On the eve of interstellar war, seven pilgrims set out across the doomed world of Hyperion toward the Time Tombs — mysterious structures moving backwards through time — and the Shrike, a lethal, godlike creature that guards them and is said to grant a single wish to one pilgrim while killing the rest. Each traveller has been chosen for reasons they do not fully understand, and each carries a secret that binds them to the planet and to the horror waiting at its heart.
As they journey, the pilgrims agree to tell their stories. A priest's discovery of a parasitic cross that will not let its host truly die. A soldier haunted by a lover who exists across time. A poet's obsession with the monster that inspired his greatest work. A scholar whose daughter ages backwards toward infancy. Together their tales assemble a vast tapestry of a galaxy-spanning human civilisation on the brink of collapse.
Winner of the Hugo Award, Dan Simmons's Hyperion borrows the frame of The Canterbury Tales to build one of modern science fiction's richest and most ambitious novels — literary, philosophical, and unforgettable. It opens a story completed in its essential second half, The Fall of Hyperion.