The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2)

by Dan Simmons

“Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” —NORBERT WIENER, God and Golem, Inc.

May there not be superior beings amused with any graceful, though instinctive attitude my mind may fall into, as I am entertained with the alertness of a Stoat or the anxiety of a Deer? Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine … By a superior being our reasonings may take the same tone—though erroneous they may be fine— This is the very thing in which consists poetry …” —JOHN KEATS, in a letter to his brother

The orange juice was fresh squeezed. The bacon was crisp and authentic.

She kept her eyes on me as she lifted a strip of bacon with lacquered nails and took a careful bite. Hermund Philomel grunted as he read something agreeable on the folded financial pages.

I might have had a few too many Scotches, but they hadn’t impaired my awareness.

all the shouts, screams, cries, and obscenities of battle which predate any media besides air and the human voice. It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

“In the case of the Core and the hypothetical UI,” I said, “God is the creature, not the creator. Perhaps a god must create the lesser beings in contact with it in order for it to feel any responsibility for them.”

Web citizens—especially Web citizens with power and influence—were not used to being denied access to new experiences, and for the Hegemony, all-out war remained one of the few experiences still untried.

It was rumored that the original farcaster prototypes had offered no sensation during transition and that the AI and human designers had altered the machinery to add that vague prickling, ozone-charged feeling to give the traveler a sense of having traveled.

I looked away, returning to the thoughts that had preoccupied me since

“Time’s bite has never been mythical,” I said, surprising myself with such a cheap bit of homespun philosophy.

“Do you think a sculptor wishes to defeat the clay? Does a painter attack the canvas? For that matter, does an eagle or a Thomas hawk assault the sky?”

The Web seemed both random in design and dwarfed by the sheer size of the galaxy … and both of these impressions were accurate reflections of reality.

Lamia watched the older man pace up and down, his movements as elegant and relaxed as a cat’s, and she realized that both observations were true but neither could counteract the personal magnetism the priest radiated. She wondered if the men sensed it.

the thin air leached the sound of any authority.

In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”

Silenus returned to himself in that process of allowing the world to rush in once more, much like the return to the senses following orgasm. Only the descent of the writer to the world was more painful as he or she returned, trailing clouds of glory which quickly dissipated in the mundane flow of sensory trivia.

she was scared. But she was with Peter Pan, at last. And Neverland beckoned.

Pain and darkness have been our lot since the Fall of Man. But there must be some hope that we can rise to a higher level … that consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.”

in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave. Faith—true faith—was trusting in that love.

“If one is to steal, steal from the forgotten masters.”

Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.

The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

I saw no one else during the walk.

The only light came from three subtle lamps recessed in the ceiling: perfect for reading, but not so bright as to compromise the cathedral quality of the little room.

Who alive can say, “Thou art no Poet; mayst not tell thy dreams”? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purposed to rehearse Be Poet’s or Fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

It is hard to die. Harder to live.

the layers of self-replicating/ self-deprecating/ self-amusing proteins between the layers of clay]

[When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]

[A lesser light asks Ummon What are the activities of a sramana> Ummon answers I have not the slightest idea The dim light then says Why haven’t you any idea> Ummon replies I just want to keep my no-idea]

Your own UI is essentially triune/ composed as it is of one part Intellect/ one part Empathy/ and one part the Void Which Binds

Dan Simmons somehow meaningfully and eloquently pulls together Christianity, eastern philosophy, and science fiction AI junk in just a couple of pages

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity.”

“I’m just an observer, Monsignor. I wait and watch and dream. Little burden there.”

“The best lack all conviction,” he thought, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“This is no stimsim or dream. Or rather, no more one than the rest of our lives have been.” “Why did they bring us here?”

“Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature. Worse than that, Duré, it is an evolutionary dead end.”

We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, these limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain. We are destined and designed to bear our pain with us, hugging it tight to our bellies like the young Spartan thief hiding a wolf cub so it can eat away our insides.

In the end, it doesn’t matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn’t matter a damn bit. We’re no avatars, no sons of god or man. We’re only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

Come a little closer\\\ The lesser light came nearer and Ummon shouted Be off with you]

The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not.

In the end, thought Sol, past logic and hope, it is dreams and the love of those dearest to us that form Abraham’s answer to God.

Imagining in excited reverie That the future years had come, Dancing to a frenzied drum, Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.…