Hyperion Cantos

[3][4] More narrowly, inside the fictional storyline, after the first volume, the Hyperion Cantos is an epic poem written by the character Martin Silenus covering in verse form the events of the first two books.

First published in 1989, Hyperion has the structure of a frame story, similar to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.

The story weaves the interlocking tales of a diverse group of travelers sent on a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs on Hyperion.

It abandons the storytelling frame structure of the first novel, and is instead presented primarily as a series of dreams by John Keats.

The group of Aenea, Endymion, and A. Bettik (an android) evades the Church's forces on several worlds through use of the Consul's spaceship, ending the story on Earth.

The series also includes three short stories: The Hyperion universe originated when Simmons was an elementary school teacher, as an extended tale he told at intervals to his young students; this is recorded in "The Death of the Centaur", and its introduction.

The Hawking Drive was developed by the Human scientists, allowing the faster than light travel which led to the Hegira (from the Arabic word هجرة Hijra, meaning 'migration').

Treeships are living trees that are propelled by ergs (spider-like solid-state alien being that emits force fields) through space.

The region of the Tombs is also the home of the Shrike, a menacing half-mechanical, half-organic four-armed creature that features prominently in the series.

In these novels, the Shrike appears effectively unfettered and protects the heroine Aenea against assassins of the opposing TechnoCore.

The Shrike may kill victims in a flash or it may transport them to an eternity of impalement upon an enormous artificial 'Tree of Thorns,' or 'Tree of Pain' in Hyperion's distant future.

[13] It is also hinted in the second book that the Tree of Thorns is actually a simulation generated by a mystical interface which connects to human brains via a strong and pulsing (as if it were alive) cord.