Seven Strangers, One Monster, Zero Ending

The pitch is Canterbury Tales, except the shrine wants to kill you

Here’s the setup, and it’s genuinely great. Seven pilgrims are traveling to the world of Hyperion, to the Time Tombs, where a creature called the Shrike waits. The Shrike is a four-armed thing made of blades and mirrors, and it is not a metaphor for death so much as death that got bored and decided to freelance. On this pilgrimage, tradition says the Shrike grants one traveler a wish and impales the rest on a giant metal tree of thorns. So: not a fun trip.

To pass the time, each pilgrim tells their story. Why they’re going. What they want from a death-god.

That’s the whole book. Seven stories, one frame, and the slow horrible dawning that these seven lives are secretly braided together in ways nobody at the table understands yet. Simmons stole the skeleton from Chaucer and I do not care even slightly, because he does something with it Chaucer never could: he changes genre every single tale. Bear with me here, because this is the part I want to sell you on.

The tales are wildly uneven, and that’s kind of the point

The Priest’s Tale opens the book, and it is a horror story. Full stop. A missionary finds a jungle tribe kept alive by a parasitic cruciform that resurrects them, badly, forever, and I read the last few pages of it standing up in my kitchen because I couldn’t sit still. It is one of the most disturbing things I have read in any genre. If Simmons had opened with something softer I might have bounced off. Instead he grabs your collar in chapter one.

Then the Soldier’s Tale is basically a violent, weird war romance. The Poet’s Tale is a foul-mouthed satire about a hack writer that made me laugh and also drags in the middle. And then you hit the Scholar’s Tale, and I have to talk about it, because it’s the reason the whole book earns its reputation.

The Scholar’s daughter, Rachel, contracts a disease from the Time Tombs that runs her backward through time. Every day she wakes up younger, remembering less, until she’s a toddler, then an infant, and her parents have to raise her in reverse, saying goodbye by watching her un-become. It’s Merlin’s sickness, and it is the saddest thing in a book absolutely stuffed with sad things. I read the Scholar’s Tale on a train and had to look out the window and pretend something was in my eye. I don’t cry at books much. I cried at that.

Now, the honest criticism, because I promised I’d give you one. The seven tales don’t hold equal weight, and the seams show. The Detective’s Tale, a noir cyberpunk thing involving a reconstructed personality of the poet John Keats (Simmons is obsessed with Keats, the whole book is soaked in him), is clever but it’s the one where I felt the machinery grinding. It reads like Simmons proving he can do Raymond Chandler too, and yeah, buddy, we get it, you can write anything. It’s the tale I’d cut first. And the Consul’s Tale at the end lands emotionally but arrives after your patience has already been taxed.

Which brings me to the thing everyone warns you about, and it’s real: this is not a novel. It’s a story cycle with a plot that never resolves. The pilgrims reach the valley. They link arms. They walk toward the Tombs, singing, and the book ENDS. You have to read the sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, to get anything resembling a conclusion, and honestly the two books are one book that got cut in half by physics and 1989 binding costs. If you go in expecting a complete arc you will throw this across the room.

So do I actually think it’s a 4.5, or am I just dazzled by how smart it is? Let me question my own taste for a second. Because there’s a version of me that’s a sucker for structural showing-off, for the guy who can do seven genres in one book, and I have to ask whether I’m grading the ambition instead of the experience. Honestly? A little. The Detective’s Tale bored me and I still rounded up. But then I remember the cruciform, and Rachel aging backward, and the Shrike standing silent at the edge of every scene, and no, I don’t think I’m being generous. I think the highs are so high they carry the drag.

The Shrike isn’t a villain you can fight or understand. It’s what waits at the end of every pilgrimage, and the horror is that you walked there on purpose.

About Dan Simmons

Simmons was a schoolteacher in Colorado before he was a novelist, which I find genuinely funny, because the man writes like someone who read every book in the library and decided he’d out-do all of them at once. He’s a shameless genre-hopper: horror (Carrion Comfort, Song of Kali), historical dread (The Terror, later made into a very good TV show), hard SF, thrillers. Hyperion is where his magpie brain paid off best, because a book built out of seven genres needs a writer who’s fluent in all of them. He’s also, it should be said, a writer whose later public opinions have soured a lot of longtime fans, which is its own separate conversation. The Hyperion books remain the peak, and you can grab them and judge for yourself over on Amazon.

If this wrecked you, read these next

• The Fall of Hyperion (Dan Simmons) — not optional, this is literally the second half of the story you just started.
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr.) — if the Priest’s Tale and its dark religious ache got under your skin, this one lives there.
• The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin) — for anyone who wants SF that’s really about people, told with the same emotional patience as the Scholar’s Tale.
• Book of the New Sun (Gene Wolfe) — if you loved being a little lost and trusting the writer to know where the pieces go, Wolfe is the deep end of that pool.

For your book club

1. Which pilgrim’s tale hit you hardest, and does that say more about the tale or about you?
2. The Shrike is never really explained in this book. Did the mystery work for you, or did you want answers?
3. Simmons frames everything with the poet John Keats. If you caught the references, did they add anything, or feel like homework?
4. The Scholar’s Tale deals with losing a child you can’t save. Is it manipulative, or earned?
5. Does ending on a cliffhanger make Hyperion a bold structural choice or an incomplete book? Defend your answer.

Go read it. Just… buy the second one at the same time. Trust me on this one.