Dan Simmons
I began this novel on Tuesday March 15, 2022. I completed it
Friday September 2, 2022. It has 475 pages. It was published in 1989 by Del Rey
Trade Paperback.
"The Consulate and Home Rule Council flatlined us three
standard weeks ago with the news that the Time Tombs showed signs of opening.
The antientropic field around them were expanding rapidly and the shrike has
begun firing as far south as the Bridal Range."
Hyperion p. 4
"A FORCE space task force was immediately dispatched from
Parvati to evacuate the Hegemony citizens on Hyperion before the Time Tombs
opened. There time-debt will be a little more than three Hyperion years. We do
not know if the evacuation fleet will arrive in time. But the situation is even
more complicated. An Ouster migration cluster of at least four
thousand...units...has been detected approaching the Hyperion system. Our
evacuation task force should arrive only a short while before the
Ousters."
Medina Gladstone
Hyperion pp. 4-5
"The FORCE joint chiefs believe that this is the
Ousters big push. Whether they seek to control Hyperion just for the Time Tombs
or weather this is an all-out attack on the world-wide remains to be seen. In
the meantime, a full FORCE: space battle fleet complete with farcaster battalion
has spun up from the Comn system: to join the evacuation task force, but this
fleet may be recalled depending upon circumstances."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 5
"Oh yes, we were challenged the moment we tunneled down
from the quantum leap. A hegemony warship is escorting us this very
moment."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 11
"Treeships rarely occurred more than a four-or
five-month timedebt, making short scenic crossings where star systems were a
few light years apart, thus allowing their passengers to spend as little time
as necessary in fogue. For the Treeship to make the trip to Hyperion and back,
accumulating six years of Web time with no paying passengers would mean a
financial loss to the Templars."
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 11-12
"There is no death in all the universe. No smell of
death, moan, moan, moan, Cybele, moan, for thy pernicious Babes, have changed a
God into a shaking palsy, moan, brethren, moan for I have no strength left;
weak as read-weak-feeble as my voice-Oh no the pain, the pain of feebleness,
moan, moan, for still I throw..."
Martin Silenus
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 16
"I was baptized a Lutheran, a subset which no longer
exists, I helped create a Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born.
I have been a Catholic, a revelationalist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot,
a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a duelspaying subscriber
to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now I am happy to say I am a simple
pagan."
Martin Silenus
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 20
"Among us we represent Islands of time as well as
separate oceans of perspective. Or perhaps more aptly put, each of us may hold
a piece of a puzzle no one has been able to solve since humankind first landed
on Hyperion. It is a mystery, and to tell the truth, I am intrigued by
mysteries even if this is too be my last week of enjoying them. I would welcome
some glamour of understanding but failing that, working on the puzzle will
suffice."
Weintraub
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 21-22
"Father Paul Dure certainly would have become a bishop
and perhaps a pope. Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble
brow and eyes too filled with sharp experience to hide their pain, Paul Dure
was a follower of St. Teilhara as well an archeologist, ethnologist, and
eminent Jesuit theologian. Despite the decline of the Catholic Church into what
amounted into a half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and
isolation from the mainstream Hegemony life, Jesuit logic had not lost its
bite. Nor had Father Dure lost his conviction that the Holy Catholic Apostle
Church continued to be humankind's last best hope for immortality."
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 25-26
"The bishopic on Pacum had not mentioned any history of
Catholicism on Hyperion, much less the presence of a cathedral. It is almost
inconceivable that the scattered seedship colony of four centuries ago could
have supported a large enough congregation to warrant the presence of a bishop,
much less a cathedral."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 33
Father Dure performed a ritual for no reason, and almost
stopped when he saw a woman in his audience. The woman was blind.
"I am tired of this city. I am tired of its pagan
pretensions and false histories. Hyperion is a poet's world devoid of poetry.
Keats itself is a mixture of tawdry, false classicism and mindless, boomtown
energy. There are three Zen Gnostic assemblies and four High Muslim Mosques in
town, but the countless saloons and brothels, the huge marketplaces handling
the fiber plastic shipments from the south and Shreik Cult temples where lost
souls hide their suicidal hopelessness behind a shield of shallow mysticism.
The whole planet wreaks of mysticism without revaluation."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 34
Father Hoyt performed a service for a dying man on the
street.
"Ain't going to be no flame trees this far down. If
there was the forest sure as hell wouldn't look like this. You got to get up in
the Pinions before you see a tesla. We ain't out of the rainforest yet,
Pedre." Old Kady
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 40
Father Hoyt was taken care of by Semfa, but as he was saying
goodbye, he could see she was sad. He blessed her and kissed her on the
forehead.
They see a Phoenix being cooked alive by a massive electric
storm that's taking place on Hyperion.
"The Cleft was not carved out of the rising plateau as
the Legendary Grande Canyon on Old Earth or World Croak on Hebron. In spite of
its active oceans and seemingly Earthlike continents, Hyperion is tectonically
quite dead, more like Mars, Lusus, or Armaghast in total lack of continent
drift. And like Mars and Lusus, Hyperion is afflicted with Deep Ice Ages,
although here the periodicity is spread to thirty-seven years by the long
eclipse of the currently ambient white dwarf."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 46
"Mist rose from the unforeseen rumblings to the rivers
far below, spray raising in shifting curtains of mist to multiply the settling
sun into a dozen violet spheres and twice that many rainbows. I watched as each
spectrum was born, rose toward the darkening dome of the sky and died. As the
cooling air settled into the cracks and caverns of plateau and the warm air
rushed skyward, pulling leaves, twigs, and mist upward in a vertical gale, a
sand ebbed up out of the Cleft as if the continent itself was calling with
voices of stone giants, gigantic bamboo flutes, church organs the size of
palaces. The clear, perfect notes ringing from the shrillest soprano to the
deepest base, and speculated on wind vectors against fluted rock walls. On
caverns far below venting deep cracks in motionless crust, and the illusion
that human voices that random harmonics can generate. But in the end, I set
aside speculation and simply listened as the craft sang its farewell hymn to
the Sun."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 47
They had a data sphere at Pacum to help them communicate.
Tuk, their guide, was killed by bandits in his sleep.
"Even fear fades and becomes commonplace after days of
anticlimax."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 50
"The Zen Gnostics would say that emptiness is a good
sign, that it presages openness to a new level of awareness, new insights, new
experiences."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 51
Father Hoyt met the Bikuru, who were natives to Hyperion.
They carried no weapons, and didn't say a word. They had no facial hair
whatsoever. Their skin was a tad yellower than human skin from the environment.
"The more I learn the less I understand."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 57
Father Paul Hoyt tries to trade with the Bikuru, but they
don't understand and discard the objects, and go back to their talks in their
huts. The trinkets he gives them are littered. They won't let him examine them.
They don't even have recognizable names. They do not eat meat regularly because
of its availability. They haven't been able to hunt, so they eat the dead
animals.
"Each new revaluation adds to my confusion."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 60
The Bikuru kept their population at 70, the same number of
survivors recorded on the Dropship 400 years ago. When someone dies, they
procreate to replace and nothing more. The Bikuru had no more than ten-year age
difference. The Bikuru had no more than a ten-year age difference between them.
"I ran my hand over the deeply cut fold of ornamental
carvings around the door, smooth. Everything had been smoothed and worn by
time, even here, hidden from the elements by the protective lip of the
overhang. How many thousands of years had this...temple... been covered into
the south wall of the Cleft?"
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 67
"Four meters high, three meters wide carved in old
style of the elaborate crucifixes of Old Earth, the cross faced that
stained-glass wall as if awaiting the sun and explosion of light that would
ignite the inlaid diamond, sapphires, blood crystals, lapis beads, queens’
tears, onyxes, and other precious stones that I could make out in the light of
the flash light as I approached."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 68-69
The Bikuru burnt all the fathers’ tapes, notes and com logs
because he accidentally exposed himself.
"There are planetary archaeo-historians who devote
their lives to the study of labyrinths."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 76
"Labyrinthine worlds are always Earthlike, at least 7.9
on the Sol-mev Scale, always circling a G-type star, and yet always restricted
to worlds that are tectonically dead, more like Mars than Old Earth. The
tunnels themselves are set deep--usually a minimum of ten kilometers but often
as deep as thirty--and they catacomb the crust of the planet."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 76
Father Hoyt had met the Shrike and he survived. Now he was treated as a holy man among the
Bikuru. The cruciform which had been implanted in Father Hoyt was his own
creation. The Bikuru are sexless.
"I now understand the reason for faith --pure, blind,
fly-in-the-face of-reason faith as a small life preserver in the wild and
endless sea of the universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to
the small reasoning beings that inhabit it."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 89
The Consul and his party were taken from a bar by a blue
android.
"For more than a century it had been illegal to own
androids on Hegemony and none have been bio factored for about that long, but
they were still used for manual labor in remote parts of the backwater,
non-colony worlds like Hyperion. The Shrike temple had used androids
extensively complying with the church of the Shrike doctrine which proclaimed
that androids were free from original Sin, therefore spiritually superior to
humankind and--incidentally--exempt from the Shrieks terrible and inevitable
retribution."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 113
Fedman Kassad found himself in a simulation, but didn't know
who was real are part of the program.
Again, it was in the final hours of OCS: HTN simulation. By
then Kassad had learned that the exercises were something more than
simulations. The OCS: HTN was part of the World Web. All thing, the real-time
network which governed Hegemony politics, fed information to tens of billions
of data hungry citizens, and had evolved a form of action my and consciousness
all of its own. More than a hundred and fifty planetary data spheres mingled their
resources within the framework. Created by six thousand Omega class AIs to
allow the OCS: HTN to function."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 129
"Qom-Riyadh was by its own choice and the accident of
its distant location, a technologically primitive world. But the inhabitants
were not so primitive. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who led the invasion
so imposed to the "Great Satan of Hegemony Science" that they refused
to lie into the global data net with their personal comlogs."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 135
"The Ousters had been the single external threat to the
Hegemony for the four centuries since the Barbarian Hordes had left the Sol
system in their crude fleet of leaking O'Neil cities, tumbling asteroids and
experimental comet clusters. Even the Ousters acquired the Hawking Drive, it
remained official Hegemony policy to ignore them as long as their swarms stayed
in the darkness between the stars and limited their in-system pondering from
gas giants and water ice to uninhabited moons."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 158
Kassad met Moneta on Hyperion, he had dreams about her
before they met at the city of Poets near the Time Tombs.
"The Time Tides drive the tombs backward through
time."
Hyperion Dan Simmons
Moneta p. 162
"The essence of honor lay in the moment between
equals." Kassad
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 165
Kassad and Moneta used the powers that the Time Tombs gave
them. As they saw a battle, they saw each bloody victim as well as victor.
However, they couldn't do more than defend themselves against the Shrike.
Kassad met Moneta in the past which was his future, because
of the Time Tombs. Kassad and Moneta make love amongst the dead of Hyperion.
Kassad told Hoyt he would kill Moneta the net time he saw her.
They were going to Naiad, but found that it was destroyed
mysteriously. So they were traveling to another city.
"From my earliest sense of self, I know that I would
be--should be-- a poet. It was not as if I had a choice; more like the dying
beauty all around breathed it's last breathed in me, and commanded me that I be
doomed to play with words for the rest of my days, as if in expiation for our
races thoughtless slaughter of its crib world. So, what the hell, I became a
poet."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 182
"Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to
the acrid test of publication is as naïve and harmless as the youthful belief
in one's immortality...and the inevitable disillusionment is just as
painful."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 184
"The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite
language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combination of
perception and memory combined with the sensitivity of what is perceived and
remembered."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 187
"For all our talk of expansion and pioneering spirit we
all know how stultified and our human universe has become. We are in a
comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little,
and that by gradual evolution rather than revaluation; scientific research
creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where it once leapt in great intuitive
bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be
instantly identifiable -- and operable: --to our great-grandfathers."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 187
"Words are the most supreme objects. They are minded
things."
William Gass
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 188
"And so, they are. As pure and transcendent as any
ideas which ever cast a shadow into Plato's dark cave of our perception. But
there are also pitfalls of deceit and misperceptions. Words bend our thinking
to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our
mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack objectivity
distortion of reality which language brings. Example: The Chinese pictogram for
honesty is a two-part symbol of a man standing next to his word."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 188
"Language serves not only to express thought but to
make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."
Bertrand Russell
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 189
"Poets are mad midwives to reality. They see not what
is, nor what can be, but what must become. Words are the only bullets in the truth’s
bandolier. And poets are the snipers.
George Wu
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 189
"Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily it
is about truth."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 190
Mother died using Flashback, a drug that made you
hallucinate. That is why I only used it twice.
"A person constantly busy accessing makes a pitiful
sight in public."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 197
"No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration
one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or
thought processor ordering and expressing revelations flowing from somewhere
else."
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 204-205
"King Billy love and appreciates fine music but cannot
produce it. A connoisseur of ballet and all things graceful, his Highness is a
klutz, a movement of prattfalls and comic bits of clumsiness. A passionate
reader, unnearing poetry critic and patron of forensics, King Billy provides a
stutter in his verbal expression with a shyness which will not allow him to
show his verse or prose to anyone else."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 205
"A perfect mixture of the classical utopia and the
Pagan mystery."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 212
"At first we think the missing are merely absent; there
are no watchers on the walls of our city, no walls actually, no warriors at the
door of our mead hall. Then a husband reports a wife who disappears between the
evening meal and the tucking in of their two children."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 214
"The Shrike is the Lord of Pain and the Angel of Final
Atonement that comes from a place beyond time to announce the end of the human
race."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 221
Martin burned his cantos to save King Billy
"In hopelessness there is always hope."
Het Masteen
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 233
Sol dreamt that he had to kill his daughter Rachel on
Hyperion. He chose to ignore it. Rachel got on a medic ship because she was
aging backwards. Rachel's ex Melio came to visit Sol. Sol asked a bishop of the
Time Tombs for assistance with Rachal's condition, but was denied and told that
she was the chosen one of the non-believers.
"The essence of human experience lay not primarily in
peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory
like dates circled in red in old calendars, but, rather in the unself-conscious
flow of little things-the weekend afternoon with each member of the family
engaged in his or her own pursuits, their crossings and connections casual dialogues
imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was
important and eternal."
Sarai
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 282-283
"After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work
to the story of the ethical system, Sol Weintraub had come to a single,
unshakable, conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal
principle which put obedience above decent behavior towards an innocent human
being was evil."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 290
Sarai died.
"Hope is good, sometimes it is all we're given."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 305
"Cybrids are a different matter. Tailored from human
genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behaviors than
androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the Technocore and the Hegemony
allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 328
"Unlike a human personality which can...I believe the
consciousness is...be destroyed at death, my own consciousness cannot be
terminated. Therefore was, however as a result of the assault, an interruption.
Although I possessed...an... shall we say duplicate recording of memories,
personality, etcetera, there was a loss. Some data was destroyed in the attack.
In that sense, the assailant committed murder."
Johnny
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 329
"AIDS II was a human plague disease long before Hegira.
It disabled the immune system. This virus works the same with AI."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 332
"There are quasi-family arrangements but they share
none of the requirements of emotions or responsibilities that human families
exhibit. AI "families" are primarily convenient code groups for
showing where certain processing trends originated."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 335
“AIs are pursing the evolution of pursuing the evolution of
consciousness on a galactic scale.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 341
Cybrids are being recycled.
“Worrying about AI's turning on us is about as productive as
worrying that Farm animals are going to revolt.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 342
“The persona template becomes self-aware…I don’t mean just
self-aware, like you and me, but self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware
persona—and that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths
that go into Escher-space.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 342
“With the Hawking Drive humankind had explored, colonized
and linked with forecaster worlds across many thousands of light-years. But no
one had tried to reach the exploding Core Sun’s. We had barely crawled out of
one spiral arm The Hercules Cluster.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 366
“May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful,
though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the
alertness of a stout or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is
a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine. By a superior being
our reasoning may take the same tone through enormous they may be fine—This is the
very thing which consists poetry.” Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 370
“The colonies of the world have limited dataspheres. While
there is some contact with the Technocore via transmissions, it's an exchange
of data only…. rather like the first Information Age computer interfaces…. rather
than a flow of consciousness. Hyperion datasphere is primitive to the point of
non-existence. And from what I can access, the core has no access whatsoever
with that world.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 382
“Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave,
A paradise for a sect, the savage too
From froth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at
Heaven; pity these have not Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf, The shadows
of melodious utterance. But bare of laurel they live, dream, and dye; For Poesy
alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet—mayst
not tell thy dreams’? Since every man whose soul is not clod. Hath visions, and
would speak, if he had loved, and been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purposed to release
Be Poet's or Fanatics will be known when this warm scribe my
hand is in the grave.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 363-364
“The Technocore has been divided into three groups for as
long as the core existed. The stables
are the old-line AI, some of them dating back to pre-mistakes days; at least
one of them gained sentience in The First Information Age. The stables argue
that a certain level of symbiosis is necessary between humanity and the Core. They've
project as a way to avoid rash decisions to delay until all variables can be
factored.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 365
Johnny died on Hyperion going to a Shrike Temple with Brawne
to try and make him human. The authorities revoked Brawnie's license and swept
the whole incident under the rug.
“The day is gone, and all are sweet are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hands, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender simple tone,
Bright eyes, accomplished shape and languorous waist!
Faded the flower and all its bedded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms.
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—vanished
unseasonably at shut of eve, when the dusk holiday—or holinight Of fragrant
curtainalace begins to weave the worst of the darkness thick, for hid delights;
But, as I’ve read love's missiles though today,
He'll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
The living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping,
would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So, haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So, in my veins red life might stream again, And though be
conscious—calmed see here it is—I hold it towards you.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 408-409
Brawnie is pregnant with Johnny’s child.
“I think one begins to feel when things aren’t important.
I’m not sure how to put it. When you’ve spent about years entertaining rooms
filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you’ve had half that
number of years experience. You know what the room and people in it probably hold
for you and you go looking for it. If it’s not there, you sense it earlier and
leave to go about your business. You just know more about what is, what isn’t
and how little time there is to learn the difference.” Siri
Hyperion Dan Simmons pp. 431-432
“The Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and
ethics and biosciences and art and all things that must change and grow to
reflect the human soul.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 467
“The Ousters understand time tides, the antientropic fields surrounding
the Tombs. They could not generate such a field, but they could shield against them—theoretically—collapse
them. The Time Tombs and all their content would cease to age backward. The
Tombs would “open.” The Shrike would slip its tether, no longer connected to
the vicinity of the Tombs. Whatever else was inside would now be freed."
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 469
“It no longer matters who considers themselves the master of
events. Events no longer obey their masters.”
Hyperion Dan Simmons p. 470
On their way to the Shrike temple, they started singing “We’re
off to see the Wizard,” from The Wizard of Oz.
