The Hyperion Chants

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The Hyperion Chants is an anthology and includes the two novels Hyperion (published 1989 ) and The Fall of Hyperion (published 1990 ) by Dan Simmons (English original title of the novels: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion ). The two novels are also 1991 as Hyperion and 1993 as the end of Hyperion in Heyne Verlag published. They were first published as an anthology in Germany in 2002. Within science fiction literature, Die Hyperion-Gesänge is assigned to the genre of space opera to.

content

subjects

According to the Greek legend, Hyperion is one of the titans. The Hyperion songs take on a wide variety of topics on over 1400 pages: gods and religions , philosophy and poetry , ethics and morals , artificial intelligences , globalization , ecology and time travel within the framework of an interstellar society. By combining elements of tension, such as space and ground battles, combined with emotional topics, Simmons combines a wide variety of elements into a science fiction vision.

The sacrifice of Isaac , the meaning of God in a secular world and the life and work of the English poet John Keats are questioned . The backward aging process of a person, reminiscent of the short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald , is also thematized in a secondary line.

Sociopolitical and technological framework

A failed scientific experiment ( the big mistake of Kiev ) destroyed the earth in an artificially created black hole . Humanity has fled into space. Most of the newly settled planets by the Government of hegemony dominated by AIs is advised, called Techno Core. These artificial intelligences include the builders and operators of the farcaster network (holes punched in the space-time structure for the real-time transport of people and goods between the solar systems) and the inventor of the fatline (a transmission medium that enables communication over any distance in real time).

The edges of the hegemony and the empty spaces between the systems populate the Ousters (Entheber). They are organized in so-called swarms, a collection of hundreds to thousands of spaceships of different functions and designs. The Ousters are people who left the earth before the big mistake and, with the help of genetic manipulation and nanotechnology , have adapted to the inhospitable conditions of a life in weightlessness between the stars. They are viewed as enemies by the government of hegemony and TechnoCore.

Problem

The TechnoCore has set itself the task of developing a kind of God, in its terminology, a Supreme Intelligence (short: HI). This requires the calculability of all variables of the cosmic context. They are well advanced along this path. TechnoCore's guides are almost infallible when it comes to predicting future developments. However, no matter how hard the AIs try, one variable remains indeterminable: the outback world Hyperion . Located outside the sphere of influence of the hegemony, it threatens the security of the hegemonic construct with the mysterious time graves and the monstrous Shrike.

In the meantime this nuisance has become virulent. There are signs that the Time Tombs are opening, and the Shrike has left its ancestral domains and is terrorizing the entire planet. As if that weren't enough, a huge swarm of the Ousters is located on the approach to Hyperion.

Options for action

To ward off the threatening Ouster invasion, the hegemonic fleet sends a task force to Hyperion to install a military farcaster. Since it is uncertain whether this force will arrive in the system in time, Prime Minister Meina Gladstone activated a second option.

The tradition of pilgrimages to the Shrike has existed for centuries. A prime number of pilgrims (mostly 7) go on this journey and all but one perish. The Shrike supposedly grants the survivor a wish. On this basis, and with the approval of TechnoCore and the All-Being (an intelligent, interstellar communication network that determines and expresses the will of the people), the government of hegemony sends seven chosen pilgrims to Hyperion. One last attempt to get, if not control, at least updated information on what was going on on Hyperion.

Part one: Hyperion

Between the prologue and an epilogue, the story of Hyperion spans six chapters and 667 pages. The formal narrative period is seven days, the time it takes pilgrims to travel from the capital to the time graves in the Shrike's domain. This trip takes place in several stages and is quite monotonous. During this period, the pilgrims tell each other their story or the story of the events that motivated them to take part in the pilgrimage.

Each of the six pilgrimage stories (the seventh pilgrim, Het Masteen, is lost on the way) offers enough material for a novel of its own. They are the heart of the book and in fact cover the last 50 years of hegemony. They can be read as a historical outline of this epoch. The arrival of the pilgrims in the Valley of the Time Tombs marks the end of the first part.

Part Two: The Fall of Hyperion

The Hyperion update comprises 750 pages and is divided into three parts and an epilogue. The story begins with the activation of the military farcaster in the Hyperion system. The departure of the fleet, which marks the official start of the war between the hegemony and the Ousters, is celebrated throughout the hegemony.

This second volume is told from two perspectives. One is that of the cybric Joseph Severn, a personality artificially created by TechnoCore. The other view is that of the hegemonic president, Meina Gladstone.

The cybrid perspective fulfills several functions. Historically, Severn was the best friend of John Keats , who nursed him in Rome until his early death. In the novel, he dreams of the dreams of the cybrid John Keats who preceded him, whose personality is currently stored in a Schrön loop in the consciousness of his lover Brawne Lamia. Seen in this light, Severn spies on the pilgrims on Hyperion for TechnoCore and for President Meina Gladstone. Last but not least, Joseph Severn is a perfect alter ego for the author as a participant observer.

President Meina Gladstone's point of view reveals the true motives and plans of TechnoCore to the reader as the novel progresses. It becomes clear that the current war against the Ousters is the result of a Core conspiracy. Its aim is either to destroy humanity completely, or to make it finally mental slaves in the service of universal computing power.

While the pilgrims on Hyperion wait for the Shrike to arrive, Meina Gladstone fights her own battle full of cunning, trickery and secret plans at the Tau Ceti Center, the seat of government.

Simmons enriches the plot intensively with religious, esoteric and philosophical elements. In its attempts to create a god-like “supreme intelligence”, the TechnoCore must finally find that its HI has to compete with a triune human deity - apparently rather accidentally arising from the collective consciousness of mankind in the distant future. Here Simmons ties in with Teilhard de Chardin's ideas . As a result, both parties try to gain advantage through more or less subtle manipulations of the future, their timeline in the past. The time graves as well as the shrike ultimately turn out to be instruments with which the future deities try to gain the upper hand.

With Meina Gladstone's order to destroy the Farcaster portals, which were identified as the seat of TechnoCore, the existence of hegemony and the novel come to an end. In the epilogue, the narrative threads of the individual pilgrims and also of the president are concluded.

characters

The main characters are, on the one hand, the seven pilgrims:

  • Het Masteen, Knights Templar and captain of the tree ship Yggdrasil
  • Martin Silenus, poet
  • Lenar Hoyt, Father and Paul Dure, Father both wear a parasitic cruciform that makes them almost immortal
  • Sol Weintraub, the historian-classicist-philosopher, a specialist in ethics and protector of his reverse aging daughter Rachel
  • The consul, former planetary governor of the planet Hyperion, secretly sympathizes with the Ousters
  • Fedmahn Kassad, Retired Colonel from FORCE: Space, a Military Legend
  • Brawne Lamia, private detective, lover of the cybrid John Keats, wears his personality in a loop

Other important figures:

  • the Shrike, monstrous warfare from the future, in the book of followers of the Lord of the pain and the Church of the Shrike the avatar called
  • Meina Gladstone, the President of the Hegemony
  • the two AI personality reconstructions (= cybrids) of the poet John Keats called Johnny and his friend, the painter Joseph Severn

Prices

The novel Hyperion won the following awards:

literature

Softcover editions
Hardcover editions
Secondary literature

An audio book version of the Hyperion and Endymion cycle was written by Detlef Bierstedt and was published by Audible in 2008 .

continuation

The novels Endymion - Gates of Time and Endymion - The Resurrection , which were published in German by Goldmann Verlag in 1997 and 1999, are an update of the Hyperion chants . An anthology was published under the title Endymion in 2003 by Blanvalet Verlag , today by Heyne Verlag .

filming

In mid-2015, Syfy announced that it would implement several SF classics as mini-series, including Hyperion together with Bradley Cooper .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Max Tedaldi: Hyperion is coming. Retrieved June 10, 2015 .