Hyperion

The Benares barge arrives at the port city of Naiad to find a charred ruin where there had once been a thriving city of 20,000. The Consul believes the SDF (Self-Defense Force) caused the damage, probably in fighting against the Shrike. He has been drinking all day, as has Martin Silenus, to distance himself from painful memories. Silenus tells his tale.

Martin Silenus arrived on Hyperion two centuries previously with Sad King Billy and many other artists who were part of the Windsor-in-Exile artistic colony on Asquith (Windsor-in-Exile being the official Hyperion government). At that time, the planet had already been “seeded” with the descendants of people who arrived two centuries earlier and had “gone indigenie.” Sad King Billy and the cohort of artists suppressed these existing occupants and forced them to work alongside their androids to build the City of Poets.

Silenus restarts his tale with the story of his origins and how he came to Hyperion. He was born on Old Earth to a wealthy family that stayed behind when most of the planet fled during the Hegira. As the cataclysms on Old Earth worsened, his mother put him on a slower-than-light ship bound for the planet Heaven’s Gate, hoping that when he awakened from cryogenic fugue 167 years later, the money in an off-world bank would have accrued enough interest to pay off the family’s debts and allow Martin to live well.

That, however, did not occur. Silenus had a stroke from the fugue that limited his vocabulary to nine curse words. He wound up laboring in the slop canals. There he claims he became a poet, as his mind was liberated and he had to confront the painful reality of life for millions. As he recovered, the words came back to him and he started writing poetry about his life and the dying of Old Earth. One day he was attacked by a bully who scattered the pages of his manuscript. However, the wife of a local manager saw the attack and gathered the papers before taking Silenus to the hospital. She read the manuscript and sent it to someone she knew with connections to the publishing world. The editor titled the book The Dying Earth and removed most of the philosophical, personal, and experimental parts of it, instead focusing on the final days of the planet. It sold billions of copies, making Silenus very wealthy.

The woman who found him divorced her husband and married Silenus. Together they lived a posh life of traveling all around the Web and taking fashionable drugs. Increasingly, though, his wife’s use of the Flashback drug, which enables one to viscerally relive memories, put a distance between them. He had stopped using it after his second try when he flashed back to a memory when he was four and found his mother unresponsive while on Flashback.

Silenus pushed to have his Cantos published. Tyrena, Silenus’s editor, had declared his poetry to be beautiful but completely unsellable. She was right, and Silenus owed a large debt to the publishing company for the advance, which he made up for by writing sequels to his first book called The Chronicles of the Dying Earth. These were very popular but he did not enjoy them, for he saw them as trite, sensationalistic claptrap. After the ninth book, he quit and moved to Asquith to join Sad King Billy, who became his friend.

For years, Silenus struggled with writing and felt his muse had left him. When he moved to Hyperion, he had himself bioengineered to look like a satyr, part man and part horse, and gave in to his hedonistic impulses. Silenus continued to struggle and began to contemplate death by suicide.

Then, people started disappearing from the City of Poets. Then, instead of disappearing, people were found slaughtered. All of the residents of the City of Poets fled, fearing the Shrike was behind the murders, but Silenus remained because his muse had returned and he was writing again—this time about the death of humanity. Silenus removed the satyr alterations.

One night the Sad King Billy visited him and implored him to stop writing his Hyperion Cantos because he believed it had somehow conjured the Shrike, who had become Silenus’s muse. The king started to burn the manuscript when the Shrike appeared and attacked him. Silenus set fire to both the papers and the king in the Shrike’s arms. After, Silenus stayed some time in the abandoned City of Poets—he is not sure how long because he lost touch with reality. Eventually, he left Hyperion, determined to finish the poem he was working on.