Krishna
This is a science fiction that was very popular and spawned a series based on its success.
The story is like Star Wars set up. However, this book fundamentally seems to be a set of stories, with a common character in each (the evil villain, metal kind of thing, Shrike). The technique to weave together all these individual stories together is to have a diverse group of team members assigned to a common voyage tell the stories of what happened to them with Shrike and why they are here. That way, this book is a collection of short stories, each with a twist at the end.
The Council has asked the commander to go back to Hyperion. All Things has approved it. Commander wakes up in the tree ship – an interesting analogy. Reminds one of Aliens or other Science Fiction movies.
There are six, chosen, who go to Hyperion. An oddball assortment, headed by Hans Matadeen the leader of the people. Each one is from a different profession, and, as already said, each has been chosen because they have had an encounter with the Shrike and has survived. There seems to be a revisit of Shrike in Hyperion and they are sent to stop further damage.
First is Father Hoyt, a priest, who goes in to find a missing father who found an ancient tribe who belong to the cross. He finds a cave full of crosses and a huge cross to boot and a cross is placed on his father which grows inside him and refuses to move. The twist? He himself has one and is still in pain. They discover this about him after he finished the story.
The next is a soldier called Kalahad, who has fought armies but in training finds a great girl in love with him. When he goes to fight Ousters and escapes, Shrike comes to help him and the girl he is in love with turns out to be a she Shrike with metal for body and all. Guaranteed twist is supplied!
Then there is a poet Silenus, who has lost everything and memory in a travel and, later, gets it all back. Finds fame writing about Dying Earth and is a multi millionaire but his real works do not sell at all. He needs a muse to rekindle his imagination. Who is the muse? It is Shrike. Finally Sad King Billy (don’t ask) sacrifices self and burns all docs of Silenus, with Shrike helping. Silenus has another copy (remade) before he joins the motley crew. There is Benares, Parvati, also a lot of Judaism and Islam thrown in (New Mecca or Riyadh, I forget)
Then Sol Weinstein whose daughter, Rachel is caught in the Time Tide inside the tombs and starts growing younger (Like the Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Heavily Jewish and his angry conversations with God are a joke. Rachel regresses into childhood and his wife dies in an accident and so Sol is out on a Pilgrimage to the Hyperion Shrike Shrine. What is the twist? The child he always carried with him turns out to be Rachel herself!
The investigator is a girl – Brawn Lemna who has a Cybrid (John Keats) as a client and tries to determine who has tried to kill him. Discovers, after travelling into the datumplane with the help of hacker Bobo – who dies – that the web is not keen on Keats cancelling his trip to Hyperion. They hide from the world and also make love to each other several times. The cybrid gets killed but downloads all his info onto a bionic chip in her and she also discovers she is pregnant. Cybrid gets killed in an attempt to go to Shrike temple and it is indeed the Hegemony that is trying to “erase” the Cybrid. (Hegemony is the Council of Wise Men)
Finally comes the Consul’s own story. Consul time travels and meets with a girl in an outer world he is forbidden to go to . The girl’s name is Siri and he meets her in various ages, seventy at the end, when he is still very young due to time travel. It is interesting that the first time he meets her she is barely eighteen and they fall in love. Later she matures into a woman and grows old before his own eyes, while he stays the same age. He is still as deeply in love with her till the end. You get the story, but then the descriptions of their meetings and reunions is very confusing and not clearly laid out, in my opinion.
The Consul’s story has multiple twists like a labyrinth of crooked alleys that make your head spin. First, the man in the story, who you assumed was the Consul – because everyone else is narrating his or her own story – was not him at all but his grandfather. In an unrelated twist, shortly after, you find that the Consul is a double or triple agent, working also for the violent villain group called the Ousters. But wait, maybe not. He is playing the bad guy to get into the good graces of Ousters. Wait, what? I do not know!
The ending is abrupt and, in my opinion, bad. It kind of negates all your expectations set at the outset and you feel as if the storybook you were reading was plucked away from you by someone abruptly before you could finish it.
I will give this one a 5/10
– – Krishna