An ambitious science fiction saga beginning with seven pilgrims journeying to Hyperion's Time Tombs, each telling their story Canterbury Tales-style before confronting the monstrous Shrike. The series expands into an epic spanning war between humanity and the TechnoCore AIs, the nature of consciousness and creation, and ultimately the role of empathy and art in shaping reality, blending literary ambition with space opera scope.
Seven pilgrims traveling to the mysterious Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion where the monstrous Shrike awaits each tell their story in the structure of a Canterbury Tales homage, revealing how each came to be on this final journey as the galaxy stands on the brink of catastrophe. The individual tales range from horror to tragedy to hard science fiction, forming an intricate and emotionally devastating mosaic. One of science fiction's great novels.
Continuing directly from Hyperion, the second Cantos novel resolves the pilgrims' fates as interstellar war erupts and the true nature of the TechnoCore the artificial intelligences secretly governing human civilization is revealed. Told partly through the dreams of a John Keats cybrid, the novel is simultaneously a war epic, a philosophical meditation, and an emotionally crushing conclusion to the tales begun in the first book. Astonishing in scope and ambition.