How Does The Fall Of Hyperion End?

That ending was incredibly powerful. The way the various storylines converged—man, the number of shocks and surprises in store for the reader—made me feel as if I were watching a galaxy-spanning tragedy unfold. Father Hoyt’s horrific demise for one. The Ousters, initially dismissed as simple space barbarians, revealed to be so much more than that. And the TechnoCore, playing God with the destiny of humanity. When, in the end, the cruciforms received their due and the farcasters failed, it was all at once both terrible and cathartic. A huge, sweeping tragedy that left me gasping. It’s like staring into a black hole that warbles out a sonnet of Shakespearean renown.

The last chapters of The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons were an intense read, extremely emotionally charged and ideas exploding left and right like a massive sandstorm. In the Shrike’s Valley of the Time Tombs, he led a bloody ballet of destruction. Some of the wounded and killed characters I grew to like and even care for through their experiences were very, very graphic in their dying. Yet amidst so much blood, there were tender moments too: the end of Joseph Severn’s journal entries and Keats’ digital spirit carrying on via Brawne. The end of the Hegemony’s empire was left off stage yet you felt its collapse through the Consul character, a space noir, hard-boiled, and lugubrious (sad) as a pianist playing the blues. And the dangling thread of a child possibly to change the universe in some future generation? Oh so beautifully done to give a feeling of vastness and life after the close of the book.

First, I should note that the end of ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ is a complete, intense and poetic work which left me stunned for hours after I finished reading it. While reading it I did not have a single clue as to how it would end. This is the way it should be, because as it unfolds the TechnoCore’s grand and complex scheme is revealed to us, including the true nature and role of the legendary horror, the Shrike. We learn the individual fates of all the pilgrims. There is Sol Weintraub’s heart-wrenching sacrifice to save his daughter Rachel, though we are not aware of it at the time, and Kassad’s tremendous heroism in his last confrontation with the Shrike. We also are introduced to the merging of the cybrid Keats with the ancient artificial intelligence Ummon in a quite beautiful and thought-provoking scene. The long buried secrets of the Time Tombs are revealed in all their strange, backward-time complexity and the completed web of prophecy laid before us in all its simplistic brilliance. Rather than tying up all the ends for us, though, it simply explores the full consequences of each of the choices open to every character in the novel, and shows us that the choice that anyone makes has far-reaching and unpredictable consequences for everyone else, including Brawne Lamia, who — long after the rest of humanity has been annihilated — finally completes her journey through space and time to carry the dead consciousness of long-dead poet John Keats with her into the far future.

What haunts me most is that The Fall of Hyperion is so extremely balanced between the deepest, darkest despair and these glimmers of hope or potential transcendence. Even though the Hegemony falls, the story of humanity doesn’t necessarily have to end. It will just change. And the ending is so peculiar, so mournful, and so very, very ambiguous. It leaves you with so much that just hangs there. The Consul’s flight into space. Moneta’s remarks about the ‘lion and the child’ (surely a reference to the Judgment of Solomon). And then you’re left with the impression of something being told, but it wasn’t. It just echoes.