Hyperion and boring techno futures
I’ve been going through some of the sci-fi books that I read as a kid — books that had been sitting in my parents’ garage for the last twenty-plus years. It’s a small library — the usual stuff you’d find on the shelves of teenage sci-fi head: Stars My Destinations, Ender’s Game, The Forever War, Mars trilogy, a bunch of stuff by Heinlein, Greg Bear, Ursula Le Guin, Tolkien, the entire extended Dune series, complete with the installments that were written after Frank Herbert died by his son. I also found the Hyperion series, the ridiculously longwinded and cliched space opera by Dan Simmons. I’d read the Hyperion books in my sophomore year of high school, mostly as I lay in bed at night, eating Finn Crisps and drinking beer that I’d steal from parents.
Looking at the books now, I realize that Hyperion was one of the few that stuck with me through the years. What I liked was one of the main conflicts at the heart of the story: a techno-ideological war between two camps of human civilization.
One of these camps was a sort of trad 21st century earth-type civilization. It was totally dependent on god-like AIs — a technology that humans invented but could no longer control or even understand. These AIs provided people with all sorts of cyborg gear and pumped them full of life-extension technology. Most importantly, though, the AIs invented and controlled instantaneous teleportation tech, which allowed the society to expanded to countless planets across the universe. It was an aggressive, militaristic and imperial civilization. Each new planet that was discovered was terraformed to make it habitable to humans. In the process, native life was wiped out. Even harmless sentient alien life got genocided. Nothing could stand in the way of human expansion and progress. Human First! Other than the existence of all-powerful AI entities, this society was very much like ours. People didn’t do anything too weird to their bodies and generally kept their traditional human form on a genetic level. They also had hierarchies and oligarchs and exploitative corporations and capitalism.
This trad techno civilization had one principle enemy: a different competing society called the Ousters. They were a group of post-humanist types who rejected the traditional definitions of what it meant to be “human” and embraced genetic tinkering and self-directed evolution. They allowed individuals to become whatever they felt like being, unencumbered by retrograde conceptions of “humanness.” You could be a cosmic slug, whatever.
These Ousters fought a war with the dominant trad civilization on Earth and escaped to the stars to begin their own evolutionary path. They lived in these giant floating space-based swarms and tinkered with their own genetics. Their point wasn’t to terraform and change other planets to fit human needs. They wanted to change themselves to fit other environments — like breeding specialized humans that could live on gas giants and things like that. Their preferred mode of living, though, was in artificial earth-like environments in outer space. Asteroids and comets were captured, mined, and contained with forcefields and turned into natural landscapes of mountains and fields and trees and rivers and lakes, all floating in orbit around stars. Oh, and they lived in harmony with other alien species they encountered. It was like an idealized galactic hippy commune.
The tech traditionalists and their AI overlords viewed these space hippies as barbarians and a threat to their way of life, and they hunted them down and vaporized their space cities whenever they could.
It’s pretty clear that Dan Simmons sided with the modded out hippies in his book. He paints them as the good guys and wants readers to side with them as well. They’re the next non-violent stage in human evolution: peaceful coexistance with the universe, man!
Back when I was first read the books, I was drawn to these Ouster types. Self-sufficient communal farms floating in outer space, watered by comet dust, stewarded by humans with massive butterfly wins that converted starlight into bio-electricity? Frolicking with friendly aliens species? It was wonderful and magical to a fifteen-year-old. Rereading these Hyperion books now, I can’t say these ideas have the same grab as they used to. I’m too cynical about the possibility of tech-driven utopias these days to fully be taken in by it, to suspend disbelief.
A future where we’re all pumped full of gene-splicing nanotech, ripped away from anything natural, living in a culture driven by an adapt-or-die logic of self-directed evolution and eugenics, dependent on massive energy sources for containment fields so that even modified humans can stay alive in space… in Dan Simmon’s space opera, there are no downsides to this way of life. It’s all breathless gee-whiz optimism, sweeping descriptions of marvelous Ouster technology and space battles, lots of cool space battles. Everything works perfectly for them. There’s no melancholy, no depression, no problems adapting the human psyche to life in the stars.
But what interests me these days is not the optimism of this kind of world — a world that very well might await us in the future — but the downsides, the fucked up things that happen, the ridiculousness of making star children out of barely self-aware apes like us. What’s the daily grind like for a humanoid space mosquito that glides through an asteroid belt all day and night? It can’t all be great, right? There has to be some tragedy? Some everyday comedy?
Rereading the Hyperion series, I started to wonder if maybe Dan Simmons ever came across the biocosmists, the weird group of revolutionary futurist-anarchist poets who were active during and directly after the Russian Revolution. Probably he hadn’t ever heard of them, as they were only resurrected in the English-speaking wold in the last decade or so. Still, the biocosmists seemed to have propagandized similar kinds of human space-based utopias — but from a radical communist/anarchist perspective. As I understand it, they advocated giving total freedom to the human race to be whatever it wants, including living forever and adapting itself to living in the stars and spreading out across the universe.
Their vision came out of the early 20th century, when belief in the power of technology was boundless. Technology was god; there was no limit to how it can be used to liberate mankind from oppression. Even space was no obstacle!
Dan Simmons is not avant-garde commie, as far I can tell. He was influenced by the new capitalist tech prophets of the dot com age when he was writing this book — by people like Kevin Kelly, a born again evangelical who was predicting a tech rapture from his perch at Wired magazine. But the technophilia of the industrial age knowns no ideological strife: tech utopianists on both the left and right flanks of our society agree pretty much on everything — everything except who gets to control the allocation of capital and to what end it is deployed.
So like I said, it’s hard for me to get excited by Hyperion’s space utopia these days. Hell, turns out even basic body modification tech like breast implants come with horrific downsides, downsides long hidden by doctors and the industry.
And anyway, as far as this genetic modification and human-directed evolution business is concerned, the scenarios I see playing out in the near future are darker, more cynical, comic. A few ideas come to mind: One would be able to solve the housing crisis by evolving homeless people to adapt to their homeless state. You could, for instance, genetically modify them to carry around tiny little shacks on their backs like hermit crabs. Or have them grow fur so they’ll keep warm and be comfortable sleeping rough on the pavement. Naturally, you’d want all your homeless to evolve hardier stomachs to consume all sorts of garbage and compostable stuffs. Why change society when you change the human to fit into it?
That’s the direction that David Cronenberg went with his last film, Crimes of the Future. If the world you live in is totally polluted with toxic plastic, the human being must evolve — evolve to be a plastic eater.
—Yasha Levine
PS: One thing I didn’t write about is how Dan Simmons tries so hard to be Jack Vance in these books. He fails spectacularly, too. Where Vance creates his fantastic worlds with economy and class and wit, Simmons goes for a bloated McMansion prose style: crude and humorless and can’t stop piling on the cultural and literary references.
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Oh man, I've been reading a lot of SF lately, and Hyperion is one I actually had assigned in high school for a sci-fi English class (it was that teacher's last year at my school, so they finally let him teach it). I think you're pretty dead-on, as I recall (and from overhearing snippets of the audiobook when my wife was listening to it).
But have you read Ilium and Olympios? More Simmons, more space opera, more literary allusions, so many literary allusions. Aaaaaaaand some pretty heavy-handed, ugly Zionism. The Voynix, for example: huge, servile insectoids who we later find out were developed by some global caliphate of the future past; who attack Jerusalem when our heroes are there, repeatedly buzzing "KILL THE JEW;" who later beseige our heroes' tiny settlement, attacking them by...yup, that's right, THROWING ROCKS.
When I read these in 2008 or 9, I didn't put all of that together. But when I started paying actual attention to Israel, and heard "rock-throwing" as the magic justification for use of force, I recall the feeling I had of "SIMMONS YOU MOTHERFUCKER" I had when the penny finally dropped.
Other than that they're pretty fun, though.