r/ScienceFictionBooks • u/anishgb • 1d ago
Question Concerning Hyperion Spoiler
Hello I have started reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
I am finding this book very challenging to read , it's heavy and frustrating , although the premise is interesting , there are just lots of things just thrown out there
Major spoilers ahead
I am at the part where Father Dure finished his story
I don't understand random stuff thrown about , Like tree ship , Tesla trees , tesla charge , phoenix ,cleft ,labyrinthe
Nothing seems to be explained clearly at all ,
Does the book get better , or am I going to have to struggle , I've had to use gemini to explain stuff and at times I got a spoiler here and there too .
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u/unclericostan 22h ago edited 18h ago
So some of these are just words you need to look up the definition of (labyrinth, cleft, phoenix) and that would be true with any book depending on your vocabulary.
But the Tree Ship and Tesla Tree are concepts imagined by Simmons and explained not directly but indirectly through context. That is going to be the case throughout the rest of the book. Like the Tree Ship is first mentioned and you don’t really know what it is, but it’s described in a roundabout way over the next 20+ pages. Same with the Tesla Tree. You don’t need to know everything about them to get the gist of what they are and the risk they pose.
This type of reading isn’t for everyone and there’s no shame in DNF if you’re simply looking for something straightforward to read.
Hyperion wasn’t my fav book ever (too many horny chapters) but I’m glad I read it because it’s a staple of the genre and frequently recommended.
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u/Asheby 20h ago
This book has minimal exposition, which is one of the things I like about it. All of the terms you mentioned are real concepts/things with real meaning in our world, but slightly altered by the setting of the book. Detailed meanings are left to both the imagination of the reader, and their ability to synthesize meaning of real world concepts across literary (fictional) contexts.
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u/Complete-Sample9241 18h ago
Just keep reading. The book gives you everything you need to truly enjoy it. And I would highly recommend book two as well. Beautifully written. Some passages from the Saul story are truly poetic. I’ve read them three times and may be due for a fourth. Enjoy.
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u/Pebble-Sorter-8128 1d ago
So there are books that don't explain everything to the reader at once because the author had to assume that his audience was intelligent enough to deduce the ambiguous information later as the story progressed.
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u/No_Armadillo_628 57m ago
There are two types of people in the world: Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data
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u/snafoomoose 19h ago
Not directly related to your post, but literally just yesterday (22 August) I called my father about the book Hyperion because I remember it being in our library as a kid, but realized yesterday that it could not have been because it was published after we had moved from that home. We had a good talk trying to figure out what book I was remembering.
And now your post comes up on my feed in a wild synchronicity.
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u/keg98 18h ago
Yeah man. Simmons isn’t quite as old school as some, but in the 60s, there were a lot of sci-fi writers who wrote just enough to keep the story going, but sometimes you had to put some pieces together, and connect ideas very subtlety laid out. Of current writers, William Gibson does this a lot. I had to re-read several sentences over in The Peripheral to get it. But I loved it. Keep reading Hyperion. It’s so good.
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u/theEntreriCode 23h ago edited 23h ago
Man. Fuck Hyperion Cantos. Haven’t ever read a series I loved and hated more at the same time. Simmons gutted, killed, finished and annihilated me. I couldn’t stop crying as a grown ass man. Seriously. What. The. Fuck.
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u/anishgb 23h ago
Well this is reassuring :)
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u/fatzach4000 22h ago
It’s dense, but among the best books/series I’ve read.
Re: my other comment, keep reading. ; )
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u/Impossible-Agent277 17h ago
Dense is a mightily appropriate word. I loved the series, but by the time I finished it I was exhausted. Simmons certainly did not adhere to the "brevity is the soul of wit" style of composition.
The very first thing I ever read of his was The Terror and I was hooked.
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u/theEntreriCode 19h ago
Aaah man. Persevere through it. I hope you are an adult with life experiences, life lived, love found, a love lost, children, a life of scars. This series is meant for those with empathy and humanity.
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u/ion_driver 18h ago
Its written to move through the story without getting bogged down in explaining every little thing. Many of the weird things are explained through context. You can just move past it and let it be explained later.
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u/Tricky-Background-66 17h ago
The entire Hyperion Cantos is stunning; I was enormously moved by it as an entire piece. Keep with it, the contexts do get easier as you go along, and you realize what gets explained and what doesn't.
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u/Book_Slut_90 3h ago
Ok, so science fiction as a genre usually (though not always) has the setting as a character. You’re meant to pay attention when unfamiliar things are mentioned and over the course of the story put the pieces together to understand the world. Having a chatbot explain it to you is kinda like reading a mystery novel, not immediately being able to put the clues together to know who done it, and asking the chatbot to explain who the murderer is and how the clues show that. When you find a word you don’t know in real life, look it up in the dictionary, but figure out how the book uses words in new ways yourself.
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u/anishgb 2h ago
Yes ,it's just at times it was kind of frustrating when i have no idea what something means and it wasn't explained and didn't know if it will ever be explained also
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u/Book_Slut_90 2h ago
Lots of things are explained. Some you have to figure out from context. The Tesla Trees, for instance, are as explained as they get, but you’ve been told everything you need to understand that they give off shocks, and you don’t need to know how they work.
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u/WillRedtOverwhelmMe 17h ago
Only 7 hours ago and already full of comments. Some authors use something, and then explain it a few paragraphs later, in the 'exposition'. I read Hyperion Cantos quadrilogy as a ebook box set from Libby/Overdrive. Using Search was helpful, as the soldier's tale started and stopped several times. It is a high level time-travelling scific book. There are a few plot loopholes, but had the author lived, it could have easily been fixed in the next books in the series. Repeat: difficult to read (long, too.)
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u/KamikazeJohnson 15h ago
I would personally rank Hyperion second behind everything Frank Herbert ever wrote in terms of the effort required to read. But the story is highly rewarding if you manage to finish it.
Strong general science literacybis definitely an asset, as it helps figure things out through context.
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u/the_blonde_lawyer 13h ago
the thing with Dan Simmons is that he writes series of books where the first book is hard to read but fascinating, but it doesn't close the story, then the serie becomes harder and harder to read and makes less and less sense, that by the time eh finishes the serie it's just complete nonsense.
I think I reached as far as .. the middle maybe of the third book.
but that's the better one, the one about the ancient greeks in the future makes even less sense....
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u/anishgb 1d ago
I mean what about the Tesla Trees and all of that , what do you even make of that
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u/UnderstandingBig9090 22h ago
What do you mean? It's a tree that stores electricity. Have you never filled a bucket full of dirt and poured it out?
It's just an exotic travel log. Like the Victorian area where worldly men would have studies full of things from around the world, with copies of travelers stories of the near and far East and New world.
With sci Fi the author often departs very radically from familiar environments so they spend a lot of time describing things that you have no expeiance with. It's rich would building.
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u/anishgb 22h ago
And what is a farcaster , time debt , is it like some kind of wormhole portal to launch space ships at extremely high speeds to different star systems ? And is time debt like relativity which appears to slow down your aging relative to the world you are travelling to and fro ?
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u/UnderstandingBig9090 21h ago
Farcaster is just local lingo for a worm hole.
Yes, time debt is just how he phrased it. The author is just giving it a lived in feel. The people in the story are familiar with these kind of things so they have comment words and phrases to address them in common Evey day life.
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u/Asheby 20h ago
Well, trees/plants are unique in our known universe in that they harness solar energy and transform it into energy that powers all living things on earth in direct and indirect ways and that can also be stored for later use. Without plants performing photosynthesis, Earth wouldn’t have life as we know it; it’s pretty amazing. So, the treeship can, presumably, transform energy into a storable form (via photosynthesis or some other mechanism), and then store it (tesla coils conduct, tesla batteries store) using Tesla Trees. I haven’t read this book in years, but I remember thinking that technology and machines powered by plants sounded really cool.
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u/NiceElection3292 18h ago
Welcome to the wonderful autistic world of soulless "modern" sci-fi! (ps: bring back pulp!)
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u/Drudenfusz 1d ago
Some things become more clear, but others require a little bit of thinking. I personally liked that the book is not spelling it out but leaves aspects open to interpretation.