HYPERION

Every four years I re-read Hyperion. Each time a different pilgrim's story becomes my favorite. This time it was the scholar's — and I think I finally understand why.

I first read Dan Simmons' Hyperion when I was nineteen, in a paperback with a cracked spine I inherited from an uncle. I remember finishing the Consul's tale on a train and staring at the window for the rest of the ride. The book does that to people. It ends without ending; the first time through feels like being handed a map of a country you aren't going to be allowed to visit.

That was years ago. I've re-read it three times since. What I want to write about here isn't a review — plenty of those exist — but the specific thing that happens when you return to a book that's built like this one.

the shape

If you haven't read it: Hyperion is a frame story. Seven pilgrims travel to a dying world to meet a creature called the Shrike. On the way, each tells their tale. That's the book. The destination doesn't happen. You get the stories and then the stories stop.

This sounds like a gimmick, and the first time through it kind of is. It's Canterbury Tales in space; you notice the architecture before you feel it. The trick is that the stories aren't equal weight. They're different genres, different registers, and they refract each other. The priest's tale is horror. The soldier's is pulp. The poet's is a literary autobiography. The scholar's is a small, domestic tragedy with one unfixable wrong in the middle of it.

why the scholar's tale hits now

Sol Weintraub's daughter Rachel is bitten by a mysterious entity on an archaeological dig and starts aging backwards. Every day she wakes a day younger. Every day she remembers a day less. He is raising her toward the moment she will cease to have ever existed.

At nineteen I read this and thought it was a clever sci-fi premise. At twenty-three I read it and found it sad. At twenty-seven I read it and got weepy. At thirty-one — this read — I understood for the first time that it's about every parent and every child. It's just a literalization of a thing that's already happening to everybody, more slowly, less cruelly, but in the same direction. You are raising a person toward a version of themselves that will not remember you.

the shrike

There is a monster in this book. Four arms, blades for fingers, made of the wrong kind of metal. The Shrike is the best monster in science fiction because Simmons understands that a monster is scariest when it has a purpose you almost but don't quite grasp. Every pilgrim has a theory. Every pilgrim's theory is partially correct. None of them adds up.

The Shrike isn't explained in Hyperion. You have to read the sequel for that, and you shouldn't. The sequel is good. The sequel also dispels some of the fog, and the fog is the point.

the thing I keep forgetting

There's a small moment toward the end of the book, after all the tales have been told, when the pilgrims are walking the last miles to the Time Tombs. They know the Shrike is coming. They are almost certainly about to die. And they are joking. They are singing. They are having, honestly, a pretty nice time.

Simmons doesn't earn this by magic. He earns it because we've now spent 500 pages inside their heads and we know exactly how each of them got here and what they're leaving behind and what they are scared of. Their cheer at the end isn't denial. It's the thing that happens when people who have told each other the truth walk into something together.

I think about that a lot. Not about Hyperion specifically. Just about that.

If you've never read it: get a paperback, not an ebook. The book's physical construction matters — the sectioning, the chapter breaks, the weight in your hand as the pilgrimage gets closer. This is the kind of novel that a screen flattens.

I will re-read it again in 2030. I cannot wait to find out whose story is mine by then.