Questions about Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos (unboxed spoilers)
First off, if you like epic sci-fi and haven’t read Hyperion and its sequel Fall of Hyperion, then grab a copy and read it. The first one won the Hugo, and the second one was nominated for the Nebula. I must’ve read both books at least a dozen times each.
There are two more sequels, Endymion and Rise of Endymion, which I didn’t think were as good, and in fact I gave up halfway through the last one out of sheer disinterest. To be honest, I think the writing and the characters sucked. I don’t think I’ll read it again soon, so feel free to spoil it for me.
There. Hopefully the spoilers won’t show up in the preview now.
Question one: how did the TechnoCore build the cybrids and the fake Ouster fleets? At the end of Fall of Hyperion, Gladstone has a dream wherein we’re led to believe that the TechnoCore exists solely as a parasitic network within the megasphere; their “physical location” was spread across the innumerable hardware plugged into the Web (comlogs and diskeys and terminals and cortical implants and so forth.) How did the TechnoCore have enough physical industrial assets for their projects?
Question two: were the labrynths ever fully explained? We’re led to believe that the agents of the Ultimates faction of the TechnoCore sculpted them eons ago as part of their Ultimate Intelligence project, but why?
I had a bunch more in my head during my morning commute, but this is all I remember. I’ll post more as they arrive.
The Core itself - the AIs’ corporeal selves - was located in the farcaster medium. But there’s no reason to assume they didn’t have massive robotic deep-space mining and production facilities. Space is a big place. You ca hide a lot there
I think they were designed to hold hordes of neutered, brain-damaged cruciform-bearing humans for the Core to use their neurons, after they’d destroyed the rest of the human race. Or maybe not.
P.S. Does anyone else suspect that Ron Moore (creator of Battlestar Galactica) has read Hyperion? With the Cylons as the core, their God as the UI…
Huh. I’ll have to go and re-read the books again. I never had the impression that the farcaster medium (the Void-That-Binds, right?) was such a tangible thing. I guess I always assumed that, since the Core was around for the Big Mistake in 2008, that they resided in digital hardware much like software does today.
I always came away with the impression that the Core didn’t have substantial offworld resources, since even the Outsters couldn’t figure out where the Core was located. I’m sure it wasn’t for lack of trying, since the Core and the Ousters had a lot of bad blood between them.
But yeah, you’re right, space is vastly, mind-bogglingly big. I guess the Core could have had entire worlds that were never discovered.
That’s what I thought too, especially given Dure’s experience in the labrynth with the Shrike. Except it doesn’t seem like a long-term solution - people are going to die, pretty fast, in such conditions. Would the TechnoCore be able to use dead neurons, or is it implied that the Core would only need a short time with living neurons?
I wonder if Cybrids had a problem with glowing spines.
By an odd coincidence, I’m nearly done rereading all 4 books. I’m about halfway through Rise of Endymion, and I don’t recall specific quotes/passages that answer your questions directly. If I find some in the rest of the current book, I’ll post them. I’d tend to agree with Alessan’s answers though.
The cruciforms will resurrect them, so dying isn’t an issue, and in one of the last 2 books, Aenea says something along the lines of the Core killing people on purpose, since a dying neural net is more creative than a living one.
But wouldn’t repeatedly resurrecting the same dead tissue, without constantly contributing any significant nutrients, render the labrynth people into brain-damaged midgets like the Bikura? I guess the Core isn’t too picky about the mental capacity of their hosts.
Another thing I always wondered about is the usage of the Deathwand Device. Obviously the Core designed it as a weapon against the Ousters near Hyperion, and obviously the Core calibrated it so that the millions of Hegemony citizens seeking refuge in the Labrynth wouldn’t (all) be zapped. (And I always thought this was a rather clever ploy by the Core.) But when Morpurgo & son activated it within the farcaster medium, (a) did it have any negative effect on the Core, or (b) did the Core deactivate the device before it could be used against them, or (c) did it not really matter due to the lancing of all the singularity containment fields shutting down the farcaster network?
I wouldn’t believe option (a) is viable - at no point are we led to believe that deathwands have any effect on anything but human targets. If option (c), then why the charade - i.e. why didn’t Morpurgo carry out orders to simply deactivate the Device once they enter [del]Mudyah[/del] [del]Mudyeh[/del] Mud-eye space? If there’s any opportunity to trick the Core, it’s away from the farcaster, not inside one. Heck, have Morpurgo hang around in Mud-eye space after the farcaster network is destroyed, then he’d at least have a chance of survival and one more functional spaceship. The way the book went just seems kind of a waste.
At any rate, I thought it made for a very touching scene between Morpurgo, this seemingly unsympathetic bulldog of a man, and his son… so I don’t have too much of a problem with it.
“You see, Core personae refuse to die unless they are forced to – Meina Gladstone’s deathbomb attack on the farcaster medium not only caused the Fall of the Farcasters, it killed billions of would-be immortal Core personae.”
So the attack was effective, but not the complete victory over the Core that Gladstone was hoping for.
According to the Core in FoH, the Deathwand device had a range of 3 light years - they were going to farcast it to Hyperion to kill the Ouster Swarm attacking there, after getting as many humans as possible into the Hyperion labyrinths. However, somewhat later in the books, we’re told it has an unlimited range, and would actually have killed every human in the galaxy except for those in the Hyperion labyrinth.
Y’know, this is exactly why I never read the book again. I read it when I was pre-teen, and I didn’t get a solid page of it. I suspect I still wouldn’t.
