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.
Themes
The Power of Memory
The theme of memory recurs throughout the novel. For example, in Kassad’s story, “Mystery” tells him to call her either Moneta or Mnemosyne. Both of these are goddesses associated with memory, as well as knowledge. Moneta appears in Keats’s poem The Fall of Hyperion as a guide to show the dreaming poet what truth in art means. In later years, Keats wrestled with how the human condition, one of pain and suffering, fit in with beauty, truth, and art. Therefore, his Moneta guides the poet to climb the steps and not turn away from the pain and death he sees there. In a sense, the goddess of memory and knowledge is encouraging him to remember the frailty of humans, to precede with his art with full knowledge that death awaits everyone.
Though Kassad is not the poet, his own Moneta shows him the culmination of his particular art—warfare—in visions of entire worlds dying violently. She recalls for him his violent way of life prior to taking up the New Bushido code. The significance of her name becomes more apparent in the sequel The Fall of Hyperion (1989) when she reveals her true identity.
Sol Weintraub’s story is an inversion of memory. From Chapter 4’s subtitle “River Lethe’s Taste is Bitter,” the reader is cued to the concept of forgetting, as the River Lethe, in the Greek underworld, is that of forgetfulness. Both Sol and Rachel work in fields that pertain to remembering or rediscovering what has been forgotten: history and archaeology. After Rachel’s singular experience in the Time Tombs, she and everyone around her work hard to help her remember. On a daily basis, Sol and Sarai remind her of where she is, how she got there, and other aspects of her life that she is starting to lose.
Rachel makes a recording for herself that she watches daily for several years. Each time she watches it, however, she is flooded with sorrow for what she has forgotten and horror about what she is going to lose. Rachel is poised “on the breaking crest of the wave of time, not seeing the murky depths of the sea beyond, keeping her balance with her small store of memories and a total commitment to the twelve to fifteen hours of now allowed her each day” (283). When eventually that becomes too much, she gives herself over to the River Lethe, to forgetting, as a way to avoid the pain that comes with the knowledge of her condition.
Issues of memory appear in more subtle ways in the other pilgrims’ tales. Hoyt’s tale is not so much his own story but that of Father Paul Duré, whose experiences and thoughts are recalled in the journals he kept. Similarly, the subtitle of the Consul’s story, “Remembering Siri,” largely concerns memories of his grandparents. In his case, the issue of memory concerns what a person does to honor the memory of a deceased loved one. Both Merin Aspic and the Consul took their memory of Siri and turned it into violent rebellion and sabotage. Additionally, Johnny, cybrid of John Keats, was created from the memories of the poet. Unlike Keats, or any other real human, Johnny possesses memories of his (John Keats’s) painful death. In essence, he remembers what a person would forget or never know at all.
Religion and Questions of Faith
Several organized religious or faith-based groups, new and old, appear in Hyperion. The characters who are part of or interact with these faiths raise questions about the origins or relevance of theologies and their impact on humanity.
Father Hoyt is a young Catholic priest. However, Catholicism in the novel is not the same Catholicism of today but a “half-forgotten cult tolerated because of its quaintness and isolation from the mainstream of Hegemony life” (25). Catholics, or at least the Catholic Church hierarchy, live on the world of Pacem. However, Jesuits, a subset of Catholic clerics, travel widely and are still doing missionary work on worlds throughout the Web and beyond. Father Duré firmly believed that the “Holy Catholic Apostolic Church continued to be humankind’s last, best hope for immortality” (25). When he found immortality in the cruciform, he realized the cruciform was a powerful yet corrupted idea of resurrection. Even prior to that, Duré had doubts about the role of the Catholic Church. He wondered about his falsifying of archaeological artifacts: “Was it so dark a sin to interpret such ambiguous data in a way which could have meant the resurgence of Christianity in our lifetime?” (36).
Finding the millennia-old basilica renews his enthusiasm for the preservation of the Church. After learning of the cruciform, he comes to “understand the need for faith—pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith—as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it” (89). However, he also realizes that immortality of the person or the Church via the cruciform is “not a rebirth but only a transition to a false life such as these poor walking corpses inhabit. If the Church is meant to die, it must do so” (89). Death is not the enemy; it is part of nature and the human condition, and only with death can new things grow.
Raised as a secular Jewish individual, Sol Weintraub’s relationship to Judaism is largely cultural and philosophical. When asked if he believes in God, his response has long been: “I’m waiting to” (250). His hopeful openness to belief changes once Rachel develops so-called Merlin’s disease and he starts having dreams where a voice compels him to sacrifice her as a burnt offering on Hyperion. He recalls the Old Testament story of Abraham, whom God calls on to sacrifice his son Isaac, and becomes more skeptical of an ethical system “which began with the order to a father to slay his son” (274).
Sarai argues that God would not have allowed the sacrifice but only wanted to test Abraham’s obedience. Sol finds that even more troubling that Abraham should be the basis of any religion: “A mere show of obedience without inner commitment would not have appeased the God of Genesis” (275). He feels that Abrahamic religions were founded on someone who would have willingly killed his own child. Sol adamantly refuses to do the same to Rachel, nor will he sacrifice himself in her stead, as he will no longer place any deity “above decent behavior toward an innocent human” (290).
Other religions have significance in the story. The Shrike Temple, known as the Church of the Final Atonement to its followers, seems an unlikely creation, as the Shrike is known as a merciless killing monster with a Tree of Pain. Kindness and love do not seem to have a place in the religion’s dogma, yet there are temples on many planets, and people have pilgrimaged to the Time Tombs in hopes of making a request of the Shrike for many decades.
The emergence of the Shrike cult asks readers to question how and why religions form and what they offer adherents. Many of the pilgrims are called “suicides” because rarely do any survive. However, followers of the Shrike cult believe firmly in atonement, making up for sins and crimes, which is a feature of many real-world religions. In addition, pain and violence are often parts of religious origins, such as God’s request of Abraham and the crucifixion of Jesus.
Another religion that is not fully described is that of the Templars, with their Voice of the Tree and the Book of Muir. The foundations of their faith spring from the writings and work of ecological philosopher and naturalist John Muir, a naturalist and real-life historical figure who lived in the 19th to early 20th century and helped preserve national parks. Though the reader is not given much information on the religion’s creed, the centrality of trees and the reference to Muir make it clear that it is environmentally based.
Atonement and Redemption
The difference between atonement and redemption is slight but significant. To atone means to make up for sins and wrongdoings, to repair what was broken by a misdeed. To redeem, or to be redeemed, is to be saved from sin or error, sometimes by a penitential action. Both concepts matter to the stories in this novel.
The cult established around the Shrike calls itself the Church of the Final Atonement. The Pain Lord, as the Shrike is known, impales its victims and sacrifices upon the thorns of its Tree of Pain. However, the methodology behind this is not clear—who deserves to be impaled and for which offenses? The bishop of the Shrike Temple informs Sol that Rachel “has been chosen by the Avatar to atone in a way which all sinners and nonbelievers must someday suffer” (281). He does not say for what Rachel is atoning, though it is possible that the bishop considers intrusions into the Time Tombs for the purposes of research to be a type of desecration, as the Shrike Temple lobbied for research in the area to be banned after Rachel’s incident. This type of atonement is more akin to punishment, for those atoning have little recourse for action once the Strike has chosen them. In fact, Sol’s research into the church’s dogma reveals that the Shrike is also known as “the Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time” (267). This shows that the Shrike is more an instrument of punishment than of forgiveness or redemption.
Other characters seek to atone or redeem themselves in the novel. Father Duré, imbued in the Catholic doctrine of penance, is sent to Hyperion to atone for his sins of falsifying data. He accepts the difficulties of travel to where the Bikura live as part of his penance. The discovery of the basilica presents itself as opportunity to atone for his past misdeeds and save the dying Church until he realizes what the cruciform does. At that point, he gives himself up as a sacrifice to save the world from false immortality. Colonel Kassad also tries to atone for his past misdeeds, which in his case was brutal warfare. Seeing visions of the interstellar war, he concludes that he can no longer be an instrument of violence, a bringer of death. His mission on the pilgrimage is not to beseech the Shrike but to kill it and Moneta, his final act of violence to save worlds.
The Consul does not seek atonement but is, perhaps, hoping that his actions will redeem him in the eyes of his grandmother Siri and others who fought against the Hegemony. Acting as double or triple agent, he allowed worlds to be desecrated and indigenous entities destroyed or suppressed. His motivation in life was vengeance against the Hegemony and the Ousters. Though he does not know what the Time Tombs will unleash, he is willing to do whatever either group does not want him to. Having set events in motion and having revealed his story, the Consul has reached the end of his life’s plan and merely awaits his verdict.
