Ultimate Guide to Hyperion (Part One)

He closed his eyes but the lightning was visible through closed eyelids.

He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through the tumbled ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs, and the colder gleam of still on the Shrike's impossible tree of metal thorns.

He remembered screams in the night, and the hundred-faceted ruby and blood gaze of the Shrike itself.

Hyperion.

In the sudden silence, he lay thinking about how insane it would be to return to Hyperion.

During his eleven years as Consul on the distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious Church of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of off-world pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens around the Time Tombs, north of the mountains.

No one had returned.

And that had been in normal times.

when the Shrike had been prisoner to the tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-entropic fields had been contained to a few dozen meters around the time tombs, and there had been no threat of ouster invasion.

The Consul thought of the Shrike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion, of the millions of indigenees and thousands of hegemony citizens helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the cabin.

Hyperion.

The Hyperion Kantos is a series of four science fiction novels written by Dan Simmons.

The story takes place hundreds of years in our future, at a time where humankind has formed the hegemony, spreading out to many planets.

Mankind also now had the technology to instantly travel from any world connected in the forecasting web.

The books mainly center, however, on the far-off planet of Hyperion, where the merciless Strike resides.

The creature known as the Strike in the Hyperion Kantos is one of the most intriguing characters to come out of modern science fiction.

The creature, which was named for the carnivorous passerine birds of Old Earth, terrorizes the world of Hyperion.

The Shrike is a being of mysterious origin and incredible power.

The Shrike appeared in the books as four-armed and vaguely humanoid.

Its entire body was comprised of some strange metal similar to steel, with countless barbs and spikes covering it.

Throughout the series, the Shrike's goals and motivations are ambiguous.

It seems to act with no rhyme or reason.

The Shrike first appeared on Hyperion with the arrival of the Time Tombs, six strange structures in a distant valley on the world.

The Time Tombs were constructed at some point in the distant future.

and were sent hurtling backwards through time.