The Fall of Hyperion

Not to be confused with John Keats's epic poem fragment, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream.

The Fall of Hyperion
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author(s)	Dan Simmons
Cover artist	Gary Ruddell
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Hyperion Cantos
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	March 1990
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	517 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-385-24950-0 (First edition)
OCLC Number	20093277
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Classification	PS3569.I47292 F35 1990
Preceded by	Hyperion
Followed by	Endymion

The Fall of Hyperion is the second science fiction novel by Dan Simmons in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe. The novel was written in 1990, and won both the British Science Fiction and a Locus Awards in 1991. It was also nominated for the Hugo Award that same year, and the Nebula Award in 1990.

Plot introduction

In 45 chapters and an epilogue, The Fall of Hyperion records the fall of the Hegemony of Man. Like the previous novel Hyperion, it follows a frame structure of sorts, although it is far less explicit: instead of a number of pilgrims telling each other their tales a la The Canterbury Tales, the perspective is that of the reactivated cybrid of John Keats (the poet to whom the novel is dedicated "To John Keats, Whose Name Was Writ in Eternity"), who dreams the adventures of the pilgrims via his twin.

Universe

The Hyperion Series of novels takes place some hundreds of years in our future. These novels are often referred to as the Hyperion Cantos.

The first of the two key technological developments that shape this universe is the 'Hawking Drive' which allows travel between the stars. The Hawking Drive has allowed Humanity to spread to hundreds of worlds, but travel between worlds can take years.

The second and more important development is the separation from Humanity of the Artificial Intelligences that have gained sentience. They are referred to as the TechnoCore and still act as allies of Humanity, having gifted mankind with several key technologies including Farcasters which are now critical to human society.

Key concepts

Hegemony of Man - The government that rules most of the worlds humanity has settled on. The Government includes Senators from the various worlds, a CEO who is elected from the Senate, and a representative from the TechnoCore. It is basically a dictatorship run by a group of elected officials. No world is permitted to leave the Hegemony and many worlds were inadvertently forced into the Hegemony, so that other Web worlds could take advantage of their resources and exploit their planets. The water planet of Maui Covenant is an example of this. The population did not want to be part of the Hegemony, but whoever resisted were slaughtered by the military forces of the Hegemony and the planet ecology was fundamentally destroyed, so that the Hegemony worlds could exploit the planet's resources. There are factions inside the TechnoCore that want to see The Hegemony disappear.

All Thing - a real-time participatory democracy, much like a web forum, which is enabled by the TechnoCore's datasphere, and reminiscent of the medieval Icelandic Althing.

Datumplane - Communication Infrastructure of the Web. It transcends vast light years but only because it is a network of communication based on cislunar spheres that must be set up first in order to permit humans to access the TechnoCore. If a human from The Hegemony is outside of this web network, then they will not be able to access information from it or communicate with any other person inside the Web.

The Web - The planets that are connected by Farcasters. A Farcaster portal can only be built if the planet has a cislunar sphere orbiting it or if there is a ship in orbit that can generate a portal for humans or things to travel through.

Farcasters - Portals that allow instant travel between worlds using singularities in space. These portals allow travel not only across light years within galaxies, but also across deep space to other galaxies. The TechnoCore sends Severn and Hunt to Earth where it was hidden in the Magellanic Cloud hundreds of thousands of light years away from the Milky Way Galaxy. The farcasters are actually where the TechnoCore resides, though this is kept secret from the Hegemony.

Outback World - Planets outside the Web, such as Hyperion. Hyperion was annexed as part of the Hegemony, but does not count as part of the Web, because farcaster portals were not placed on the planet. It was believed that the Shrike would somehow make it through the farcaster portals and slaughter people on the other worlds of the Web.

TechnoCore - The sentient artificial intelligences that have separated themselves from Humanity, but are outwardly allied with the Hegemony of Man. In reality, there exist three factions in conflict as to whether or not mankind should be exterminated. The TechnoCore resides in the farcaster network, though this is kept secret from the humans.

Ousters - Humans who left the planets long ago and now live in 'swarms' out in deep space. They are not part of the Hegemony of Man and are usually referred to as barbarians by its citizens.

Shrike - A 'monster' covered in spikes that is said to reside on the Planet Hyperion. It is an organic, metallic humanoid looking being with four arms that can travel through space and time at will. It is responsible for the deaths of millions of humans. It was created by the AI's Ultimate Intelligence and sent back in time in order to search for Empathy, a facet of the Ultimate Intelligence spawned from mankind.

Church of the Final Atonement - A cult that worships the Shrike as an avatar of retribution.

Plot summary

Meina Gladstone has committed to reinforcing the FORCE:Space picket at Hyperion and pushing the Ousters out. Parties all over the Hegemony break out on the day the armada is dispatched; it is to the party at Government House on the capital of the Hegemony, Tau Ceti Center, that one Joseph Severn, the technological reincarnation of John Keats, a cybrid, fully of neither the human world nor the TechnoCore where his AI consciousness resides, is invited. He meets with Gladstone and her council of war, to "offer an artist's perspective". His official excuse for being there is that he has been commissioned to do a series of sketches of Gladstone during these historic events. He does do these sketches, but the real reason is that Gladstone needs to stay informed about the crucial events surrounding the pilgrims and the Time Tombs, and Severn's dreams appear to correspond to the events. He sees and feels what the Hyperion pilgrims are experiencing.

His dreams are of an uneventful first day exploring the Time Tombs. The Shrike does not appear, nor does Captain Het Masteen. That night a sandstorm begins. Lenar Hoyt staggers off to the Jade Tomb, driven there by the pain of the cruciform. Brawne Lamia awakes and decides to look for him. Fedmahn Kassad, who was standing watch the whole night, trails behind both: he hopes the two shall serve as bait, to draw out either the Shrike or Moneta, the woman from the future who protects the Shrike, but is in love with Kassad. In the Jade Tomb, Hoyt discovers a shaft that drops thousands of kilometers to a veritable inferno. It would surely kill him permanently and destroy the cruciform. Before he can hurl himself over the precipice, the Shrike appears. It ignores the bullets that Lamia fires at it, and slices Hoyt's throat open. Hoyt dies, but the cruciforms he carries might still resurrect him in three days.

Before Severn's meeting with Gladstone, he attends a military briefing. The defense of Hyperion is not going well; the Ousters have several times the number of combat units FORCE predicted, and each unit is more effective than believed. The two space fleets are deadlocked in a bloody stalemate.

The Consul tries to retrieve his ship so its medical facilities can be used on Father Hoyt, and if need be, the ever-younger Rachel, but FORCE grounds the ship on Gladstone's orders. Carrying the corpse of the now-dead Hoyt, they all head up to the Sphinx for shelter.

Severn confronts Gladstone about her callous abandonment of the pilgrims. Severn has just learned in a dream that she does not intend to evacuate the millions of people on Hyperion nor the Marines who defend the planet. She is surprised that anyone else knew about it, since she had just given the order, and is convinced that Severn's dreams are true. She defends her action, saying that it is absolutely crucial that the pilgrims stay at the Time Tombs to work out whatever their destinies may be. It is later learned that she expected all along for Hyperion to fall to the Ousters, so that they can deal with the problem of the Shrike and not The Hegemony. She knows that a great war was predicted many years ago between the Ousters and the Hegemony and that the Hegemony would win, but Hyperion was the only factor that could change that. She then asks Severn to visit Hyperion for a short time with her close aide, Leigh Hunt - to get a closer view of things. On his trip, he meets Governor Theo Lane and Dr. Melio Arundez; from the former he learns that Hyperion is breaking down as everyone crowds around the spaceport, and from the latter that the Time Tombs are preparing to open at any time. The reason that the time tombs are opening is because The Consul allowed the Ousters to bring a device to the planet that disabled their anti-entropic fields. Once the fields collapsed, then the time tombs opened, allowing the Shrike to travel where ever and when ever it wanted to go.

In Severn's next dreams, Kassad is attacked by Moneta. Their long-distance sniper duel devastates the Crystal Monolith. Kassad catches up with her at the top. After she defeats him in hand-to-hand combat, they make love. She then gives him a suit of armor/weapon from the future, to which the Shrike takes Moneta and Kassad. Kassad fights the Shrike in single combat, but fails to kill it. He is only saved, because Moneta decides to transport him through time to a future where it seems that the Ousters have taken over. The Ousters are not the barbaric enemy that humanity makes them out to be however. They are helpful and heal Kassad's injuries that he endured with the battle with the Shrike. He also sees that the Ousters vary greatly in appearance, having genetically modified themselves to suit their environments rather than vice-versa. Some Ousters are large, very tall, and muscular while others are smaller with wings. He describes some of them as being almost like insects, while others are furry like animals, but all are sentient beings that communicate with him either telepathically or vocally. After making contact with other Ouster humans from this future, he attacks the Shrike again as his new allies attack legions of other Shrikes that have come into existence, in a battle to decide if "humanity gets a say in its future". Although this future humanity apparently wins the battle, Kassad is killed.

The Ousters reveal their master plan when a dozen fleets' fusion drive tails are spotted so close to crucial Web Worlds that when they activate their Hawking drives, they are scant dozens or hundreds of hours travel-time from their target, having previously traveled at sub-light speeds below the detection threshold. Simultaneously, the swarm in the Hyperion system presses the FORCE even harder: Gladstone has just committed the strategic reserve to reinforce them, but to little avail.

By this point, Father Duré has been reborn by the cruciform attached by Father Hoyt's remains. Lamia and Silenus leave for Chronos Keep, to resupply. The pilgrims had not brought many supplies with them, as they did not expect to live long enough to exhaust them. Silenus peels off when they pass the Poet's City; he is sick of Lamia, and wants to finish his Cantos, and he had always done his best work in the Poet's City. Lamia leaves him to meet what may come. During the two's absence, they (the Consul, Sol Weintraub, and Duré) find Captain Het Masteen collapsed in the sands, feverish and dehydrated. He too eventually dies, never telling his tale aside from some confused babbling about the Shrike's Tree of Pain and Masteen's failure to pilot it through the galaxy.

Silenus finds the silence of the city extremely conducive to writing. He makes extraordinary progress - his muse has returned. Silenus's Hyperion Cantos is a retread of Keats's two previous failures, attempts to write the great epic of the Titanomachia - the overthrow of the Titans by their more beautiful upstart offspring, the more familiar Olympians of Greek myth, and the Titans' counter-attack: Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream. Silenus's poem is not merely poetic myth, but an obvious allegory for events wracking the stars, the long-running conflict between humanity and its creations, the AIs of the TechnoCore. As the wan light fails, Saturn and Jupiter have concluded their grand debates at the treaty table by expressing fear of some third hostile other force. Unable to see the manuscript, Silenus pauses to find some source of illumination. The Shrike silently appears and commandeers Silenus's arm, writing that "IT IS TIME, MARTIN." Silenus refuses to go: the poem is almost done, after all. The Shrike takes Silenus and impales him on the Tree of Pain anyway.

Lamia's mission to retrieve supplies from the Keep is perturbed by odd moving noises and abruptly cut off screams of pain. On her way down, she is knocked unconscious by dislodged falling rocks. When she returns to the Sphinx agonizing hours and kilometers later, she finds no one except the Shrike. Her bullets are for naught against the metal body, and it stabs a blade into her head behind her ear near her data-access implant. Sol and the Consul discover her prone and unconscious - apparently brain-dead - and her head seamlessly connected to the bare rock of the Sphinx by an odd techno-organic cable. The Consul departs on a Hawking mat (the same one used by Merin and Siri) back to the capital of Hyperion, Keats, to try to free his ship; it has a cryogenic freezing unit that Rachel could be put in before her last birth-day arrives, and tools to help in cutting the cable off Lamia.

Lamia is still alive, but her consciousness has been transferred to the datumplane. She is joined there by Johnny, apparently freed from the Schrön loop by the Shrike. Johnny mentions that he had been dreaming Severn's reality, much as Severn had been dreaming Johnny's reality. The two head into the heart of the TechnoCore to find answers.

The scene switches back to Kassad. The portal the Shrike led him through takes them to the Tree of Pain where all of the Shrike's victims are impaled and still living. Kassad moves to free Martin Silenus from the tree, but the Shrike multiplies to put thousands of them in Kassad's way. Kassad then begins to battle the Shrike.

Kassad's battle with the Shrike takes him and the Shrike through different times and places one of which is a room in the ship the pilgrims rode across the planet in the first book. The blood on the wall that was found, and thought to be that of Het Masteen, ends up being Kassad's as they continue to battle.

Back in the Web, there is a state of mass panic, as billions of hegemony citizens attempt to find some way to flee from the imminent invasion. Riots break out on major worlds, some of which are led by the resurgent Shrike church, whose membership has swelled. Gladstone decides to sacrifice some of the "first wave" worlds, hoping to buy time to position fleet defenses on worlds that would be attacked later. Hopes that negotiation may be possible are swept away when the first world to be invaded is bombarded with nuclear and plasma weapons. The Technocore, through its liaison Councilor Albedo, states that they may have found a solution, in the form of an extremely potent variant of the Deathwand. The weapon would wipe out both the Ousters as well as the nearby Hegemony citizens. To avoid the latter, the Technocore proposes a mass evacuation into the labyrinth worlds to shield the civilians from the weapon's effects.

The Consul makes his way over the mountains and the sea of grass, but eventually falls asleep and crash lands near the outskirts of Keats. Meanwhile, Duré decides to go explore while Sol and Rachel wait with Lamia at the Sphinx. As the last seconds to Rachel's birth tick away, the Shrike appears, and takes her away, leaving Sol to contemplate, as the Time Tombs open.

Lamia and Johnny make their way through the TechnoCore and then into the Megasphere, a world the AIs inhabit beyond the Datasphere. There they find Ummon, a powerful and influential AI, who explains that the Core was indeed responsible for the "destruction" of Old Earth, and the movement of it to another arm of the Milky Way galaxy. This was to influence the expansion of the Hegemony and number of Web Worlds so that the TechnoCore could also expand with the farcaster system. Ummon reveals that "greater beings" reside in Metasphere, a realm of consciousness that encompasses the Megasphere, and that the Core fears a future human created Ultimate intelligence within the Metasphere in a place called the Void that Binds. He also reveals that he was behind the murders of both Bryon Lamia and Johnny. He then destroys the residing Johnny persona and expels Lamia from the Megasphere.

On Hyperion, the Consul makes contact with Theo Lane, the planet's governor general. As FORCE is attacked by vastly superior Ouster forces, he is contacted by Gladstone and asked to attempt to negotiate with the Ousters to stop the war.

Meanwhile, Severn barely escapes from a mob of Shrike Church radicals, and winds up on Pacem, where he finds, of all people, Father Paul Duré. Duré explains that while walking, he found a new entrance in the Shrike palace, which was previously sealed off. Upon entering, he found himself inside Hyperion's labyrinth, which is filled with millions of decaying corpses and cruciform parasites. The Shrike then transports him to a spaceship (well beyond the range of the time tides) and pushes him through a farcaster portal to Pacem. Duré and Severn realize that the Technocore's proposed evacuation is a trap; the Technocore plans to connect all the humans in the Labyrinths to a massive parallel processing network using the "Cruciform" parasites that Duré encountered to sustain them. Whilst Duré travels to God's Grove, Severn leaves with Leigh Hunt to confront Gladstone, but the farcaster instead traps them on Old Earth. Not long afterward, Severn contracts tuberculosis in a strange parallel to his persona's target, John Keats.

Duré returns to Tau Ceti Center just as God's Grove is destroyed in an Ouster bombardment. There, he is inexplicably elected Pope of the Catholic Church and returns to Pacem before he can warn Gladstone of the threat. Meanwhile, Severn (his physical body having died of Tuberculosis) enters the metasphere and contacts her in a dream with a warning and revelation that the TechnoCore resides in the farcaster system.

The Consul makes contact with the Ousters, who reveal that the "invasion" is only occurring in the Hyperion system; the Core is behind the other attacks. FORCE autopsies of "Ousters" from the other invasions confirm that they are indeed Core cybrids. Acting on this evidence, Gladstone authorizes FORCE to destroy the entire farcaster network, having learned from Severn that the Core resides within it. As a result of this destruction, the human Hegemony essentially collapses, and millions die in the chaos. The "Fatline" communication system (which sends messages through a quantum system that is overlapping with the metasphere void) breaks down not much later, accompanied by a message from an alien intelligence from the metasphere that "There will be no further misuse of this channel. You are disturbing others who are using it to serious purpose. Access will be restored when you understand what it is for".

Back on Hyperion, Brawne Lamia penetrates the Shrike Palace to find Silenus and all of the other victims of the Shrike from over the years connected by the same cable that connected her to the Datasphere. It is revealed that the Tree of Thorns is apparently a simulation (Silenus later alleges that it is both real and a simulation). As the Shrike approaches, she cuts Silenus' cable, freeing him. Lamia attacks the Shrike and somehow defeats it.

Meanwhile, Sol's daughter Rachel appears in a newly-formed body outside the Time Tombs as a young woman, carrying her younger self (now aging normally again). Giving her younger form to Sol, she explains that she is Moneta, and is now traveling back in time with the Shrike under orders from humanity's future. She disappears and Sol decides to go forward in time to Rachel's future using the portal.

The story concludes several months later; the worst of the chaos caused by the fall has abated, and Hyperion is flourishing again, with former Hegemony citizens and Ousters co-existing. Newly substantiated glyphs give some insight to the various tombs and monoliths of the Time Tombs. And rarely, the portal to the future will admit a person. The novel ends with the Consul returning to the former Web Worlds in his starship to discover what happened, with Severn secretly acting as his starship AI.

External links

• Audio review and discussion of The Fall of Hyperion at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast
• The Fall of Hyperion at Worlds Without End