to fight the Shrike. He is transported to a future Hyperion where the planet is desolate and without an atmosphere. All that remains is the Tree of Pain, the tombs, and hundreds of Shrikes. Vowing to save the victims impaled on the Tree, Kassad charges.

  • At the Tombs, the templar Het Masteen reappears. Before dying, he reveals that the Shrike Cult has colluded with the Templar Brotherhood, and claims that he was meant to pilot the Tree of Pain through space and time. Shortly thereafter, Father Duré disappears. Minutes before the time of Rachel's birth and the simultaneous opening of the Time Tombs, Sol offers her to the Shrike, who carries her into the Tombs.

  • Meina Gladstone positions Severn as a member of her staff. Gladstone is informed that the Ousters have counterattacked, attacking the WorldWeb itself in an unprecedented and unexpected move that appeared impossible. Since FORCE fleets have been committed to the Hyperion system, the first wave of worlds threatened by the Ouster invasion seems destined to fall. As sudden Shrike Cult uprisings devastate major Hegemony planets, Severn travels to Pacem and encounters Father Duré, who had been transported to Pacem by the Shrike. Intrigued by the collusion of the Templar Brotherhood with the Shrike Cult, Duré travels to God's Grove, which is soon to be attacked by the Ousters. Severn and Gladstone's chief of staff, Leigh Hunt, attempts to farcast to Tau Ceti Center. Instead, they arrive on a world that is an apparent replica of Old Earth, on the way to Rome, the place of the original Keats's death. Like the original Keats, Severn dies of tuberculosis while the Shrike keeps watch outside, preventing Hunt from leaving with Severn until his physical form dies; his persona retreats into the TechnoCore.

  • The Consul meets with the leaders of the Ouster Swarm and learns that the Ousters are not responsible for the attack against the WorldWeb. The TechnoCore is the only power capable of launching such an attack. The Consul tells Gladstone the truth about the attack. Admiral Lee sends a transmission showing an autopsy on a supposed Ouster from their battlefleet, but the body destroys itself by consuming itself in the same manner as the Core cybrids do, confirming the intel that the supposed Ouster attacks are really Core attacks. The only Ouster swarm attack is the one on Hyperion. Through a dream, Severn tells Gladstone that the TechnoCore resides completely within the farcaster system. They fear other intelligences found in the Void Which Binds, another dimension through which the farcaster portals pass. Gladstone orders the immediate destruction of the farcaster network. General Morpurgo leads a ship supposedly on its way to Hyperion with a Core deathwand technology designed to kill any human on the surface and all of the Ouster swarm. Instead, the General and his son release the deathwand while the ship is in the farcaster network, saving Hyperion. The WorldWeb disintegrates; mass chaos and riots ensue. Gladstone allows herself to be killed by the rioters, as partial penance for the suffering she caused. The fatline, which utilizes the Void Which Binds for faster-than-light communication, is suddenly shut down by unknown forces.

  • On Hyperion, Lamia frees Silenus and destroys the Shrike through an unknown power. Rachel appears outside the Time Tombs as a young woman, carrying her infant self. She explains that she is Moneta and is traveling back in time with the Shrike under orders from humanity's future. Sol enters the portal to raise the infant Rachel in the far future.

  • Several months later, the worst of the chaos caused by the Fall has abated. The novel ends with the Consul returning to the former Web Worlds in his starship to discover what happened, with Severn's personality stored in his ship. Lamia is seven and a half months pregnant with Keats's child, who is named by the Severn personality as "The One Who Teaches."

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Characters (Wiki)

  • Joseph Severn: The second John Keats AI persona. 

  • Consul: One of the seven pilgrims; former planetary governor of Hyperion who betrayed the Hegemony. 

  • Het Masteen: One of the seven pilgrims, Templar priest, captain of the treeship Yggdrasil.

  • Lenar Hoyt: One of the seven pilgrims; a Jesuit priest.

  • Paul Duré: A Jesuit priest and archaeologist, resurrected by a cruciform carried by Lenar Hoyt.

  • Col. Fehdmann Kassad: One of the seven pilgrims, a FORCE colonel. 

  • Martin Silenus: One of the seven pilgrims, a poet from Old Earth.

  • Sol Weintraub: One of the seven pilgrims, a Jewish scholar and professor.

  • Rachel Weintraub: Sol’s daughter; an archeologist afflicted with Merlin Sickness.

  • Brawne Lamia: One of the seven pilgrims, a private detective.

  • Johnny: Cybrid persona of John Keats, downloaded in a Shrön Loop carried by Lamia. 

  • Shrike: A mysterious creature of unknown origin and incredible power that moves backwards in time. Also known as the Lord of Pain, the Avatar, or the Angel of Final Atonement.

  • Moneta: Kassad’s mysterious occasional lover that turns out to be Rachel; she is accompanying the Shrike.

  • Theo Lane: Governor-General of Hyperion.

  • Melio Arundez: Time physician, Rachel’s past boyfriend.

  • Meina Gladstone: Senate CEO of the Hegemony of Man.

  • Leigh Hunt: First aid to the CEO.

  • General Arthur Morpurgo: Commander of FORCE ground troops.

  • Commander William Ajunta Lee: FORCE Navy Commander promoted to Admiral to assist the CEO. 

  • Admiral Kushwant Singh: Admiral of the FORCE.

  • Admiral Nishita: Commander of Hegemony forces in the Hyperion system.

  • Tyrena Wingreen-Feif: Martin Silenus’ editor.

  • Councilor Albedo: AI advisor to the Hegemony.

  • Ummon: AI in the TechnoCore.

  • Sek Hardeen: High ranking Templar priest, also known as the True Voice of the Worldtree.

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Misc Quotes

"We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body...We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life.”

“In the end--when all else is dust--loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith--true faith--was trusting in that love.”

“Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.”

“Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.”

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.”

“My intellect was my greatest vanity.”

“Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.”

“Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them.”

“God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.”

“[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon’s koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon’s way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.”

“Are we so sure that Christ always knew what to do next? He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do.”

“A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick.”

“Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love.”

“For our race to achieve the true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophies proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become conscious strivings for art.”

“Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.”

“When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet.”

“Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.”

“Gladstone had read Weintraub’s book, The Abraham Dilemma, in which he analyzed the relationship between a God who demanded the sacrifice of a son and the human race who agreed to it. Weintraub had reasoned that the Old Testament Jehovah had not simply been testing Abraham, but had communicated in the only language of loyalty, obedience, sacrifice, and command that humankind could understand at that point in the relationship.”

“For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth”

“Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.”

“The Shrike is a catalyst,” said Hardeen. “It is the cleansing fire when the forest has been stunted and allowed to grow diseased by overplanting. There will be hard times, but the result will be new growth, new life, and a proliferation of species … not merely elsewhere but in the community of humankind itself.”

“Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic. Ummon and the Stables recognize only one value—existence. Where religious values might be relative, intellectual values fleeting, moral values ambiguous, and aesthetic values dependent upon an observer, the existence value of any thing is infinite—thus the “mountains in the sun”—and being infinite, equal to every other thing and all truths.”

“The sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.”

“Only someone who is willing to look beyond the bureaucratic limits of tactics and strategies and the obsolescent will to "win" can truly wield an artist's touch with a medium so difficult as warfare in the modern age.”

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