A Frictionless Horror
'Hyperion' (Dan Simmons, 1989)
[Warning: this review contains spoilers]
In his introduction to Dan Simmons’ 1989 sci-fi masterpiece, Hyperion, Peter F. Hamilton suggests that the book is best understood as a collection of stories about pain. Framed as a space-age Canterbury Tales, Hyperion follows a group of pilgrims journeying to the eponymous planet, which lies on the outer reaches of the Hegemony - the embattled interplanetary human empire of the twenty-eighth century. The object of their pilgrimage is the Shrike, a mysterious creature (god? alien? robot?) made of glinting metal spikes, which exists to inflict pain and death upon living beings. When it’s not impaling people in the style of its namesake bird, however, the Shrike is also said to grant wishes to anyone who successfully reaches its lair in the ancient Time Tombs. Each of the six pilgrims of the novel - the priest, soldier, poet, scholar, detective and consul - harbours a secret pain that they wish to have resolved by the Shrike.1 In Chaucerian style, they share their stories as the pilgrimage makes its slow and fraught progress across the blasted landscapes of Hyperion towards the Time Tombs beyond.
Perhaps the most fascinating - and horrifying - of these tales of pain is the first. ‘The Priest’s Tale’, subtitled ‘The Man Who Cried God’, is told to the pilgrims at the very beginning of their journey, while still aboard a spacecraft that is yet to deposit them on Hyperion. Its narrator is a young but visibly sick Catholic priest by the name of Father Lenar Hoyt (Catholicism still exists in the twenty-eighth century, albeit reduced to a fringe religion).
Father Hoyt’s story largely concerns the last journey of his fellow priest and amateur scholar, Father Paul Duré. After falling foul of the Church authorities, Father Duré travelled to Hyperion to undertake ethnographic work on the Bikura, a small tribe who inhabited an area of near-inaccessible jungle bordering a deep gorge known as the Cleft. Father Hoyt recalls that he had accompanied Father Duré as far as Hyperion, where he then left him to his studies. He would not see the older priest again for eight years.
It is from the remains of Father Duré’s log that Father Hoyt tells his story. We learn that Father Duré successfully tracked down the Bikura, whom he discovered to be a group of diminutive, unintelligent humanoids. They numbered exactly seventy, all appeared to be roughly middle-aged, bald, and had no discernible sex. Father Duré observed that, aside from a little foraging, the Bikura only undertook one meaningful activity: each day they would clamber down the Cleft to an unknown location, deep in the mists of the gorge.
However, while they may have been idle, the Bikura were not placid creatures. One of their first acts had been to murder Father Duré’s local guide, hewing his throat with a sharpened stone. Father Duré was only spared because he carried a ‘cruciform’, the term by which the Bikura described the crucifix he wore around his neck.
Father Duré soon discovered the reason for the Bikura’s respect for the crucifix. One day, while the Bikura were foraging, the priest climbed down into the Cleft, where he discovered a vast temple, comparable to a basilica. Soon after returning to camp, Father Duré was nearly killed by the Bikura after he removed his crucifix to bathe. At the last minute they relented, taking him instead down into the Cleft, to a cavern lined with pink, glowing crosses - the ‘cruciforms’ that so obsessed the Bikura. The Bikura removed a cruciform from the wall and placed it round the priest’s neck. When he awoke, the cruciform had fused with his flesh.
Now Father Duré began to piece together the true horror of the Bikura. Shortly after the trip to the cavern, one of the Bikura was killed in an accident. The tribe swiftly took the body down to the temple, where Father Duré witnessed a cruciform - which he now deduced to be a kind of parasite - reconstitute and resurrect the corpse. The Bikura returned to life, albeit as a slightly imperfect version of its previous self, and rejoined the camp.
Father Duré concluded that each Bikura hosted a cruciform parasite, and that every time they died they were resurrected as an increasingly imperfect clone of their previous self. Hence the tribe, probably once human, had now degenerated into sexless, mentally stunted zombies. Horrified by the implications of this, Father Duré tried to flee, but found that the cruciform inflicted immense pain on its host if it strayed too far from the Cleft. Determined to rid himself of the parasite, he opted to crucify himself against a Tesla tree - a species unique to Hyperion that generates powerful electrical charges in stormy weather. His hope was that the tree’s electricity would burn the cruciform from his body, leaving him free to die a natural death.
Returning to the present, Father Hoyt initially claims that, when he returned as part of a search party, he discovered the remains of Father Duré on the tree, his charred body mercifully free of the cruciform. However, upon further interrogation, he reveals a darker truth. The cruciform was stubborn: Father Duré did not die immediately, but was instead repeatedly electrocuted and resurrected for more than seven years. When Father Hoyt found him, there was little left of the priest but a burnt-out - yet still living - skeleton.
Father Hoyt was able to remove the cruciform from the flaking remains of Father Duré, allowing him a ‘true death’. However, the younger priest was soon captured by the Bikura who, noting his crucifix, implanted a cruciform on his chest. To make matters worse, the Bikura also attached Father Duré’s old cruciform to Father Hoyt, meaning that he now hosts two of the parasites. The tale ends with his rescue and the obliteration of the Bikura by a nuclear bomb. Sustained by powerful painkillers, Father Hoyt now returns to Hyperion to petition the Shrike to rid him of the cruciforms forever.
On the surface, the kind of pain experienced by Father Hoyt appears to be physical. The ostensible reason for his latest journey to Hyperion is to rid his body of the two cruciforms, which have been inflicting agony upon his body ever since he escaped from the Bikura camp and the Cleft inhabited by the cruciform parasites. Yet physical pain is only ever (quite literally) skin-deep in ‘The Priest’s Tale’. As Simmons understands, the real horror of Father Hoyt’s story is not physical but theological. The fate of Father Duré and the subsequent trials of his younger colleague show that the cruciform’s power lies in its ability to completely upend the most fundamental Christian ideas of life, death and the meaning of existence.
In some ways this is made relatively clear to the reader. Father Duré finds the cruciform repulsive because it denies its host the chance of a ‘true death’. With the cruciform in place, there can be no end to life’s suffering and therefore no union with God at the end of the earthly life - something that lies at the very core of Christian belief. When Father Hoyt discovers the living remains of Father Duré on the Tesla tree, his shock is only partially caused by the physical suffering of the older priest. More monstrous to Father Hoyt is the fact that he hasn’t been allowed to die - to end his time on earth at its natural time and to commend his soul to God. Instead, what soul he may have is kept in a hideous limbo, chained to the physical body it has inhabited well beyond the natural point of its expiry.
The fact that all of this is caused by an alien parasite shaped like a crucifix only adds to the theological horror. The point of Christ’s crucifixion is that his suffering saved humanity and brought them closer to God, whereas the cruciform works only to damn humans to an existence of never-ending, slowly degenerative misery. Similarly, Father Duré’s radical act of self-crucifixion (and self-electrocution) is meant to save him, to free him from the parasite and allow his soul to escape the earthly realm. Instead, he remains alive - just - sustained by the cruciform in a gruesome mockery of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice.
Yet, for all the visceral misery suffered by the two clerics, it is the Bikura themselves who represent the deepest horror of ‘The Priest’s Tale’. These creatures may resemble humans, but they lack anything that can even be vaguely described as humanity. They have no discernible personalities, no compassion, no intellect, no rationality, no sense of enquiry. Like animals they never consciously act, but instead react - often with murderous consequences.
Driving this slavish, inhuman existence is, as Father Duré discovers, a lack of any concept of mortality. Because the Bikura cannot die (at least, not until their total atomisation by a nuclear device), they have lost any sense of emotional investment in existence. Nothing matters to them because, after generations of being respawned by the cruciform, they have discovered that there is no end point and therefore no urgency to live. They don’t love, hate, worry, plan, question or argue because there is simply no point in doing so: whatever happens, they will continue to exist, slightly mutated but essentially the same. At some point they may have been consciously aware of their growing nihilistic lethargy; but by the time Father Duré appears, their minds and bodies have become attuned to their situation. Even then, the arrival of the priest does not cause curiosity or fear among the Bikura, only a vague irritation at any perceived threat to their routine.
The Bikuras’ lack of mortality strikes at the very heart of Catholic ethics. Catholic social teaching maintains that humans are rational creatures made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). It is our rationality that ‘dignifies’ us as human beings, and every day we exercise - and strive to perfect - our inherent dignity through moral decision-making, responding to choices brought on by the endless conflicts that make up human existence. The Bikura are so offensive to this understanding of humanity because they lack the ability to make moral choices, and in doing so have corroded their rationality to the point that it no longer really exists. The reason for this is because there is no ultimate consequence to their actions. The removal of mortality as the final consequence of human action has ground down their ability to exercise rationality over the centuries, as ultimately nothing matters if one cannot eventually die. They live a life without friction, drifting from one day to the next, rendered cripplingly lethargic by their own immortality.
This, rather than the pain inflicted upon the two priests, is the real terror at the heart of ‘The Priest’s Tale’. From a Catholic perspective, the Bikura are an affront to very the idea that God made man in His image. Unhindered by death, they have ceased to concern themselves with anything but the basic necessities of sustaining life (i.e., foraging for food and maintaining a connection to the cruciform parasites). Their overwhelming luxury - the denial of mortality and, by extension, of any sense of threat or conflict in life - may have preserved the lives of the Bikura, but it has also robbed them of their humanity.
Hyperion is a fine book, managing to balance being both a highly original work of science-fiction and a profoundly philosophical novel. Every one of the pilgrims’ tales holds immense emotional and intellectual power, each leading the reader in different directions to explore the diverse ways that pain manifests itself in our lives.
Yet it is Father Lenar Hoyt’s story that delivers the greatest impact. While the other tales pack a punch, they tend to focus on a single kind of pain - romantic, familial, artistic, ecological, among others. What sets ‘The Priest’s Tale’ aside is the multiple layers of pain that it probes. On the surface, there is the physical pain of the priests’ sufferings - on the Tesla tree and at the mercy of the cruciform parasites. Below this, there is the pain of the diabolical reappropriation of Christian symbolism in form of the cruciform parasite and Father Duré’s drastic and misguided self-crucifixion. But the real pain at the heart of ‘The Priest’s Tale’ is theological. At the centre of the story is the dehumanising power of the cruciform, which breaks down the natural cycle of life and death and so removes any sense of difficulty - of friction - from human existence. The result is the Bikura: a people (if indeed they still are such) utterly devoid of critical thought and moral decision-making.
In this sense, ‘The Priest’s Tale’ can be read as a warning. It reminds the reader that life is meant to be difficult, to be filled with obstacles that must be overcome because human lives are so short. We aren’t on earth for long, so there is an urgency to use our rationality to make moral choices with the aim of achieving a better life for ourselves and for those around us. Ultimately, our humanity stems from the fact that we understand our own mortality, and that we are therefore compelled to face the frictions of life head-on. To avoid this reality is to surrender the very thing that makes us human.
Technically speaking, there are eight pilgrims on the journey to Hyperion. However, for reasons that won’t be revealed here, two of them don’t get the opportunity to tell their stories.