Reviewing Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion took its time pulling me in. Described to me as “Canterbury Tales in space”, the book is composed of vignettes told by each character interspersed with present-day interludes after they’ve all found themselves heading toward the planet Hyperion. The prologue was pretty jarring from a worldbuilding perspective. A swamp on an alien planet, a personal spaceship equipped with a Steinway piano and a wet bar stocked with Scotch. Most faster-than-light space operas I’ve read, like Dune or Foundation, have wholly lost the memory of Earth and certainly lost actual artifacts from the 20th century. After that opening I was skeptical that I would enjoy the stories set in this universe, but the vignette structure worked really well. Each revealed a new slice of the society these characters live in, and by the midpoint it all started to fit together. The Hegemony of Hyperion has a few technologies beyond our understanding of physics, but that technology comes with real constraints and…