52 pages • 1 hour read
Dan SimmonsHyperion
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Soldier’s Tale: ‘The War Lovers’”
The pilgrims arrive in Keats, Hyperion’s capital. The Consul meets his former aide Theo who is now the Governor-General of Hyperion, the newest world in the Hegemony. Theo reports that there have been over 20,000 deaths and disappearances attributed to the Shrike, and many of them have been the Self-Defense Force. The Hegemony’s FORCE has only served to control the mobs of people trying to flee to safety.
Theo shows them the ruins of the Shrike Temple, which was recently destroyed by people angry with the Shrike cultists. After Theo departs, the pilgrims go to a bar but are quickly escorted onto the river barge Benares by an android. The former soldier, Fedmahn Kassad, then tells his tale.
Fedmahn Kassad, a member of the Palestinian diaspora, grew up in a poor and violent neighborhood. As a teenager, he joined the FORCE military when given a choice by a judge. He realized that he enjoyed the orderliness of military life, especially the New Bushido code, which is based on the principles of Japan’s samurai and center on self-respect, duty, and honor. During a war simulation at the Olympus Command School: Historical Tactical Network, he was cornered by an enemy in a simulation of the 1415 Battle of Agincourt.
Suddenly, a beautiful young woman appeared. Together they killed the enemy, after which they made love. The woman appeared in other simulations with similar endings—they kill the enemy, then have sex. An obsessed Kassad didn’t know whether she was real or part of the simulations. He would dream of her, too.
Kassad’s military career kept rising and he was put in a leadership position when the Ousters attacked Bressia. He became known as “the Butcher of South Bressia” (13). Some people wanted him court-martialed while others viewed him as a hero. After suffering a serious injury days after the war, he awoke on a medical ship bound for Hyperion just as it was attacked by Ousters. He managed to escape in a small Ouster pod as it tumbled to the planet and regained consciousness on Hyperion in the City of Poets, with the woman he called “Mystery” tending to him. She told him her name was Moneta or Mnemosyne, and that their meeting was in her past and his future because the Time Tombs were moving backward in time.
She took him to see the Pain Lord, the Shrike. Kassad saw the huge, silver tree of thorns upon which the Shrike’s victims writhe. Covered in a special forcefield that manipulates time, the two followed the Shrike to where the two Ousters landed in pursuit of Kassad. By slowing and stopping time, the trio was able to kill most of the Ousters with ease. Kassad was initially disturbed by the unfairness of this, as it did not align with the code of the New Bushido, but he gave in to his bloodlust. Afterward, as Moneta made love to him, he had visions of wars and “the death of worlds” (170). Then Moneta partially turned into the Shrike. He fled in terror and was found by Hyperion’s Self-Defense Force a while later. He resigned from the military and became involved in antiwar movements.
Kassad’s story raises questions with the other pilgrims, such as whether it is known that the Shrike can shapeshift. The Consul asks Kassad if he saw any of the pilgrims on the tree of thorns. He did, but he refuses to tell them who he saw. He believes that he is meant to play a part in starting the interstellar war of which he had visions. When asked what he will petition the Shrike for, he responds that he will not petition but will kill him and Moneta.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Through Kassad, Simmons explores the theme of Atonement and Redemption. In the military, Young Kassad finds salvation from his rough early life as well as order and purpose. Instead of the mindless or self-appeasing violence in which he partook at home, he can see himself as a noble warrior, a brave defender. The New Bushido code “combined the age-old concepts of honor and individual courage with the need to spare civilians whenever possible” (137). Nuclear weapons and other large-scale killing devices are not used except in extreme circumstances, and fighting is meant to be exclusively between professional forces whenever possible. However, Kassad’s training in the simulations is bloody and uncompromising.
Fedmahn Kassad’s tale inverts classic stories of knights and courtly love. In a courtly tale, Kassad would be the knight rescuing a fair maiden; however, in his encounters with Moneta, she saves him or, at the very least, assists in his military victories.
The subtitle of his tale “The War Lovers” has two meanings: lovers during a war and lovers of war. The sexual nature of their encounters right after battle suggests that, in unleashing his violent war abilities, Kassad is tapping into something more primal and animalistic. The twining of sex and death is a common occurrence across cultures and times. Sex is progenitive, death destructive, but both are supremely intimate and physical.
Kassad initially feels that slowing and stopping time is cheating. He believes that their fighting with the Ousters is “wrong […] the ultimate violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than the wanton murder of civilians. The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals” (165). However, he responds when time resumes its pace. When he sees Moneta, naked under her forcefield, his bloodlust surges and he is fully engaged in the time-manipulated fighting.
Moneta/Mnemosyne, which are names for goddesses of memory and knowledge, shows Kassad visions of an interstellar war. The story in John Keats’s epic poem The Fall of Hyperion has Moneta instructing a poet to embrace pain and suffering before showing him a vision of the fallen Titans, or elder gods. Moneta of Simmons’s novel, however, does not want Kassad merely to accept pain and violence for art’s sake, but to be an actor and agent of it, a party to the destruction of entire worlds.
Kassad’s horror at the visions taps into his previous discomfort with the lopsided skirmish with the Ousters, and he flees from this mysterious woman he has loved for years. In resigning from the military and taking up antiwar causes, Kassad may hope to prevent the future he witnessed by being an agent of peace instead of war. The impending Ouster invasion of Hyperion could well be the start of that interstellar war.
