Hyperion introduces us to seven pilgrims crossing the WorldWeb of the Hegemony of Man on their way to the Valley of the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion. In true Chaucerian form, six of the pilgrims (one doesn’t survive long enough) tell each other their personal stories and reasons for coming on the pilgrimage as they cross The Sea of Grass and other obstacles to reach the Shrike—the fabled killing creature of the Time Tombs, part machine, part time-traveling god, part avenging angel, and all sharp thorns, spikes, claws, and teeth. The idea is that one of the pilgrims will have his or her request granted by the Shrike; the others will die. Through their stories we learn of the TechnoCore—a hidden and manipulative group of Autonomous Intelligences escaped from human control—of the destroyed (or perhaps just kidnapped) Old Earth; of the fake war between the Hegemony and the space-adapted, human-evolved Ousters; and of one Jesuit’s discovery—and rejection—of a cross-shaped symbiote called the cruciform which can bring about physical resurrection. The story ends with the pilgrims’ arrival at the Valley of the Time Tombs.
The Fall of Hyperion picks up exactly where Hyperion left off but utilizes totally different narrative techniques and structures to pursue John Keats’s themes of individuals—and species—not happily surrendering their place in the scheme of things when evolution tells them it is time to go. The pilgrims from the first book find that their fates are not as simple as they had thought: the Time Tombs open, mysterious messages and messengers from the future show that the struggle for the human soul continues on for many centuries, the Shrike wreaks havoc but does not kill all, nor does it grant requests, and the complex interstellar society of the Hegemony of Man with its WorldWeb farcaster system is kicked apart like an ant hill by interstellar war—although whether the war is between Hegemony and Ousters, or Humanity and the TechnoCore, is not clear. Of the pilgrims, one named Brawne Lamia is pregnant by her lover—the John Keats cybrid created by the Core—and it is rumored that her child will be The One Who Teaches, humanity’s next Messiah. Another, soldier Fedmahn Kassad, travels to the future to meet his fate in combat with the Shrike. A third, Sol Weintraub, has stopped his daughter from aging backward to nonexistence, but now has to travel with her through a Time Tomb to their own complicated part in the mosaic of the future. The fourth pilgrim, the Hegemony Consul, takes an ancient spacecraft whose AI is inhabited with the essence of the dead John Keats cybrid and returns to explore the ruins of the Hegemony. The fifth pilgrim, a priest, dies and is reborn through the cruciform as the Jesuit whose tale he told—now the pope of a reborn Catholic Church. The final living pilgrim—the seven-hundred-year-old poet, Martin Silenus, who has been telling all this tale—remains as obscene and crotchety as ever.
Endymion opens 274 years after the Fall of the Farcasters. Things have gone to hell—which is usually the case in so-called Dark Ages between empires—but the Pax, the civil-military arm of the reinvigorated Catholic Church, now extends its dominion to most of the former worlds of the Hegemony. The Church—and the Pax—control its citizens through its monopoly of resurrection. Unknown to most, the Church has entered into a Faustian bargain with the now-hidden TechnoCore and utilizes the cruciform symbiotes to bring its followers back to life and into obedience. Suddenly, an eleven-year-old messiah-to-be named Aenea appears on the scene. Aenea is Brawne Lamia’s daughter, and she has fled across almost three centuries through the Time Tombs only to find the Pax authorities searching for her, and with both the Church and the Core acting on an absolute need to destroy her. The still alive, still obscene, still cranky poet, Martin Silenus, assigns a young soldier and escaped murderer—Raul Endymion—to rescue the girl and to transport her wherever she wants to go on the now-dead Consul’s returned ship. Most of Endymion is a massive chase across human space with the Pax in close pursuit, as Raul, Aenea, and the blue android A. Bettik run for their lives and perhaps the future of humanity. Created by the Core, unleashed by the Church, is a female monstrosity named Rhadamanth Nemes who makes the killing-creature Shrike look like a Sunday-school teacher. At the end of Endymion, Raul, Aenea, and a wounded A. Bettik make it to Old Earth—not destroyed after all, just transported to the Lesser Magellanic Clouds by aliens known only as the Lions and Tigers and Bears. Our trio settles in at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West while young Aenea trains to be an architect.
The Rise of Endymion picks up four years after the events of Endymion. Aenea, now sixteen, knows that she must return to Pax-dominated space to cany out her role as The One Who Teaches. Raul, her protector and friend, has no wish to go. The idea of martyrdom—especially his beloved Aenea’s martyrdom—appalls him. Aenea sends Raul “ahead” by farcaster, but actually his few weeks of traveling allow Aenea to age five years, thanks to the miracle of time dilation and time-debt during Raul’s interstellar travels in the old Consul’s ship. When they meet again, Aenea is a woman and well along in her role of The One Who Teaches. The Pax is still after her. The Church still needs her dead. The creature Nemes has now been joined by three equally impossibly powerful and destructive siblings. And amidst all this, on the mountaintop-and-cloud world of T'ien Shan, Aenea and Raul become lovers. This makes Raul, our narrator through the two books, even less happy at the thought of his beloved’s becoming the messiah so many have predicted. Raul is not the smartest character in these books, but he is absolutely loyal, absolutely in love, and he is smart enough to know the fate of most messiahs.
The Rise of Endymion ends with tragedy, torture, death, and separation, followed—not miraculously but inevitably—by great enlightenment and the reunion of Raul and Aenea. The Pax has murdered her—thus unwittingly bringing about their own downfall through Aenea’s Shared Moment, wherein every human being on every world glimpses the truth behind the Pax, the Church, the cruciform, and the parasitic TechnoCore—but during her “absent five years” while Raul was traveling, she had come ahead in time with the help of the Shrike to spend one year, eleven months, one week, and six hours with Raul on Old Earth. Earth has been emptied, cleansed, renewed, and returned to its proper place in the solar system by the Lions and Tigers and Bears.
Martin Silenus, the poet and constant character through all the books, dies shortly after Raul and Aenea are wed. Some of the poet’s final words were to the Consul’s ship, which has also come through a thousand years and four fat books—"See you in hell, Ship.”
As The Rise of Endymion ends, the still-mysterious Shrike stands vigil over Martin Silenus’s grave on Old Earth; thanks to Aenea’s sacrifice, humanity has been freed to “learn the language of the dead” by tapping into the empathic fabric underlying the universe—and also by now being able to freecast, that is, personally teleport anywhere; and Raul and Aenea fly off on their ancient hawking mat to celebrate their honeymoon on the empty, virginal Old Earth—”… our new playground, our ancient world… our new world… our first and future and finest world.”
—Dan Simmons