A Cautious Trip to "Hyperion", by Dan Simmons Quiz

Answer: The Hegemony of Man

The Hegemony of Man is the ruling body at the heart of world-building in the "Hyperion Cantos". It binds together hundreds of human worlds through a network of political alliances, commerce, and the almost magical farcaster portals. Step through one doorway and you're on another planet in an instant. It makes commuting very easy, but it certainly doesn't play nice with physics.

The first novel in the Cantos, "Hyperion", models itself a bit after Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", with seven pilgrims traveling to the planet Hyperion and retelling their different stories along the way. It allows the blending of many disparate genres and incompatible storylines that somehow manage to paint a rich image of the world Simmons has created.

Answer: Fedmahn Kassad

While none of the tales told by the pilgrims are without their oddities, Fedmahn Kassad's tale is very strange indeed. A brilliant military officer, Kassad first encounters Moneta in a battle simulation during his youth. She appears again and again throughout his life, seemingly always connected to moments of conflict and destiny.

As Kassad finds himself on Hyperion, he meets his mystery woman and learns that his story goes beyond conventional history. Their timelines are in opposition. That is, she is moving backwards through time relative to him, getting younger every time they meet. Moneta's story and her very identity remain one of the great mysteries of the novel, although later books begin to explore her connection to the Time Tomb and the Shrike.

Answer: They appear to move backward through time

The Time Tombs are among the biggest mysteries in "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. Wrapped in anti-entropic fields, they appear to move backward through time relative to the rest of the universe. That fun effect means that the artifacts are gradually renewing rather than decaying from the perspective of the characters. Nobody fully understands how they work, and that's part of the intrigue.

The Hegemony, the TechnoCore, and numerous religious and political factions all have theories, but the mystery behind the fields is a tough nut to crack. The tombs are also home to the Shrike, a strange and horrifyingly deadly being whose relationship to time is every bit as mysterious as the structures themselves.

Answer: The Ousters

The Ousters are dismissed by the Hegemony as little more than dangerous barbarians lurking beyond the borders of "civilized" space. The Ousters are aiming to change that. They're descended from humans who chose not to live under Hegemony rule, and they've spent generations adapting both themselves and their technology for life in deep space. Genetic engineering, artificial evolution, and biotechnology allow many Ousters to thrive without setting foot on a planet for years.

They're a loose collection of clans and "swarms" with their own cultures and priorities.

Answer: Brawne Lamia

When you're reading an epic space opera, you don't expect to encounter a detective story/romance, but that is exactly how Brawne Lamia's tale begins. She's a tough private investigator on Lusus who is hired by John Keats - Johnny. Johnny is a cybrid, an artificial intelligence in a biological body, based on nineteenth-century poet John Keats. Before long, people are dead, conspiracies are unfolding, and Johnny is caught in the middle of events that reach all the way into the mysterious TechnoCore.

The noir-ness of her tale gives it a very different flavor from the other pilgrims' accounts. Rainy streets. Dangerous clients. Existential questions.

Answer: The cruciform

The cruciform is one of the more unsettling ideas in "Hyperion", a book full of unsettling ideas. Introduced in Father Lenar Hoyt's account of Father Paul Dure, it's basically a small, cross-shaped parasite that attaches itself to a person's chest. Death becomes no longer a permanent state.

Instead, the host is resurrected again and again. Sounds kind of cool at first. It definitely isn't. Each resurrection takes a psychological and physical toll, gradually eroding memory, intellect, and identity until the person becomes a shadow of who they were. And then of course, a person "infected" can no longer leave the area around the Flame Forests of Hyperion without suffering excruciating pain.

Answer: The Shrike

The Shrike is the horrifying and deadly beast of Hyperion's Time Tombs. A towering, metallic creature covered in razor-sharp blades, the Shrike appears and disappears without warning. It very much is unconstrained by the ordinary flow of time. The legends surrounding the Shrike are wildly contradictory.

Some worship it as a god. Others fear it as an unstoppable executioner. Some manage to do both at the same time. Most sensible people simply try to stay as far away from it as possible. The pilgrims journey to the Time Tombs in part because each believes the Shrike may grant a single request at the cost of the other six.

Answer: Poet

Martin Silenus is one of the seven pilgrims traveling to Hyperion. Depending on who you ask, he's either the perfect stereotype of a poet or about as far away from that stereotype as you can get. In either case, he is certainly not a dignified literary figure: profane, egotistical, usually intoxicated. Nevertheless, he's regarded as one of humanity's greatest poets. His life's obsession is a work called the "Hyperion Cantos", a poem so epic that it consumes decades of his life and repeatedly drives him to abject despair. It also may be the cause of everything that's happening.

He has moments of genuine brilliance sandwiched between outrageous insults and spectacularly bad behavior. It's an entertaining combination.

Answer: Farcasters

Farcasters are the technological oddities that hold the Hegemony of Man together and the scientifically questionable invention that makes the book possible. These portals connect distant planets so completely that a person can walk through a doorway on one world and emerge on another light-years away in the blink of an eye. No spaceship required. No relativistic effects. Fees may apply.

Entire houses are built with rooms scattered across different planets, and some rivers even flow through farcaster portals from one world to the next. It's a bizarre concept that Simmons explores with pretty obvious enjoyment.

Answer: She is aging backward in time

Rachel Weintraub's fate is one of the most heartbreaking stories in "Hyperion" and the only reason I picked up the sequel. ("I have to know what happens to Rachel!") After exploring the Time Tombs as an archaeologist, Rachel returns afflicted with the mysterious Merlin sickness.

Instead of growing older, Rachel begins aging backward one day at a time. Each morning she awakens physically and mentally one day younger than before, gradually losing her memories and experiences in reverse order. Her father, Sol Weintraub, travels to Hyperion with Rachel, now an infant, in desperation more than faith.

As the second book opens, she is only a few days old. No pressure.