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.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
The Consul plays his ancient piano on his private ship when Meina Gladstone, the CEO of the Hegemony (a political structure composed of the resident and governing bodies of new worlds) contacts him. She tells the Consul (formerly the Hegemony’s lead political appointee for the planet Hyperion) that the Church of the Shrike (a religion dedicated to a powerful entity named the Shrike) and the All Thing (a forum for Hegemony members that works through neural implants) have chosen him to be part of the final pilgrimage. It is the last pilgrimage, as the Time Tombs (six mysterious constructions on Hyperion) are showing signs of opening, and a rebel band of Ousters (genetically modified humans) are preparing an attack to invade Hyperion. The citizens of Hyperion are being evacuated, as not only will the impending interstellar war potentially kill multiple millions, but the terrifying Shrike has been killing people in areas of increasing distance from the Tombs.
One among the seven pilgrims is likely an agent of the Ousters. Gladstone tasks the Consul with finding out who the agent is and preventing the Time Tombs from opening or uncovering its secrets, and those of the Shrike, before they fall into enemy hands.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Priest’s Tale: ‘The Man Who Cried God’”
The seven pilgrims meet aboard the Templar treeship Yggdrasill: Father Lenar Hoyt, a Catholic priest; Fedmahn Kassad, a retired colonel from the Hegemony FORCE; Martin Silenus, a poet; Sol Weintraub, a historian and scholar who is traveling with his infant daughter Rachel; Het Masteen, a Templar Voice of the Tree, or the treeship that they are on; and Brawne Lamia, a private investigator; and the Consul. Only a prime number of pilgrims can make the pilgrimage. As their journey to the Time Tombs will be long, they take turns telling their story for why they believe they were chosen for this Shrike Pilgrimage, which may well result in their deaths.
Lenar Hoyt begins by reading from the journals of Father Paul Duré, a disgraced priest sent to Hyperion as punishment for falsifying archaeological evidence on another planet in order to renew interest in the dying Catholic Church.
Duré decided that his missionary work should be ethnographic, studying the little-known Bikura people who live in a remote area beyond the dangerous flame forests and tesla trees on Hyperion. One morning, he awoke to find his local guide murdered. He soon found the diminutive Bikura, who told him that the guide died the “true death,” and that they spared Duré because he “belongs to the cruciform” (53). Duré interpreted this to mean that the Bikura did not kill him because he was a priest and wore a cross, but in reality the Bikura mistook the priest’s crucifix for the mark of the cruciform—a parasitic organism that inhabits all of the Bikura tribe and can resurrect them after death. The Bikura referred to themselves as the “Three Score and Ten,” as they descended from the first 70 settlers.
Duré lived with the Bikura and began to believe that they were unintelligent. He found them to have a “placid idiocy,” similar to earlier reports (51). In the evenings, the Bikura would descend the cliffs but forbade Duré from following. The priest was perturbed by the fact that there were no Bikura children. One of the Bikura told him that their members “return” after death, which confused Duré.
One day, while the Bikura were out foraging, Duré descended the cliff and discovered a basilica-like room carved out of the stone which appeared to be thousands of years old, pre-dating the Hegira or exodus from Old Earth, and which contained a crucifix on an altar. This discovery had significant implications for the Church, and Duré was anxious to send his findings back to his superiors.
Before he could, however, the Bikura saw him shirtless and realized that the cross he wore was not the mark of the parasitic cruciform. They took him down the cliffs past the basilica to the labyrinth. (Hyperion is one of the nine Earth-like worlds that contain ancient and mysterious labyrinths.) Cross-shaped organic creatures called the cruciform covered the walls and emitted a roseate glow. A tall, silver being called the Shrike approached Duré. The Shrike had four arms, covered with blades, and blood-red gem-like eyes. The Shrike embraced Duré before disappearing.
The Bikura tied one of the cruciform creatures around the priest’s neck, and it ceased to glow. At first, Duré believed that the cruciform had become inactive and was now just like any other crucifix. However, the next day, Duré awoke and was unable to remove the cruciform from his body. The cruciform burrowed in and formed a network within Duré’s body. When Duré tried to leave the Bikura’s territory, the cruciform caused him intense pain to the point of unconsciousness.
One of the Bikura, whom Duré named Alpha, died from a fall while foraging. Duré returned Alpha’s body to the Bikura. He was astonished to discover that when the Bikura die, the cruciform breaks the body down quickly and re-forms it; thus the Bikura never really die, but each new iteration lives a banal half-existence. In his last journal entry, Duré wrote about his intention to escape the Bikura through the flame forest—he planned to hide his journal and research in a protective pouch.
In the present, Hoyt recounts how he returned to Hyperion to find Duré after eight local years. Time debts accrue with space travel, meaning that one doesn’t age as rapidly in space, so it was only one month to Hoyt. Hoyt tells the other pilgrims that the Bikura told him Father Duré died trying to enter the flame forest and that his cruciform was destroyed as well.
Hoyt retires to his cabin, as he is feeling ill. The Consul goes to his room, sees the young priest writhing in pain, and withholds the painkiller injection unless Hoyt tells him the true story.
Hoyt admits that he lied. Father Duré was still alive when Hoyt found him. He had staked himself to a tesla tree that would burn him and the cruciform periodically. He had been in that excruciating state of death and resurrection for seven years. When Hoyt removed the pouch containing Duré’s journal and research, Duré’s cruciform fell off and Duré finally died. The Bikura took Hoyt to the labyrinth, and now he carries both a cruciform of his own and that of Father Duré.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
One of the most important parts of science fiction is world-building, where an author describes not only the physical setting but the sociocultural milieu of the time in which the story is set. The Prologue provides a good portion of that orientation to the novel. In the Prologue, the Consul sits in his spaceship above a swamp with “saurian” creatures while he plays Rachmaninoff on his Steinway piano. These details suggest that the story will feature not only space flight, but planets with other biological beings. The naming of the composer and piano inform the reader that the characters are part of, or at least aware of, Earth’s human culture. This contextualizes them within a history and culture that some readers may identify.
As the Prologue continues, more names and titles appear: the Hegemony, Meina Gladstone, the Church of the Shrike, Home Rule Council. These things are not explained here, but their mention suggests that there are political structures and religious organizations in this world. Simmons avoids an “info-dump,” or explaining upfront all the unknown vocabulary that will be important to know later in the novel, by seeding the terms that will be repeated in fuller context later on. However, Simmons reveals an important part of the plot: Among the seven pilgrims, one is believed to be an agent of the enemy, the Ousters. It is the Consul’s task to prevent whatever comes out of the Time Tombs from falling into their hands. Thus, the stakes of the outer frame story are set.
Chapter 1 presents the main cast. The odd assortment of people, from a priest to a poet and a man with his infant daughter, raises a question: Why were these people chosen? The pilgrims vote to tell their stories to help answer that question for themselves, and given Sol Weintraub’s explanation that “each of us may hold a piece to a puzzle no one else has been able to solve since humankind first landed on Hyperion” (21).
Some, including the Consul and the priest, are somewhat reluctant to do so. Another question is raised: What do the reluctant ones want to keep hidden? This creates tension.
Through Lenar Hoyt’s tale of Father Paul Duré, the novel explores the theme of Religion and Questions of Faith. The tale fits into the mold of a missionary/first contact story, in which someone of a dominant culture explores and interacts with an unknown culture, or little known, as the case is here. Duré is modeled in part on the real-life Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who lived in the first half of the 20th century. Like Duré, Teilhard had been involved in an archaeological finding that proved to be a hoax (the Piltdown Man) and was at odds with the Catholic Church for his ideas about evolution, biology, and the cosmic.
Duré hoped to find something of importance to keep the Catholic Church relevant. However, his discovery of how the Bikura are essentially immortal because of the cruciform is horrific to him. He sees that the resurrected Bikura are soulless, joyless, and insipid. Duré opts to sacrifice himself in penance, realizing that sometimes death is not a great evil but a form of grace. Simmons explains that Duré also acts to preserve what remains of the Church’s sanctity by suffering “a terrible crucifixion, over and over again, rather than allow the cruciform to bring actual resurrection to his Church—preferring the Church based on the promise of Christ rather than to have it thus corrupted by controlling the secret to immortality” (White, Claire E. “A Conversation with Dan Simmons.” Writers Write).
Hoyt reveals that he carries two cruciform only when confronted by the Consul when in extreme pain. The Consul keeps his secret, in part perhaps because it could be dangerous for the others to know that the priest is immortal when they face the Shrike.
