The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A true genre-defining SF epic – a rollicking read.
Allegorical on many levels – the battle of Titans vs Olympians with Dis adding spice to the picture, the Human Hegemony vs Mutant Ousters with Shrike and the AI Technocore playing the role of Dis to muddy the waters, or Good vs Bad, or simply a Miltonesque pilgrim’s progressing quest. In the religious context there is talk of Holy trinity of Christianity – corresponding to that of Hinduism – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahadev.
I love this kind of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook

When I glanced back up, a holoed globe of Hyperion ceased spinning and unwound itself into a series of flattened projections: oblique equirectangular, Bonne, orthographic, rosette, Van der Grinten, Gores, interrupted Good homolosine, gnomic, sinusidol, azimuthal equidistant, polyconic, hypercorrected Kuwatsi, computer eschered, Briesemeister, Buckminster, Miller cylindrical, multicoligraphed, and satplot standard, before resolving into a standard Robinson-Baird map of Hyperion.

This is an extract from the song of Ummon from the Stable faction of the AI triumvirate

Your UI
seems to make its home
on the plane where Heisenberg and Schrodinger
first trespassed\
Your accidental intelligence
appears not to be the gluon
but the glue\
not a watchmaker
but a sort of Feynman gardener
tidying up a no-boundary universe
with his crude sum-over-histories rake\
idly keeping track of every sparrow fall
and electron spin
while allowing each particle
to follow every possible
track
in space-time
and each particle of humankind
to explore every possible
crack
of cosmic irony
[Kwatz!]
[Kwatz!]
[Kwatz!]

The last bit means Ha! Ha! Ha! In AI language.

View all my reviews