Hyperion

Hyperion is a science fiction novel by the American author Dan Simmons, published in 1989. It opens the Hyperion Cantos and took the Hugo Award for best novel, and its structure comes from The Canterbury Tales: a framing narrative carries the tales of a group of pilgrims. The Fall of Hyperion, from 1990, carries the story on.

Seven pilgrims are travelling to the Time Tombs on the world of Hyperion, and each has been asked to tell the others the story of why they came. There is a priest whose mission ended badly, a soldier who fought for the Hegemony on a world where his friends did not return, a poet who has run out of work, a scholar whose daughter is ageing backwards, a detective whose lover was murdered, and a Templar whose order knows more than it says.

Something called the Shrike waits at the tombs, a metallic creature said to grant a wish to one of the pilgrims. The Hegemony is about to go to war with the Ousters, and the pilgrimage has been organised as the last of its kind. The novel moves between the present journey and the pilgrims' own accounts, which are set on different worlds and in different periods.

Simmons uses the separate tales to build a single picture of the Hegemony and its frontier, and the book ends before the pilgrimage does. It is the first half of a story completed in the following volume, and the Hyperion Cantos continues past that.