Hyperion

“Hyperion” is built like “The Canterbury Tales”: pilgrims travelling to the Time Tombs each tell a story, and nearly every tale would stand as a fine novella while adding to the larger mystery. It reads more like literary than hard science fiction. Some readers could do without the explicit sex scenes and the invented jargon, and some miss a resolution: the answers wait in the next volume.

Worth knowing Hyperion, from 1989, won the Hugo in 1990 and is built like The Canterbury Tales: seven pilgrims travel to the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, where the Shrike, a creature of blades that moves through time, grants one wish and kills the rest, and on the way each tells the story that brought them there. The priest’s tale, about a cross-shaped parasite that will not let a man die, and the scholar’s tale, about a daughter who ages backwards a day at a time, are the two people remember decades later. The book stops before the pilgrims reach the Tombs; The Fall of Hyperion of 1990 is the other half, and the two are one novel published in two parts. Dan Simmons later added two more, set centuries on.

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