Hyperion Universe

On the windswept world of Hyperion, out past the farthest reach of the Hegemony's farcaster web, the Time Tombs stand open and something waits inside them: the Shrike, a thing of blades and mirror-steel that humankind has learned to worship because it cannot be killed. Here Dan Simmons raises a far future assembled from the ruins of Old Earth, the unfinished poetry of John Keats, and the cold arithmetic of machine gods called the TechnoCore — a literary space opera that keeps asking, across three thousand years and two hundred worlds, what any of it is finally for. The Hyperion Cantos is one long tale split by the accident of binding into four novels and two cycles. It opens with Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990): seven pilgrims cross a doomed world toward the Tombs, each telling a story in the manner of Chaucer's travelers — the soldier's, the priest's, the poet's, the scholar's — while an interstellar war gathers overhead. Nearly three centuries later, Endymion (1996) and The Rise of Endymion (1997) follow a hunted child named Aenea and the man sworn to shield her from a Church that now rules the stars through resurrection. Three short stories drift in the same orbit, "Remembering Siri" and "Orphans of the Helix" among them. The register is elegiac and grave, sensuous where it is not terrifying, threaded with Keats and old religion and the physics of dying suns. Begin where it began: read the four in publication order, the only sequence Simmons intends — each cycle a single story broken cleanly in two.