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Our ongoing series reviewing audio adaptations of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror works. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.

By John J. Joex

Book Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars
Audio Book Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

Hyperion | [Dan Simmons]Dan Simmons’ Hyperion is a 1989 novel that has garnered much acclaim in the Science Fiction community and that won the Hugo award upon its release. It takes places centuries in the future on the eve of an impending confrontation between the Hegemony (a Roman Empire-like galactic-wide human civilization) and the Ousters (“interstellar barbarians” who live apart from this society) that will occur near the planet of Hyperion. Seven diverse people have been brought together for a pilgrimage to the “Time Tombs” where they will each ask the Shrike (a mysterious, deity-like creature) one wish. As they make their way to the tombs, they decide to each tell their story of why they were selected for this pilgrimage and what connection they have to the Shrike and/or Hyperion.

Hyperion is an acclaimed work of Science Fiction literature that regularly appears on “Best Of” lists and finds itself set out as one of the exemplary genre works from the last two-plus decades. And it does provide a galaxy-sprawling story delivered with a Canterbury Tales style framing device of multiple people each telling their own tale. It also establishes a vast universe that Simmons would elaborate on through his Hyperion Cantos series of novels which would include Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion as well as several short stories. And readers of Hyperion should note that the first book does not deliver a complete tale in itself as six of the travelers tell their stories (the seventh disappears mysteriously) and then go prancing off into the horizon singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard” (no really). Apparently Fall of Hyperion concludes this part of the story then the other two novels carryon from there.

By the time I got to the end of Hyperion, I found it a rather interesting and enjoyable tale with all of its interweaving stories (each person’s tale overlaps with at least one other at some point), but what a long journey it was! The print edition runs close to 500 pages (depending on which version you buy) and the audio book runs past twenty hours. That’s a heck of a commitment and it had me wavering at several points. I understand the trend over the past few decades has been toward longer books, but you shouldn’t pad the story just to increase the page count and I definitely felt that way several times while making my way through Hyperion. It’s rare that you find a long book like Dune that makes efficient use of pretty much every word through its 400 plus pages, and Hyperion, despite its accomplishments, falls well short of what Frank Herbert achieved. Pretty much every one of the six separate stories apart from the Consul’s tale could have been shortened by as much a half and still conveyed the same message. Simmons is apparently just a very verbose writer, and that works against the grander story in my opinion. In fact, if Wikipedia had not provided some pretty decent summaries of each of the tales, I would have forgotten several of the earlier details by the time I got to the later stories. So while in the end I had a generally good impression of the novel looking back, it was a pretty tedious and times laborious journey to get there. Now to be fair, I have not read (listened to) the conclusion yet (and I don’t even want to know how long that audio book will be), so my opinion of the work may improve by that point. For now, though, I’m left sitting on the fence and debating whether I will tackle Fall of Hyperion. However, since it’s so highly rated amongst Science Fiction novels, I guess I will have to deal with it at some point.

As far as the audio book adaptation, it is produced by Audible Frontiers and it uses multiple narrators for each of the seven characters. This lends an additional dimension to the audio production and makes it a bit easier to venture through the twenty one hour long recording. If you are new to audio books, this is definitely not the place to start. Go with an easier book like World War Z or The Time Machine or the Lovecraft adaptations from Audio Realms. And a friend of mine suggested that Hyperion is not a great fit for the audio book format because you really need to reread some parts several times. I would tend to agree. Still it is available, though apparently only through Audible.com at this point. They also have the other three books of the Hyperion Cantos on audio as well.