The technological backbone of the Hegemony is a network of portals called farcasters, portals that allow people to teleport from planet to planet with ease. In the Hegemony, the very rich even have mansions filled with farcasters, just so they can occupy the most desirable real estate of several worlds at once. This fabulously complex teleportation web and its communications network are operated by artificial intelligences who can predict future events with uncanny precision ... except where Hyperion is concerned. The Time Tombs and the Shrike confound extrapolation. As a result, the planet is a powder keg—the AIs are obsessed with it, as are the spacefaring transhuman rebels known as Ousters. As the novel Hyperion opens, a war for control over the planet is brewing.

In an attempt to tip the military balance in its favor, the Hegemony sends seven pilgrims to Hyperion to seek the Shrike. A few have encountered Hyperion before, each is involved in some way with the ongoing crisis—and at least one, they are told, is an Ouster spy. The party includes a priest, a soldier, a poet, a government official and a private investigator, each with a heartbreaking story to tell. Perhaps none of them is as tragic, though, as Sol Weintrab, a scholar whose adult daughter has slowly aged backward to infancy, all as a result of an encounter with the Shrike. When Rachel reaches the moment of her birth, she will cease to exist.

This group of strangers set out on a long journey to the Time Tombs, sharing their stories to kill time as they travel. With their conflicting agendas and emotional baggage, they seem unlikely choices to succeed in preventing a war whose true causes are deeply buried, and whose consequences threaten to destroy the entire human race.

A dazzling, seductive and frightening future

Dan Simmons' 1989 novel Hyperion is a stunning work of imagination, a "big canvas" book in every sense of the term. The author's universe is vast and full of surprises—a river that flows through every world under the Hegemony, thanks to farcaster technology. Hyperion has a forest of flaming trees whose ecology is driven by lightning strikes, a technologically resurrected poet by the name of Johnny Keats, an implacable, homicidal monster, cyberpunk sequences, homages to the noir genre, literary references aplenty, mindless clones with fleshy pink crosses embedded in their chests and a satyr.

As the various pilgrims in the story began to share their experiences (the frame story is deliberately based on the style of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), a messy network of interconnections, conflicts and tantalizing clues about the nature of Hyperion emerges. Over time, an enormous conspiracy takes shape. Novels of this sort, based on murky intrigues and grand plots, often fall apart once the author starts to show his cards, but Simmons has put together a story that is genuinely interesting. In its early stages it is compelling, and once the truth starts to come together everything somehow makes perfect sense. In that sense Hyperion is not only an ambitious book but a significant literary achievement.

That is not to say that by the end of Hyperion everything has been neatly resolved; in fact, the novel brings the pilgrims to the foot of the Time Tombs, leaving the full disclosure of secrets for a sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, and two books that follow that. For readers who prefer standalone works, this might be a source of frustration, but most fans can expect to be glad to know that finishing this first, impressive book does not mean an end to the story of the Shrike and its victim-petitioners.