Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Oh no!  Another SciFi novel!  This one 20 years old!  I hope you don't think I'm going all soft on you, and remaking my fantasy blog.  Far from it my friends, but with the awesome body armor of the Shrike, pictured by Garry Ruddell, I've been salivating for this book for over a decade.  Thinking about it now, this might be where the dark figure in my child's mind came from, if this were true, it would be appropriate.  That beast on the cover, is called The Shrike.  And he is the half mythological figure of a death cult, whose effigy exists on dozens of planets, exists in dreams, nightmares and half forgotten memories, who is alternatively mankind's ultimate destruction or savior.

But all of that to come!  Dan Simmons is a brilliant writer.  And this book can only be regarded as classic SF.  Why it hasn't been brought to film is anyone's guess.  Well--actually its an easy answer.  The book is too literary.  Ok, so first off.  I try to come to a book completely tabla rasa.  I know nothing about Dan Simmons, the mythos about Hyperion in the fanverse, nor have I read any reviews on the book or series itself.  I may post an update, after I do, because there is much which needs explaining.  But the book is WAY literary.  To start, it begins with a shout out to Chaucer.  The book is structured similarly to the Canterbury Tales, in that it is laid out in a series of tales; tales of pilgrims, with a prologue and an epilogue.  The whole univerise is structured around the poetry of Keats, and Keats himself becomes a character of sorts in the story.  Add to that that one of the main characters is a famous scholar, and yet another is a famous poet, and you get a very scholarly science fiction book.  Likewise the quality of the writing was just top notch.  Spare where it needed to be, flowery and descriptive at those points requiring the most visual depictions.

I will use the rubric I established in my BattleStar Galactica review as a blueprint:

SF is about The Big Idea. The Big Idea is big here. REALLY Big. It's Time. Each of the main characters' stories relate to odd particularities inherent in time, including living backward (like Merlin!) prophetic recordings, and dreams, and recreating the past. However, there are lesser big ideas, the sorts that are popular in more mainstream science fiction epics. For example, Simmon's "Ousters" are a group of space pirates/barbarians at the gate. The Ousters are a group of humans who eschewed the world of the Hegemony to live extraplanetary lives aboard massive raiding spaceships. Their bodies are elongated and possess more joints due to the lack of gravity. The book sets them up as an enemy of humanity, but a plot twist in the final pages may change things. Regardless, that big idea was good enough to get used in Josh Whedon's Firefly, as the Reavers (a cannabilistic space pirate). Another big idea is the Techno Core. Simmon's sci fi is far more advanced than mere robots here. AI's exist on a far more advanced level, much as they do in Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep, where they become entities called Powers and migrate to the High Beyond. AI's have something to do with the endgame of Hyperion, but it's unclear at this point what. But to get back to time--I can't be more specific without giving too much away. One thing I can say is this: The Shrike manipulates time, and this is completely unresolved by story's end.

SF is reactionary. This is a toughie. Simmons seems to be a fairly open minded guy. Central to the story's plot is a federal government, one for the whole of the populated universe, called the Hegemony. The Hegemony doesn't seem to be particularly oppressive, at least not at first. But it does have a very "my way or the highway" style of governance. Still, the Hegemony acts a lot like most modern nations. New worlds are mined for commodities and involved in intergalactic trade. If their economies become important enough to the Hegemony, they're inducted. That induction often involves territorial war, independence movements, racism, and environmental damage.  Here again, Whedon's Firefly seems to take a lot from these ideas; the premise of Firefly is based on a federated interplanetary government, and those frontiersmen who resisted annexation.  Even so, while the Hegemony's motives are opaque, we are given to know that it is a representative form of democracy, which functions fairly smoothly.  Further, a common reactionary theme in SF is fear of technology, embodied in wars between artificial intelligence and humanity.  As mentioned above, this is simply not the case in Hyperion.  Though the AIs seem to be divided by party, one of whom approves of the overall extinction of humanity, the other two are either more progressive or completely ambivalent.  The Big Bad is never entirely clear here, it seems on the face of things, to be The Shrike.  It is a cold hearted killer.  But since we are never allowed to really understand what the Shrike is, it's hard to say whether or not the Shrike is in fact the Big Bad, or if it's the Ousters, the Hegemony, or the Techno Core.  This is all to the good, though it was frustrating to finish the book with little concluded.  Black and whites in genres like SF and fantasy are easy prey to bad writing, dissection, and subsequent dismissal of the work and the form overall.  Therefore, I'm inclined to say Hyperion fails this test of traditional SF, it is NOT reactionary.

SF is voyeuristic.  All of which begs the question, if it fails a test, is it still SF?  Oh yes.  Hyperion is voyeuristic to the core.  Recall that my definition of voyeuristic does not include peeping toms, or reality TV.  It simply means, getting a peep at what life is like in the future, and Simmons future is a whopper.  All SF falls prey to the simple distance involved in interplanetary travel.  Traveling to an alternate star system can take decades.  Hyperion's world has conquered that distance with something called a Farcaster.  Now Farcaster's are not some magic panacea.  The Techno Core gifted humanity with the technology for its own murky reasons, and you can't just 'cast anywhere.  You have to get there first, get Hegemony approval, and build a gate.  Something which costs billions of whatever the local currency is (Simmon's has two, black market dollars which are untraceable, and standard credits.)  And yet, as much as these things cost, the fabulously wealthy, as only a free-wheeling corporatist "democracy" can have, have farcaster homes, where every doorway goes to a secluded room on a completely different planet!  One of the main characters, farcasts to a beautiful, watery world to relive himself.  One thing that the story's premise allows for is that each character has a completely different background and history, this scattershot of history allows the author incredible lattitude to explore this diverse galaxy.  The drug currently in vogue is called Flashback.  It's like it sounds.  You take it, you fall unconcious and relive a prior experience.  So of course, there are good flash backs and "bad trips."  This falls within the realm of the Big Idea, Time.  My one question with flashback is, you have to have some control over it, since most days of our lives are fairly boring and placid.  To say nothing of the downright awful days!  But then again, seeing the past through the eyes of the present, might well make anything short of torture more bearable.  Apparently, Simmons himself had questions about fashback because his most recent book, to be released in July is based on it.  If ever an SF book were to be made a movie, this is it.

SF is about plot.  Though Hyperion seems in someway to be a prequel to a much larger story, this prequel is indeed heavily plot driven.  Even more so than most plot driven stories, because of the six stories that make up the whole.  Characters are introduced and killed off within pages of each other.  Simmons writing is tight, so its well done, but only the main characters are described in any way, and you still feel that they are complete strangers by the end of the story.  In no way do we empathize with them, even though several of the stories are quite touching and sad.  Given that this novel ends at the start of the action, at page 473, a lot of things happened.  If any of the characters had been developed further in this volume, it would have been an epic.

SF:  What survives?  As stated so often, my SF rubric is evolving.  So a new category today.  What survives, what gets left behind?  Part of the joy in all SF is seeing what remnants of our own common history survived whatever calamity befelled the Earth.  Or if the planet survived, what is remembered and what is lost?  There is a voyeuristic element to this, but I've classified this as a separate realm of inquiry for the following reason:  Watching the unfamiliar is titillating because of its strangeness, finding artifacts relevant to our own lives is titiliating because of their familiarity.  In Hyperion?  Well, Keats is an obvious answer.  Numerous other writers and works of poetry and prose are mentioned, many of which were beyond my own knowledge base.  (One nice thing about the new world of e-books and wireless networks is that its easy to look these things up on the fly!  But I ain't no e-book guy.  Not yet.)  One of the highlights of the book (SPOILER) is that the Techno Core has created a replicated terraformed recreation of Old Earth (before the fall) which is full of artifacts.  Judaism survives, and moves from Old Earth (which is destroyed by a black hole) to New Hebron.  Interestingly, man's relationship to God changes drastically once Earth is gone.  For the Jews in particular, with Jerusalem nothing more than cosmic dust, a major part of their religious texts became obsolete.  Catholicism (one of the main characters is a Catholic priest) likewise survives, also has a new homeworld and Archdiocese, but now it is just one more obscure Earth religion among many.  There is a lot in Hyperion to achieve familiarity with the reader. 

Anyway, this was a great read.  The test: will I pick up the sequel?  I saw it recently at my local library, and given that my almost-wife has passed an edict on no new fantasy in the house, I may well.  Why the caution?  Well, it's not my genre.  I don't mean to sound closeminded, but SF just doesn't have the same appeal to me.  And as the conclusion to this book was so unsatisfying, unlike A Fire Upon the Deep, with which I was enthralled from beginning to end--well, I just don't know.  At anyrate, Simmons is definitely on my list now.

Anne McCaffrey: Dragonsdawn

In an effort to add some classic fantasy from my past, I found myself reading another science fiction crossover.  As stated in the past, I genuinely believe in judging a book by its cover, and though Dragonsdawn did not have a fly cover, the next book in the series, had a truly beautiful cover, reading the jacket indicated to me my mistake, and I picked up Dragonsdawn. However, as I learned from McCaffrey's Wikipedia page, the editors repackaged the Pern books, as they have now done with the Narnia series, making the books chronological.  In fact, Dragonsdawn was published in 1989, a full six years after the dragon riders had been established through various short stories, and Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern.  So Dragonsdawn is actually, a prequel.

SPOILER:  In short, a group of colonists arrive at their new planet, Pern, to find a beautiful, untouched world--with a dark secret.  That secret is Threadfall, every hundred or two hundred years, a nearby planet wobbles by, emitting masses of a carbon destroying lifeforms called Thread.  Thread devours anything it touches.  Fortunately, its non-sentient.  It's basically as if it rained fire for 50-60 years.  Except that fire can be killed, eliminating the threat.  The colonists still have some of their technology in place when they land.  But it becomes exorbitantly resource demanding to defend the populace and their holdings, and so a solution must be found.  Fortunately, the planet's indiginous population is a vaguely pet-like firedrake, warm blooded lizard with wings.  An advanced civilization with a precious natural resource, you put the pieces together. 

There is a grand tradition of dragonriding in fantasy, every bit as prevalent as riding pegasi, or horses, or He-man's boar cat, Tolkien's eagles, or Wargriders.  The entire Dragonlance franchise was predicated on the search for a magic lance that knights would use to spear evil dragons from the skies.  Raymond E. Feist's epic, the Riftwar Saga had an omnipotent race of dragon riders, the Valheru, who became both villain and hero.  With all these predecessors, there are some basic dragon cliches that need to be discussed.  Dragons are intelligent.  It is surprising that the myths about dragons have always made them at least as intelligent as humans, if not more so.  Not so for the vast majority of fantasy fiction monsters.  A unicorn is magical, but its still just slightly smarter than a horse.  Orcs can speak the human tongues, but they use their smarts only to create devices to kill.  In Dungeons & Dragons, and indeed, DragonLance, Dragons are generally genius level smarter than humans.  You can tell, because in that rubric, intelligence is measured by a simple number 1-18 (three roles of a six sided die).  Most humans fall between 8 and 13.  All dragons fall between 15 to 22 (numbers above 18 are called modifiers in D&D parlance) This intelligence allows them to cast spells, to reduce their weight to allow them to fly, and often, to travel to new worlds.  This intelligence is marked by McCaffrey in that humans can speak to their dragons telepathically.  Moreover, this intelligence also allows them to make the calculations necessary to make teleport jumps between places to avoid danger.  Of course, Dragons breathe fire.  On Pern, they do so by ingesting a rock laden with chemicals that the dragon's second stomach converts to fire breathing fuel.

Since, I haven't quite come up with a great rubric for judging SF/Fantasy crossovers, I'll touch on several of the Five Factors first.  Cliche's abound, in fact, SF relies a bit more on cliche's since they don't have the time to develop characters in the same way that fantasy fiction can.  But human dramas are lessened, sideshows to the action.  Still McCaffrey is a master at her craft, and even the few human dramas described are expertly done.  The scope, in a science fiction is the entire galaxy, infinite possibilities, and history is often dumped on the reader for no other purpose than to establish character's personal histories.

In my BattleStar Gallactica review, I posted the following:

Fantasy is about good and evil.
Fantasy is about self-determination and fate.
Fantasy is about standing up against insurmountable odds.
Fantasy is liberalizing.

In comparison, Science Fiction has remarkably different pillars.

SF is about The Big Idea.
SF is reactionary
SF is voyeuristic.
SF is about plot.

A central reason for why Dragonsdawn is a crossover is that it does touch on ideas of good and evil.  Not spelled out as such, but as general rules for living.  There are several human "villains" one of whom is a belligerent scientist driven mad with grief over his lost daughter.  All the villains "get what's coming to them," every single one of them.  They all are rude, at some points unkind, sarcastic, and greedy.  Some are murderers, like the beautiful narcisist, pyschotic Avril Bittra.  And so, like any good fantasy, they get theirs, because the central moral tenet of fantasy isn't about the fight between good and evil, its about choosing to be kind, choosing to be just, and choosing the community over the self.  One of the stories main characters, makes this exact sacrifice, gathering data for the colony while bleeding out from stab wounds.  And yet--there is undoubtedly, a Big Idea.  Namely, what if Dragons were man made?  So McCaffrey takes the Dragon cliche and reworks it to suit her needs.  This is the reason for the cliches, they're flexible models that contain a variety of preconditioned knowledge.

The book continues in the fantasy vein when discussing Self-Determinacy and Fate.  If you've read the Pern books in order of publication, than you know exactly what the fate of the colony is, as the first books and stories take place hundreds of years after the colonists land.  In this aspect, much of Dragonsdawn is preordained.  Yet, the earnest struggle of the characters against the external menace of Thread indicates that its their own resolve that makes this fate possible.

Liberalizing/Reactionary.  The science fiction nature of Dragonsdawn struggles with and eventually loses to McCaffrey's innate liberal tendencies.  Pern is an idyllic paradise, and the colonist's government is generally speaking democratic.  There is a chapter where the governors take martial law to fight the threat of Thread, but they do so by asking the colonists to elect them to this position in a completely fair election.  More, there's no sense in the world of Pern, that "this is what will happen if--" or, "these are the consequences of these actions."  The colonists are trapped, not enough fuel to fly back.  They've made Pern their home, and when it turns out the planet has some unpleasant surprises, they fight back.  And its genetics that allow them to do so.  On the other side of the coin, the Evil Botanist, creates some nasty surprises in his own labs for future generations of Pernese to discover.

Dragonsdawn is a great book, and a quick read.  It does not however have much interest characterwise.  Its an ensemble cast, and many of those members are indistinguishable from others.  Though I have not reread the series in many years, it is my memory that the other volumes more than make up for this lack.  This is after all, a prequel meant to explain the dragon origins of Pern, not a personal struggle about humans growing up and fighting the odds.  I thoroughly recommend it.  And--I will be presently adding a Great Moment in Fantasy to my library from this same book.