Dan Simmon's Hyperion- might have spoilers

[roguexunited]

I have to admit, when I started reading Hyperion I was well aware to the connection it had with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, after all it was given to me as a school assignment. So, I was mentally preparing myself to seek out those connections (for a future essay), and get my homework done. Nonetheless, I have to admit I enjoyed the book, a lot; its play with intertextuality goes further than The Canterbury Tales, or Keats. The genre medley is one of the books qualities that makes most enjoyable, and keeps in the spirit of Chaucer’s work. Personally I liked “The Detective’s Tale”, where we find a typical hard-boiled detective story but with a couple of twists; first of course, it’s set in space, second and most importantly, the main character is a woman. So it is funny to see all the clichés of the masculine detective, enthralled by the stunning femme fatale reversed and applied to a woman. It was weird, unsettling and entertaining. Some of the other stories broke my heart, and I can’t say that I completely disliked any of them.

In my opinion the success of Simmons’ story resided in making the reader emotionally invested in his characters. One can form bonds with them very quickly. The other thing I appreciated about Hyperion was the way Simmons dealt with his equivalent of the prologues and epilogues of the tales, feature derived from the Chaucerian text. In Chaucer this pauses between stories are mostly for the author to comment on the success or failure of each pilgrim’s storytelling skills. In Simmons’ work, this sections carries an important narrative purpose, which keeps the reader hooked with the story. It particularly reminded me a little of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; “The horror, the horror”, “Hyperion … Hyperion”, as a journey back to a terrible, violent and unknown place that will only bring misery. This was a wonderful way to keep the tension throughout the book mainly because each tale, although it adds to the frame story, is a deviation. Nonetheless, there is always a lurking feeling that will not go away as you read, which keeps the tension and the importance of the pilgrims journey present at all times.

In the sci-fi front, which I must admit I am not very familiar with, I found it to be understandable and friendly, even for someone like me. After all, this was an assignment for my medieval literature seminar where I never thought they would make me read science fiction, but they did. Personally I enjoyed the descriptions of the technology, in particular the whole idea of the treeship. Mind-boggling.

What I didn’t enjoy was the uncertainty the story left. Each tale added more and more to the mystery surrounding the war, and painted a portrait of the future human civilization. Simmons complicated the relationship between the good side and the bad side, Hegemony vs Ousters, through the use of each tale. The pilgrims’ stories become a sort of sneak peak into a different perspective that allow the reader to fill in the blanks that were established in the prologue, nonetheless, there is one story we never hear, and I felt cheated. Which takes me to the open ending; I’m not a fan. I understand that it might be a nod to both The Canterbury Tales and John Keats’ Hyperion (which were both left unfinished), but that was just cruel, and now I have to go and buy the second book to find out how it all ends; and one of my friends says that there is even a third. Great, there goes my food money, thank you Dan Simmons, thank you.

To round this up, I liked to book. The variety of stories you are able to get from it is ridiculous, considering that Simmons’ reduced the original number of Chaucerian pilgrims to 7, and yet we are left with: sci-fi, detective stories, cowboys and Indians, a gothic mystery, medieval modernized epics, war tales, androids, humor, and much more.