Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hyperion
An ode to Keats (the poet being paid in the same coin – after penning odes to Indolence, Melancholy, Psyche, Night Grecian urns and Nightingales). There are enough references and allusions to Keats – the title of the book, Lamia, Endymion, Homer and the Greek Titans, (Fanny) Brawne, Port Romance. The book is a repository to other tropes – time travel and FTL, space battles, horror, gore, cyber punk

Datumplane is itself an abstract. A commingling of computer and AI-generated dataspheres and the quasi-perpetual Gibsoian matrix designed originally for human operators, now accepted as common ground for man, machine and AI.

There is an example of syzygy and junk-food

In the twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.

There are references to Yeats (translator of The Upanishads), Chaucer, Wizard of Oz, Milton, Hitler, Tom Sawyer. It reads like H Rider Haggard meeting HG Wells meeting Asimov and Peter F Hamilton among others.

’Let there be life!’ And so, somewhere in the Technosphere vaults of my mother’s estate, frozen sperm from my long-dead daddy was defrosted, set in suspension, shaken like the vanilla malts of yore, loaded into something part squirt gun part dildo, and – at the magic touch of a trigger – ejaculated into Mother at a time when the moon was full and the egg was ripe.
Mother didn’t have to be impregnated in this barbaric fashion, of course. She could have chosen ex utero fertilization, a male lover with a transplant of Daddy’s DNA, a clonal surrogate, a gene-spliced virgin birth, you name it … but, as she told me later, she opened her legs to tradition.

A riotous read. On to the sequel…

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