Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos Book 1)

The Fall of Hyperion. On the world of Hyperion, the mysterious Time Tombs are opening. And the secrets they contain mean that nothing—nothing anywhere in the universe—will ever be the same. A stunning tour de force filled with transcendent awe and wonder, Hyperion is a masterwork of science fiction that resonates with excitement and invention, the first volume in a remarkable epic by the multiple-award-winning author of The Hollow Man.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the reach of galactic law, waits a creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret.

And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands. Silenus trained as a poet, but his training was interrupted when the Kiev Team's black hole "ate" the Earth; his mother dispatched her son aboard a slower-than-light flight to a nearby system, calculating that the shrunken family fortune would accumulate enough in compound interest over the century the voyage would take that the family's debt would be paid off and enough would be left over for Martin to live on for a time. Unfortunately, the accounts were nationalized by the Hegemony, and Silenus suffered brain damage during the voyage.

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Deep in penury, Silenus had to work as a common laborer. The back-breaking toil forces Silenus's mind to flee to higher planes, and as he recovers his use of language, he starts work on his Hyperion Cantos , a work he began as a parody of John Keats ' famous poem, but which evolved into a dual account of Silenus's life and an epic account of the Titanomachia , in which the Hegemony of Man takes the part of the Titans and the TechnoCore the Olympians.

His Dying Earth as it is called, in an explicit reference to Jack Vance 's Dying Earth series becomes an enormous hit, selling billions and making him a multi-millionaire. Eventually he falls into debt again due to divorce and the extreme cost of maintaining a house whose rooms are located on over thirty separate planets and connected by continually active, expensive to operate farcaster portals and in an attempt to produce another hit has a larger unabridged version of his cantos published, which is predicted to fail by his publisher.

The work is a terrible flop, selling few copies and not recouping the money he was advanced. In order to pay his debt, Silenus is forced to produce further hackwork for his "Dying Earth" series, a misery many artists face.

Hyperion Cantos Series

One day he realizes that his Cantos, his greatest work, has not been added to for years; his muse had fled. Silenus leaves his lifestyle, liquidates his assets, and signs on with Sad King Billy. Billy is an aristocrat of the planet Asquith, descended from the House of Windsor , and an intelligent and sensitive lover and critic of the arts.

He chooses for his capital a location near the Time Tombs on the then-even less inhabited Hyperion, reasoning that their presence will give the proper ambience for the creation of great art. For ten years, all goes well until people begin vanishing, with no abductors ever seen. At the same time, Silenus' muse returns, and he continues work on the Cantos.

Soon, the culprit is discovered to be the Shrike. At this time, Silenus becomes convinced that it is the Shrike who is his muse, who, in some occult way, his poem had brought into existence.

The murders continue until only Silenus is left living in the City of Poets. He writes the last line on the day that the last murder occurs.

Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1) by Dan Simmons

One day, Sad King Billy returns to the deserted city. Martin is gone on a trip to the Time Tombs seeking the Shrike, and when he returns to his quarters Billy confronts him with the fact that his writing is dependent on cold-blooded murder, and that it will need more murders if it is to ever be completed. Billy burns his manuscript. After Billy is taken away by the Shrike, Silenus recopies his poem as well as possible.

Eventually he leaves Hyperion. In the centuries since, reliant on life-extending treatments, he has been waiting to return to Hyperion to finish the poem. This is told on an uncrewed, wind-powered landship. Sol Weintraub, a Jewish academic, had been a professor of ethics on Barnard's World, the second colony founded from Old Earth. He and his wife, Sarai, had been happy when their only daughter, Rachel, was born forty years ago. She eventually became an archaeologist, and while in her post-graduate studies went on an expedition to study the Time Tombs of Hyperion regarding the Shrike as a myth the Shrike not yet having become active again.

While mapping the so-called Sphinx for hidden passages or rooms, something happens to Rachel: Rachel is returned to the WorldWeb where her parents learn of the novel disease she has contracted, dubbed the "Merlin sickness" after T. White 's The Once and Future King , in which every time Rachel goes to sleep, she ages backwards two days for a net loss of one day per day , losing her memories and in fact physically becoming younger; there is no sign that the condition will reverse itself when she ages backwards to her birth.

Behold The Unfilmable: Hyperion Cantos

However, she still needs to eat and breathe normally, she talks and acts normally while awake, and bruises from medical procedures one day are still present the next. Rachel's life is shattered by her retrogression, slowly destroying her links with the present; her parents devote their lives to caring for Rachel and trying to cure her.

A visit to the Shrike Temple on Lusus sees the bishop there cast out Sol, claiming Rachel doesn't need to be cured when she is the most blessed and cursed human in all of existence. After more than a decade of illness her story is picked up by the news media and Hyperion becomes a tourist destination. Meanwhile, Sol wrestles for years with his dreams in which he is ordered to go to Hyperion and sacrifice Rachel in a replay of the Binding of Isaac.

Weintraub becomes increasingly fascinated with the ethical problem that the Binding presents. Shortly before his wife dies, Sol learns that she has been having the same dream word for word with the same faceted, glowing red eyes that match earlier descriptions of the Shrike's eyes. He also worries about what will happen when Rachel reaches her birthday her actual age of zero days old which will be very soon , and so he decides to become a pilgrim and to implore the Shrike for a treatment. Following Sol's story the pilgrims witness a space battle which includes the destruction of the Templar Tree-Ship, one of only five, which carried them to Hyperion.

The next morning Het Masteen, True Voice of the Tree and captain of the ship, is not to be found on the landship that has been carrying them from the river to the mountains. Despite a watch being maintained all night and no one onboard hearing anything Masteen's stateroom is found full of blood. Silenus, having witnessed such carnage centuries before, states it is obviously the work of the Shrike. This is told on a suspended cable car across the mountains.

Brawne Lamia , the daughter of a senator of Lusus, eschewed politics for the life of a private investigator after her father's apparent suicide which occurred shortly after he and the then junior senator Meina Gladstone proposed a bill to quickly incorporate Hyperion into the WorldWeb.

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Her client is a "cybrid" a cloned human body which is controlled through its electronic implants by a TechnoCore intelligence named "Johnny", who wishes to hire her to investigate his own murder. This cybrid is the genetic clone of famous Romantic poet John Keats , and the AI controlling it was programmed to have the personality and memories of Keats as best as could be reconstructed from surviving materials and the 'Core's finest extrapolations. Unlike most "retrieved personalities", which are of insufficient fidelity to maintain sanity, Johnny functions quite well though he disclaims poetic talent.

A backup could not be brought online for a full minute, causing the loss of five days' worth of data and memory. This limited amnesia was the apparent goal of the assault. The whole series was, in my opinion, one of the most overlooked, amazing, epic series of novels. While we would want it to be as good of an adaptation as say LOTR, we would be lucky to get Harry Potter and likely get something more akin to Twilight.

Over the past several years I have seen rumors of scripts of the Hyperion Cantos, and Bradley Cooper is still working on adapting a script when he apparently hasn't done it before. I hope it continues to not get made, because I just don't see how that would be possible. Yes, my thought exactly. He's a handsome guy and a good actor, but I don't believe you can be a good writer just because you semi-successfully have played one a few times. I would love it if he had the chutzpah to send his first three pages to John August and Craig Mazin on the Scriptnotes podcast and let them rip it a new one.

Do we actually know anything about Bradley Cooper's writing abilities? I'm doubtful myself but it seems to me that without knowing his capablitities in writing, there's an equal chance of him being awful or terrific. If he could write, he'd be making money that way. Not by being handsome and in front of a camera. Please don't film it.

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If anything, thats principally what makes it unfilmable. I think I have to read these now. Because I needed more "I need to read these" books. That being said, whenever another of my favorite books gets filmed, I get scared, because I'm so afraid it's going to be horrible, but I can't resist going to see it How do you deal with the fact that the first movie couldn't possibly stand on its own? A way to introduce the cantos to the big screen could be for Dan Simmons to write a prequel like the sequel "Orphans of the Helix", but longer. I would be delighted to read it, as fans would I can guess.

Then, if it does well on the big screen, it's the green light to go ahead with Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. If it does not, the four Cantos remain unspoiled. As for the special effects, the technology as advanced quite far and it's not as challenging as it used to be to do something decent.

As for the ideal director, it's hard to tell. Anybody but James Cameron that's for sure. It will give the characters enough room to breathe and unfold. There would have to be some rewrites , just as G. R Martin had to do , but it can be done and be done well. Not in a classic hero type way, but just like Ned Stark was in GoT, you just "assumed" he is the main character, even though there were many equally important stories and he was by no means always present.

And just like Ned dies at the end of Season 1, the Consul You do the first two books as a TV show a'la Game of Thrones. You could a season for each story. A season for the Priests tale. A season for Kassads and so on. Maybe consolidate or run two stories side by side. GoT has proven that a complex show with hundreds of characters is indeed possible if and only if you stay faithful to the original story and plot. Yes there are some changes but overal these changes improve the story and are so well done that I, even after reading the series several times, have no idea when bits have been altered.

You'd build the back story as a television show. This would allow for the construction of an experienced team of writers, production people, sets and other material that could safely sustain itself within the budget of the show and the revenue it'd earn. As the OP himself has noted this story is straight forward enough plus the fact you don't have to tell people about the back story allows you to drop a bit of the baggage that Simmons put in the later novels to help the reader remember and to rewrite some of the siller momoments.

It must be done, it must be filmed. There's talented, genius people who can do it - and then I, we get to see it. But never at the possibilities of the movie. Janeway did take some of that disgust away. And every permutation of every sci-fi, spec-fic novel I've ever loved, I've sat through every visualization of it - because the creators of that visualization may see some, may see all, may see it so much better, than what I saw when I read the original.

Lord Of The Rings: OK, actually, also the Ents But I wasn't my friend who refused to see any realization lest it spoil his personal vision. I think the LOTR's cinematic team saw my vision one better. Absolute fact - the genre is still mainly a man's game right now. But I still watch, because - there's no alternative if you want to see sci-fi and spec-fic.

Because - it's my genre, my main literary direction. I have faith and I have hope that my enjoyment of the novel might be displayed beautifully by talented cinema artists. Somebody might deliver Hyperion. Dan Simmons has given it all the right ingredients and out there are all the right artisans. Eventually it will be here.