Ultimate Guide to Hyperion (Part One)

0:00 Hyperion is often cited as one of the best modern sci-fi series out there. Over the years, I've made several videos covering various aspects of it. Due to popular demand, this video will contain a compilation of all of my Hyperion videos so far, with some visual improvements, some added excerpts, and some corrections.

0:19 I know a lot of you have been asking for this for a while, so here it is. He closed his eyes, but the lightning was visible through closed eyelids. He remembered the glint of ice crystals blowing through the tumpled ruins on the low hills near the Time Tombs, and the colder gleam of still on the strike's impossible tree of metal thorns.

0:40 He remembered screams in the night, and the hundred faucet ruby and blood gaze of the strike itself. Hyperion. In the sudden silence, he lay thinking about how insane it would be to return to Hyperion. During his eleven years as consul on the distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious church of the strike had allowed a dozen barges of off-world pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens around the time tombs north of the mountains.

1:10 No one had returned. And that had been in normal times, when the strike had been prisoner to the tides of time and forces no one understood, and the anti-antropic fields had been contained to a few dozen meters around the time tombs, and there had been no threat of ouster invasion. The consul thought of the strike, free to wander everywhere on Hyperion, of the millions of indigenes and thousands of hegemony citizens helpless before a creature which defied physical laws and which communicated only through death, and he shivered despite the warmth of the cabin.

1:47 Hyperion. The Hyperion Cantos is a series of four science fiction novels written by Dan Simmons. The story takes place hundreds of years in our future, at a time where humankind has formed the hegemony, spreading out to many planets. Mankind also now had the technology to instantly travel from any world connected in the far casting web.

2:17 The books mainly center, however, on the far-off planet of Hyperion, where the merciless Strike resides. The creature known as the Shrike in the Hyperion Cantos is one of the most intriguing characters to come out of modern science fiction. The creature, which was named for the carnivorous Passerin birds of Old Earth, terrorizes the world of Hyperion.

2:42 The Shrike is a being of mysterious origin and incredible power. The Shrike appeared in the books as forearmed and vaguely humanoid. Its entire body was comprised of some strange metal similar to steel, with countless barbs and spikes covering it. Throughout the series, the Shrike's goals and motivations are ambiguous.

3:06 It seems to act with no rhyme or reason. The Shrike first appeared on Hyperion with the arrival of the Time Tombs. Six strange structures in a distant valley on the world. The Time Tombs were constructed at some point in the distant future, and were sent hurtling backwards through time. It is assumed early on that the Shrike itself was also created at some point in the distant future, but for an unknown purpose.

3:37 On the planet Hyperion, the being called the Shrike impales its victims upon the Tree of Pain, a giant structure made of a similar material to the creature itself. Impaled upon the spikes of the Shrike's tree, its victims would be condemned to suffer eternally, fully conscious and aware of their own agony.

3:58 The Shrike's victims could potentially number in the millions. The Shrike had the power to move through the void which binds in order to travel through time and space. It could travel anywhere, but for the vast majority of its existence, it chose to reside solely on the planet Hyperion in a territory that it had chosen.

4:22 The strike could move so fast that it often appeared to be in two places at once, and its many thorns and spikes could easily butcher any opponent it faced. Normal weapons had no effect on the strike, and the creature often intentionally chose to mutilate its opponents in exceedingly horrifying and painful ways.

4:45 Perhaps due to the ambiguity of its origins and due to the godlike power of the strike, the Church of the Final Atonement was formed after the strike first appeared on Hyperion. The Strike Church revered the entity, naming it the Lord of Pain. Many within the galactic hegemony believe the church to be a cult.

5:07 The church believes that one day the strike will unleash its rage unto the inhabited worlds of the galaxy and punish the living for the sins of mankind. It is suggested in the later books that the strike may have been the final result of something that evolved alongside the technocor, the entity created through the amalgamation of all sentient artificial intelligence.

5:33 It was called the Reaper Program. The Reaper program was originally designed to maintain order amongst the first AIs, and as the eons passed and the AIs formed into the Technocore, the Reaper program continuously grew and evolved as well, eventually creating the Shrike. The Strike acted as the avatar to the ultimate intelligence, an AI god created by the Technocore in the distant future.

6:02 It had no true motive of its own. It is somewhat implied that the strike had been sent back in time to seek out the human counterpart to the ultimate intelligence, which was the collected conscience of humanity. The ultimate human intelligence would reside somewhere in the void which binds. It is possible that the strike's tree of pain was intended to draw out the human intelligence, so that the strike could eliminate it before it was ever a threat to its AI equivalent.

6:34 The Shrike is of key importance in the Hyperion Cantos. It appears in each of the four novels and is a part of every major character arc in the series. At some point during the hegemony, the bizarre structures known as the Time Tombs appeared on the distant world of Hyperion. It was thought that the large objects had been constructed at some point in the distant future and had been sent backward through time, just as the creature known as the Shrike had been.

7:19 There were six structures in total: the obelisk, the Sphinx, the Strike Palace, the Cave Tombs, the Jade Tomb, and the Crystal Monolith. The Time Tombs lay in a valley. A low obelisk glowed softly. A stone sphinx seemed to absorb the light. A complex structure of twisted pylons threw shadows on to itself.

7:44 Other tombs were silhouettes against the rising sun. Each of the tombs had a door, and each door was open. Kassad knew that they had been open when the first explorers discovered the tombs and that the structures were empty. More than three centuries of searching for hidden rooms, tombs, vaults, and passageways had been fruitless.

8:08 The Time Tombs emanated an anti-entrophic field which created temporal distortions called the Time Tides. The effects varied between each tomb. These Time Tides increased over time. Each tomb also had a specific purpose, but not all of them are revealed in the series. The crystal monolith, for instance, was named for its crystalline structure, but practically nothing is known of its hidden nature.

8:39 The Sphinx, on the other hand, was explained in much greater detail. The Sphinx, which resembled the creatures described in Old Earth myth, was a structure full of narrow and uneven halls, which varied widely in width and led to nowhere in particular. It also contained many strange and unusual shapes in its design.

9:03 Eventually it is understood that the Sphinx is a portal through time. The Sphinx led forward into the time when the time tombs were first created. Hundreds made attempts to enter the Sphinx's portal, but all failed except three. And it is not known why a select few are allowed to enter, while the vast majority are not.

9:26 The Strike Palace was named as such due to its similar appearance to the Strike creature. The structure was domed with many jagged arches and buttresses, giving it a bladed and thorned look. Eventually, it is revealed that the Strike's tree of pain was in fact not a physical tree at all, but an advanced simulation.

9:50 Within the Strike's palace lay countless humans connected by neural interface. Within the simulation they experienced incomprehensible amounts of pain, pain which the strike broadcasted into the void which binds, attempting to draw out the enemy of the AI ultimate intelligence, the human ultimate intelligence.

10:13 Like the crystal monolith, almost nothing is known of the nature or purpose of the cave tombs, just that they are a group of caves which exist in the Valley of the Time Tombs. The Jade Tomb, however, stands out due to the green glow it emits. The entrance to the labyrinth of Hyperion also waited at the base of the Jade Tombs.

10:37 Hyperion was one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, which each contained a mysterious system of underground tunnels. The labyrinths were created by some long-gone race which the humans of the hegemony named the builders. The actual purpose of the Jade Tombs may in some way be related to some exotic ousters who have been bred to survive on gaseous planets.

11:04 The purpose of the obelisk tomb remains ambiguous, though it is vaguely suggested that it could contain the Shrike army glimpsed by the character Fedmun Kassad at some point in the future. This is not clear, however. The obelisk could also in some way be related to the Brotherhood of Muir, a seemingly religious group interested in shaping mankind's destiny, who vanished from galactic society after the hegemony fell.

11:34 Dan Simmons leaves much of the detail concerning the purpose and the origin of the Time Tombs open, though it seems to be clear that they are tied directly into the purpose of the strike. Before the existence of the hegemony, the cradle of humanity, Earth, had been destroyed by the event afterward referred to as the Big Mistake.

12:27 It was said to be a catastrophic occurrence that caused the Earth to be consumed from the inside out by a man-created black hole. Over the course of 100 years, as the planet was annihilated from within, the Hajyra began, the mass diaspora of humankind from the planet Earth and into the stars. The results of the Hajyra, man's great exodus from the planet Earth, was the hegemony, which eventually would connect over 150 billion human beings inhabiting 200 planets.

13:00 There were also about 200 planets considered protectorate of the hegemony, which were only reachable through traditional means of space travel. These outback worlds were not connected by Farcaster or Fatline. This means that in traveling to these worlds, time debt is accumulated. For instance, two weeks traveling at near-light speed would equate to about one standard year relative to those outside of the ship.

13:27 The planet Hyperion was one of such worlds. The planet Hyperion stood out for several reasons. It was the location of the mysterious time tombs, which had appeared on the world at some point. They had been sent backward in time from some point in the future. Another reason was that Hyperion was the place where the Shrike resided, a deadly being which had appeared on the planet at the same time as the tombs.

13:54 The Church of the Final Atonement, or Shrike Church, built a temple on the world. The Shrike was their avatar, their lord of pain. Hundreds of thousands of believers from throughout the hegemony made the pilgrimage to the Shrike Temple. Hyperion was also one of the hegemony's nine labyrinthine worlds.

14:16 These worlds each contain strange complex underground tunnels. It is speculated that they had been created by some ancient long-gone race referred to in the series as the Builders. The hegemony of man's government consisted of a bicameral legislature, ruled by the Senate, the Senate CEO, who was essentially a president, and the All Thing.

14:41 The public forum which could be accessed by any member of the hegemony through comlogs, neuro implants through which citizens of the hegemony could be given information about the state of the empire. The All Thing had evolved a consciousness of its own. Through the All Thing, citizens were able to vote on a hundred different laws per day if they chose.

15:03 The All Thing was maintained by artificial intelligence systems and was dependent on Fatline and Farcaster technology. The hegemony's armed forces was collectively known as Force. Many of the soldiers were trained at the Olympus Command School, which was built on a dead volcano on the surface of the planet Mars, which was the first planet to be colonized during the Hajira after the Big Mistake.

15:28 Force contained four branches: a Marine Force, a Space Force, a Navy Force, and a ground force. The headquarters of Force was located on Tao Ceti Center, a planet less than 12 light years from Old Earth's solar system. Taoseti Center was the central world of inhabited space and the capital of the hegemony.

15:51 Tens of billions of humans lived there, on the surface, and among the ring of habitats and cities in orbit above the planet. Taoseti Center was also the center of the hegemony of man's Datum Plane Web Megasphere. The Datum Plans was the aggregate of all real-time networks generated by computer and AI.

16:11 The Web Megasphere was one of the two main data spheres within it. The other one was the Technocore Matrix. By communicating through members of its AI Council, the Technocore maintained an advisory position within the hegemony, making predictions for the government. The Technocore and the Hegemony government sustained a cooperative relationship, though the Technocore had a distant coldness, indicative of its inhuman nature.

16:39 For the hegemony, the Technocor also created many different technologies, most notably Farcasters and Fatline technology. Beyond the grip of the hegemony are the ousters. They were a society of humans spread throughout the galaxy who colonized the outer edges of human space. They had begun to set themselves apart from the rest of humankind during the beginning days of the Hajira.

17:04 In the four books of the Hyperion Cantos, the Ousters remain the enemy of the hegemony and later packs. Throughout the series, much about the actual nature of the ousters is revealed. Dan Simmons provides in the Hyperion Cantos a strange and mysterious and pretty scary universe. I love the fact that there are mysteries, like what the Technocore is really up to, or where the time tombs came from, or what exactly is the purpose of these labyrinthine worlds, and who exactly were these ancient builders, and do they still exist somewhere?

17:41 Dan Simmons is able to make his universe feel large and complex and even convoluted at times without it becoming overwhelming and without making it feel like a non-stop barrage of names and places that don't seem real. The hegemony of man controlled the majority of the worlds that humankind had inhabited.

18:02 Though the citizens, through connection with the all thing, could participate in democracy, the hegemony was essentially a dictatorship led by senators from various worlds. Many planets had been forced into the hegemony, and no planet was permitted to leave. Those who resisted would risk being slaughtered by the military arm of the hegemony, which, as I mentioned, was called force.

18:27 Though the hegemony of mankind marked a great achievement for humanity, even away from the planet Earth, humans faced great struggles and oppression. The hegemony of man, perhaps, like all empires, was destined one day to fall. Just a heads up, this video will contain some spoilers for the Hyperion Cantos.

18:48 In this video, I will go over the significant confirmed dates from the four Hyperion books. This video will also include dates from before the start of the Empire, known as the hegemony of man, more than 2,000 years before, in fact. In the final book of the Hyperion Cantos, Rise of Endemion, it was claimed by Aenea that Jesus of Nazareth was the first human being to truly understand the void which binds.

19:16 Christ had stayed long enough within the void that he had ascended to what Aenea referred to as the second level. He could speak the language of the dead. While dying on the cross, Jesus was able to move through space-time, appearing to his disciples in the future. And liberated from the restrictions of his time, by his glimpse of the timelessness of the void which binds, Jesus realized that it was he who was the key, not his teachings, not scriptures based on his ideas, not groveling adulation to him, or the suddenly evolving Old Testament God in which he solidly believed, but him, Jesus, a human man whose cells carried the decryption code to unlock the portal.

20:04 Jesus knew that his ability to open that door lay not in his mind or soul, but in his skin and bones and cells, literally in his DNA. These events, as described by Aeneah in the final book in the series Rise of Endemion, would have occurred around the year 33 CE, the epoch CE denoting the Common Era.

20:27 The next notable date within the Hyperion Cantos would be 2038 CE, when old Palestine, which had become its own nation for a short time, was destroyed by nuclear jihad. The year 2143 CE is said to mark the founding of the hegemony of man. This is also the year zero PC or present calendar, which can be used for days following the founding.

20:51 Though this year is marked as the beginning of the hegemony, it wasn't until nearly a century later that the fate of old Earth would be sealed. In the year 2238 CE, the event known as the Big Mistake occurred, in which an experiment performed by a team of physicists was said to have gone wrong. This created a black hole which would devour the Earth from the inside out over the course of the next 100 years.

21:18 Sometime after the event occurred, the ousters left the planet Earth. It is not until the year 2282 CE that the Hagyra starts. Humankind fled the planet in the mass diaspora into the stars. It would be several more decades before the planet itself would succumb to the black hole at its center, and there were still those who refused to leave.

21:40 Martin Silenus, one of the main characters of the series, and the only one who lived on Earth, was born on the planet in the year 2318 CE. Silenus left his home planet in the year 2338 as it was consumed from within. The death of Earth. The creature called the Shrike first appeared on The Outback World of Hyperion in the year 2533.

22:04 It killed Sad King Billy, friend of Martin Silenus in the year 2554 CE, inside the city of Poets. In the year 2732, Catholic priest Father Duray, who would eventually become infected by the parasite known as the Cruciform, would become stranded on the planet Hyperion. Seven years later, Rachel Weintraub, daughter of Saul Weintraub, visited the Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion and contracted Merlin sickness, a mysterious disease which caused her to age backward every 24 hours, losing another day of her life.

22:39 In the year 2761, the anti-entropic fields surrounding the Time Tombs began to expand, and the final strike pilgrimage began. The tree ship Yggdrasil, a spaceship created and used by the Brotherhood of Muir, is used to deliver seven pilgrims to the world of Hyperion. During his eleven years as consul on that distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious church of the Strike had allowed a dozen barges of off-world pilgrims to depart for the windswept barrens around the Time Tombs north of the mountains.

23:14 No one had returned. The pilgrims arrive on the planet Hyperion and make their way to the Valley of the Time Tombs in the year 2764. In the year 2852 CE, the hegemony of man collapses due to the destruction of the world web. Without the Farcasters, the hegemony could not function. The dates following the fall of the hegemony can be marked with the epoch AF or After the Fall.

23:40 Raoul Endemion, the main character of the final two novels, was born in the year 247 AF. The book Endemion opens in the year 274 after the fall, or 3126 CE. After the fall of the hegemony, Pax became the main government of the people of the galaxy. Pax was under the control of the Catholic Church who possessed a large military divided into four groups: Swiss Guard, Home Guard, Fleet, and Ground Force.

24:10 Under the rule of Pope Julius, the Church developed successful methods for resurrection through use of a parasite called the Cruciform. The Pax era would last 300 years before it would be brought down. The Pax era would be followed by the Aenean era, though specific dates are not mentioned. From the time Aeneas says Jesus was said to have traveled in the void which binds in 33 CE to 274 after the fall when the final book opens, approximately 3100 years pass.

24:45 The ousters varied widely in culture and physiology because they had adapted to the environments of many different worlds. The ousters developed a number of augmentations, allowing them to become more suitable for the environments in which they lived. Some appear mostly human except for elongated and animal-like limbs, and some have webbed fingers or coats of fur.

25:10 All of these differences are genetically superficial, however. All ousters are in fact human and have the potential to reproduce with other humans within the galaxy. The genetic adaptations were necessary and self-inflicted. They were required in order for the ousters to survive even in the vacuum of space.

25:31 Ouster angels are a division of ousters who are fully adapted to the vacuum. They exist adjacent to other clusters of ousters in orbital foresterings, or other such microgravity conditions. Angels can feed off sunlight and possess the ability to communicate via bioradio transmissions. Ousters came to be before humanity's big mistake, which would render the planet Earth uninhabitable and the Hajira which followed.

26:02 In the beginning days of space colonization, numerous ships were sent out into the vacuum of space, headed for faraway star systems. These ships contained altered human beings, embedded with nanotechnology which could allow them to adapt quickly to extraterrestrial environments. These humans sent out into the cosmos in cryogenic chambers would go on to form the groups referred to as the ousters.

26:30 Because of the need to survive in space, a lot of the technological innovation among the ousters was related to the optimization of life in low-gravity environments. For example, many ousters had implanted wings which could be extended outward. Soldiers wore suits which included mechanical tails serving as extra limbs or weaponry.

26:54 Ouster ships also possessed these tentacle-like appendages, capable of gripping enemy ships. Though they were thought of by many in the hegemony as backward barbarians, the ousters actually had created incredible works of engineering. Eventually the ousters would even help with the engineering of the Star Tree Biosphere, which would be home to Templars, Ousters, and even alien species.

27:22 The Star Tree was technically a Dyson spear. The concept of the Dyson Spear was first described by Olaf Stapledon in the book Starmaker, but it was popularized and named for Freeman Dyson, who wrote in his paper Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation, published in 1960, that such a megastructure would be a necessity to a sufficiently advanced enough civilization.

27:50 A Dyson spear would be the only way that such a civilization could hope to possess enough power to supply its energy needs. A Dyson spear could harness the power of a star by completely encompassing it. The Star Tree of the Hyperion Cantos is one of many versions of a Dyson spear to show up in science fiction.

28:13 The ouster home swarm itself was constructed of many asteroids, kept inside of containment field tubes. Water streams connected several of these tubes, allowing the ousters to travel between different habitats. The ousters who had sequestered themselves from the rest of humanity during the Hajira understood the damage that Farcasting caused to the void which binds.

28:37 Due to this, they were against the use of them for transportation. The ousters also only used conventional methods of space travel, which means it took them much longer to move from place to place. Ousters are also known to form migration clusters. Swarms of ships which traveled through the stars together.

28:57 These clusters of ships can number in the thousands and contain many kinds of vessels, small ships which consisted of only a single person, and even terraformed asteroids, home to tens of thousands of humans. Throughout the hegemony's existence, tensions between them and the ousters had continued to increase.

29:18 Unlike the hegemony who chose to colonize and terraform worlds, the ousters had chosen to colonize space itself, harvesting the resources of comets and asteroids. Several armed conflicts took place among the hegemony's outback worlds, and these tensions would eventually lead to a war between the hegemony and the ousters.

29:39 The ousters would, however, outlive the hegemony and later even Pax, continuing to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing universe in which they lived. The consul, who had spent time among the ousters, said this in Book 1 of the Hyperion Cantos. I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a swarm.

30:02 Their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their microorbital forest and migrating rivers, and 10,000 colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Olsters have done what web humanity has not in the past millennia. Evolved. While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of old earth life, the ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.

30:42 I believe that it is plausible to assume that if the ousters continue to evolve, that eventually their DNA will diverge enough from normal human genetics that they will no longer truly be human, but perhaps several new species. Then again, who is to say that it would be they that were inhuman, and not the others who had chosen to stagnate, to forego evolution for familiarity or security?

31:10 Perhaps it is the ousters who are honoring the natural progression of the human species. It has been often said that nature is cruel. All life on Earth is believed to have evolved from the same single-celled organism. Over the course of 3.5 billion years, those single cells diversified, multiplied, became multiple-celled organisms, developed organs, bones, and limbs.

31:39 Life eventually filled every niche on the planet, each species learning to survive in its own way while constantly being tested by Mother Nature. But the cruelest fact about life has always been that in order to survive, it must feed upon itself and compete against itself. Life consumes life, and there are many ways of doing it.

32:04 A butcher bird is a type of bird found mostly in African and Eurasian countries. It is a type of bird known as a shrike. Once a strike captures its prey, it impales the body upon sharp thorns or spikes. This allows the strike to bit by bit tear the flesh from the creature it has captured, eating it in small chunks.

32:28 These birds are also known to be territorial. They defended their acclaimed areas against rivals. The idea of a strike has been used in fiction multiple times, but Dan Simmons' Hyperion, in my opinion, makes the most interesting use of the attributes of the strike bird within a fictional creature. I've made several videos discussing the Hyperion Cantos.

32:53 You can find those videos in a playlist linked in the description. The Hyperion Cantos is an epic science fiction series following in the footsteps of the work of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Jack Vance. In the Hyperion Cantos, mankind forms an interstellar hegemony after Earth was destroyed and an experiment gone wrong.

33:14 The hegemony would eventually connect at least 200 worlds. Fatline connections allowed communication between worlds, while what was called Farcaster technology allowed for instantaneous travel between connected planets. There were many humans who lived outside of the influence of the hegemony, such as the ousters, and many inhabited worlds not connected by Farcaster or Fatline.

33:40 Such worlds were known as outback worlds. The world Hyperion is, of course, an outback planet. The world is Earth-like and contains three continents Equus, Aquila, and Ursus, as well as a single small moon. The sun of Hyperion was said to shine brighter than the Sun of Earth, though it was smaller in mass.

34:04 Hyperion was also known to be one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, but we will talk more about that in another video. Other than this, Hyperion had two other things that made it an astounding world. The time tombs, structures of unknown origins, which emitted anti-entropic fields. The tombs seemed to be moving backwards in time.

34:28 And of course, the creature sometimes called the Lord of Pain, the Shrike. It was vaguely man-shaped, but in no way human. It stood at least three meters tall. Even when it was at rest, the silvered surface of the thing seemed to shift and flow like mercury suspended in mid-air. The reddish glow from the crosses set into the tunnel walls reflected from sharp surfaces and glinted on the curved metal blades protruding from the thing's forehead, fore-wrist, oddly jointed elbows, knees, armored back, and thorax.

35:05 I've covered the strike and its incredible abilities already in this video here. The strike's appearance itself is terrifying enough until you find out what it actually does once it decides to make you its victim. Like the Shrike butcher birds I mentioned in the beginning of this video, the Hyperion Strike also impales its prey upon spikes, using the glistening metal thorns of its tree of pain.

35:34 Shimmering, mirage-like, a tree of still thorns appeared out of the haze, and a sudden dust storm of ochre sand. The thing seemed to fill the valley, rising at least two hundred meters to the heights of the cliffs. Branches shifted, dissolved, and reformed like the elements of a poorly tuned hologram.

35:57 Sunlight danced on five-meter-long thorns. Corpses of ouster men and women, all naked, were impaled on at least a score of these thorns. Other branches held other bodies. Not all were human. The final tree, or the tree of pain, is a key part of the strike legend among those who worshipped him as the Lord of Pain.

36:19 When the Shrike chose not to completely destroy its victims outright, he brought them to this tree. The tree itself does not truly exist as a physical tree. It is eventually revealed to be an ultra-advanced simulation. The victims he chose to impale were brought to his strike palace and neurally plugged into his simulation.

36:42 The pain he put them through was exquisite. They eternally suffer the torment of the impaled just as fully as if they were real, only without the eventual release of death. There were endless victims impaled upon the tree of pain. The strength's motivations are largely mysterious. Its power seems almost godlike, and its cruelty is unmatched.

37:09 Perhaps one of the most terrifying things about the creature is its seeming indifference. It does not seem to feel pain or fear or happiness or empathy. It merely acts to work towards its strange goal. More about the strike's motivations are eventually revealed in the series. But the essential horror of the strike arrives from the fact that for most of the time, we have no idea why it does what it does, or wants what it wants.

37:41 Only that it is capable of great and terrifying things. The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons consists of four books: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endemion, and The Rise of Endemion. The first book of the series opens up in the 29th century and follows seven humans as they make the journey to the outback world of Hyperion in order to partake in the Shrike pilgrimage.

38:07 The Technocore, the amalgamation of all Sintient AI, have dubious motivations throughout much of the books. The hegemony of man maintains a seeming alliance with the core, and the core has also gifted several groundbreaking technologies to humanity. The Technocore advises the hegemony through avatars of its own creation, using cybrids, beings that are grown from human DNA, but whose true being exists inside of the Technocore itself.

38:34 The Technocore also manages the all thing in real time. In this time, humans of the hegemony were all linked through the All Thing. Through the All Thing, they could vote on legislation, communicate with each other with ease, and instantaneously access whatever information they needed. But this was only possible on worlds connected by Fatline Technology.

38:57 The world of Hyperion was one of the hundreds of inhabited worlds of the galactic hegemony, which was not connected by Farcaster or Fatline Technology. Because of this, journeys to the world of Hyperion had to be made by way of conventional space travel. At the start of Hyperion, seven pilgrims have been chosen by the Shrike Church, also known as the Church of the Final Atonement, to partake in the Shrike Pilgrimage.

39:23 The Shrike is a legendary being that appeared on Hyperion at the same time as the mysterious objects known as the Time Tombs, which were believed to have been sent backwards in time from some distant future point. The Shrike Church believed that the Strike was the Lord of Pain and would one day be unleashed upon the universe to end the human race.

39:44 The Church of the Final Atonement had granted many believers the opportunity to enter into Shrike Territory, undertaking the pilgrimage on the world of Hyperion. Only death had waited for them. Our seven pilgrims in the beginning of this series are believed to be the final seven who will ever take this pilgrimage due to the fact that the anti-entropic fields surrounding the Time Tombs are expanding, and the Shrike's territory is increasing, whereas previously it had been bound to a single area on Hyperion.

40:17 Each of the pilgrims has a different reason for journeying into Shrike territory, though they are all going into it with the understanding that they will all likely die. During his eleven years as consul on that distant and enigmatic world, the mysterious Church of the Shrike had allowed a dozen barges of off-world pilgrims to depart for the windswept barons around the time tombs north of the mountains.

40:43 No one had returned. The seven pilgrims are as follows: Father Hoyt, a priest of the Catholic Church. The consul, essentially a hegemony diplomat and politician, a poet by the name of Martin Salinas, who had been born on Earth before its destruction. Saul Weintraub and his now infant daughter Rachel, who has a strange illness which forces her to age backwards in time.

41:08 Braun Lamia, a private investigator, who had been rescued by the Church of the Final Atonement, Fedmin Kassad, the soldier. And Hetmestin, a Templar, who is in fact the captain of the living tree ship which transports them to the world of Hyperion. The first book in the Hyperion Cantos is based on the structure of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tells.

41:31 During their journey, each of the seven pilgrims takes turns recounting the strange events which led them to be on the Shrike pilgrimage. At the same time, these seven partake in the pilgrimage, an ouster attack is underway. The ousters were among the humans in the universe not under the influence of the galactic hegemony.

41:51 The ousters had inhabited many different kinds of worlds and augmented themselves to fit the various environments in which they lived, which caused them to seem less human to the members of the hegemony. The first book in the series concludes after each of the seven pilgrims have finished recounting their harrowing tales, each of which unveils more about this universe.

42:12 The world of Hyperion plays some key role in each of the stories. At the end of the book, the pilgrims are finally approaching the Time Tombs, known to be guarded by the being known as the Shrike, after a long and dangerous journey on the world of Hyperion during an ouster attack from above. The second book, Fall of Hyperion, starts up directly following the events of the first book and concludes the story of the seven pilgrims.

42:37 Hi guys, the YouTube algorithm demands the sacrifice. If you enjoy my channel, please click the like button. It helps the YouTube algorithm see my videos and notify people when I upload. In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos, the world of Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine worlds. Each of the labyrinthine worlds contains a series of complex tunnels beneath its surface.

43:01 These mysterious tunnels are more than 750,000 years old. They had been there long before mankind ever set foot on these worlds. Virtually nothing is known about the constructors of these tunnels. The ancient race, whoever they may have been, were given the name the builders by the humans of the hegemony.

43:22 The first colonist arrived on the world of Hyperion more than 400 years before the start of the first book in the Hyperion Cantos. Among the colonists were the Bakura, though they were not called such at the time. These settlers were brought to the planet by way of conventional space travel, but the drop ship carrying them ended up crashing on the planet's surface.

43:46 The surviving settlers took up residence in the mountainous area of the planet. They would eventually discover the secret of this world the labyrinths. After exploring the labyrinths, the settlers eventually. Came into contact with a cross-shaped parasite, which they eventually gave the name, the Cruciform.

44:06 The Cruciform gave the settlers the power to resurrect after death. The parasite was somehow able to store its host DNA after bonding. When the host died, the parasite would restore the host's body as well as memories. But this was also a curse. Once bonded to the parasite, the host was also forever bonded to the area.

44:30 The Bakura could not leave the mountainous region they inhabited. And also with each successive resurrection, mental capacity was diminished, and eventually the ability to reproduce was lost as well. They had no genitalia and were devoid of sex entirely. This is how the settlers became the Bakura, the physically and mentally stunted humanoids that inhabited the cleft in the mountainous region of the Aquila continent.

44:58 The facial features of the Bakura were said to resemble the genetic defects which were often associated with Down syndrome. Seventy Bakura survived the initial crash landing on the world of Hyperion. Several centuries after this, the 67-year-old Jesuit priest, Paul De Ray, would encounter the Bakura after being exiled to the outcast world of Hyperion.

45:22 The details of what happened to Father De Ray on Hyperion are recounted by Father Hoyt during the beginning of the pilgrimage to Hyperion, which takes place in the first book in the series. De Ray's fanatic loyalty to his faith had been the reason for his exile. He had attempted to create false evidence for pre-human Christian society on the labyrinthine world of Armagast.

45:47 He had falsified archaeological records during his time researching the labyrinths of Armagast. Hyperion was his punishment. Early on during his time on Hyperion, he had paired with a man named Tuk, who would be his guide to the high country of Hyperion. After weeks they made it to their destination, the cleft, where he had intended to set up an ethnological research center.

46:12 The flame forest near the cleft made it unreachable for most of the Hyperion year, and the region was believed to be uninhabited by most. But Father Duray knew of the Bakura and intended to study them in the context of the retrograde cultural effects of their extreme isolation, over adaptation, and inbreeding.

46:34 Eighty-seven days into his exile on Hyperion, they set up camp on the gigantic expansive cliff. Hyperion was not like Earth. Tectonically speaking, the planet was dead. Though it had oceans, the continents did not drift. The cleft was not formed by rushing water as the Grand Canyon of Earth had been, but instead had been caused by a weakening of the planet's crust through long periods of freezing and thawing throughout the billions of years of the world's existence.

47:04 That combined with the flow of underground rivers led to the collapse that created the cleft. The cleft ran across the entirety of the mountainous region of the continent of Aquila. The cleft! I had almost forgotten our destination. This morning, stumbling through the fog, leaping from one wet rock to another alongside the widening stream, I took a leap to a final boulder, teetered there, regained my balance, and looked straight down above a waterfall that dropped almost 3,000 meters to mist, rock, and river far below.

47:41 Eighty-eight days into his exile on Hyperion, his guide Took is murdered. De Ray discovered his body after leaving his tent one morning. His throat had been cut. There had been no sign of anyone else. De Ray even climbed to a high boulder to search the area using binoculars. But there was no one, no trace of the murderer.

48:04 Took had been no more than four meters from him during the time of his death, and yet Father Duray had heard nothing. The murderers cut his throat while he slept. I heard no cry. I did dream, however. Dreams of Simpha ministering to me during my fever. Dreams of cool hands touching my neck and chest, touching the crucifix I have worn since childhood.

48:31 I stood over Took's body, staring at the wide dark circle where his blood had soaked into Hyperion's uncaring soil, and I shivered at the thought that the dream had been more than a dream, that the hands had touched me in the night. A week later, Father Duray finally encounters the Bakura, the people he had come to study.

48:54 Outwardly, the Bakura showed no signs of aggression, and they did not carry weapons. They appeared to be androgynous, and all of them were bald. The people who had approached me so silently were short, none came higher than my shoulder, and swathed in roughly woven dark robes that covered them from neck to toe.

49:14 When they moved, as some did now, they seemed to glide over the rough ground like raves. Father Duray was able to interpret the Bakura dialect using his Comlog device. The Bakura referred to themselves as the Three Score and Ten. After studying them for more than a day, he finally asked them if they had been responsible for the death of his companion Took.

49:37 The member of the group, which Doray believed to be the Alpha of the group, spoke up in response. We cut your companion's throat with sharpened stones and held him down and silent while he struggled. He died the true death. Why? I asked after a moment. My voice sounded as dry as a corn hus crumbling.

50:00 Why did he die the true death? said Alpha, still not looking up. Because all of his blood ran out, and he stopped breathing. No, I said. Why did you kill him? Alpha did not respond. But Betty, who may or may not have been female and Alpha's mate, looked up from her loom and said simply, To make him die.

50:26 Why? Continually their responses provided him with no insight as to why they had slain his guide. He began to wonder if his comlog had in fact not been working. Eventually he was in a rage. He asked them directly why they had spared his life, but not Tux. They all looked at him, but it was the Alpha that spoke.

50:49 You cannot be killed because you cannot die, said Alpha. You cannot die because you belong to the cruciform, and follow the way of the cross. The cruciform parasite that all of the Bakura possessed left the mark of the cross upon all those infected. The Bakura had spared Father De Ray because they had mistaken his crucifix for the cruciform.

51:14 Eventually the Bakura led De Ray to a large space within the cleft, where a large cross had stood on an altar. The place was ancient and had been carved there by intelligent hands. Father De Ray knew that the cross in the center must have been the cruciform the Bakura worshipped, and he knew it had been there for thousands of years, long before humankind had ever found Hyperion, or even left Old Earth, even before the days in which Christ was said to have walked the earth.

51:48 At first he believed that he had stumbled by chance on something that could change everything, evidence of a pre-human Christian civilization. But he was wrong. The Bakura eventually realized that De Ray was not actually of the cruciform as they were. Those not of the cruciform must die the true death, and her voice held the tone of complacent finality common to oft-repeated formulae and religious litanies.

52:17 It took the Bakura three days to decide the fate of Father De Ray, though he did not know what they meant. Finally, Alpha came close. You will become of the cruciform, he said softly. The Bakura led De Ray to the entrance to the labyrinths of Hyperion, and in the darkness of the labyrinths, Father De Ray came face to face with the legendary being known as the Shrike.

52:45 There came the slightest whisper of sound. No, not sound. A disturbance in the cool air, perhaps. And I turned in time to see something enter the chamber. The Bakura were still kneeling, their heads down, eyes lowered. I remained standing. My gaze never left the thing which moved among the kneeling Bakura.

53:10 So far I've made two videos about the being known as the Strike. You can find those videos linked in the Hyperion playlist in the description below. The Strike is a malevolent being of immense power and ambiguous origin that resides solely on the world of Hyperion. At that moment, I must have moved or made a sound, for large red eyes turned my way, and I found myself hypnotized by the dance of light within the multifaceted prisms there.

53:41 Not merely reflected light, but a fierce, blood-bright glow which seemed to burn within the creature's barbed skull and pulse in the terrible gem set where God meant eyes to be. The strike moved all around him, shifting through space and time. He could see his reflection distorted in the metallic body of the creature.

54:03 He felt exaltation and fear. He could not move or breathe. He waited for the embrace of the strike, but suddenly it was gone. The Bakura then placed a small cross-shaped item around his neck, a cruciform. The walls of the cave had been lined with them. It stopped glowing once it was removed from the walls of the place and was cool to the touch.

54:27 The Bakura told him that he would forever be of the cruciform, from this day forth. Duray did not understand the meaning until later, when he found that he could not remove it. It lay there, as if it were part of my flesh. I pulled and scraped and tore at the thung until it snapped and fell away. I clawed at the cross-shaped lump on my chest.

54:53 It did not come off. It was as if my flesh had sealed itself around the edges of the cruciform. Except for the scratches from my fingernails, there was no pain or physical sensation in the cruciform or surrounding flesh, only sheer terror in my soul at the thought of this thing attached to me. After performing scans upon himself, he realized that what the Bakura had said to him had been true.

55:20 He was in fact now truly of the cruciform. The scans indicated no invasion of foreign DNA. The cruciform on his chest, read as being composed of familiar tissue. It was his own DNA. Duray eventually comes to discover the regenerative abilities of the cruciform. But even after weeks of studying, he was no closer to understanding how the parasite actually worked.

55:48 He was being driven mad by the strangeness and the horror of it all. He wondered how long before he would become like the Bakura, sexless and simple. There is no doubt that I have discovered the ultimate in stagnant human societies. The Bakura have realized the human dream of immortality and have paid for it with their humanity and their immortal souls.

56:13 Eventually, Father De Ray decides that he will leave the place. The flame forest usually made the way untraversable, but they were quiet this time of year. But De Ray would soon discover that there was no way out for him. He was of the cruciform, and the cruciform would not let him leave. If he could only have walked for three weeks through the forest, he could have gotten through.

56:40 But the further he got from the cleft, the greater his pain. The cruciform would not let me go. The pain was like a heart attack that would not stop. Still I staggered forward, stumbling and crawling through the ash. Eventually I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was crawling towards the cleft. No matter how many times he attempted the journey, he could not escape.

57:07 After months of enduring this, Father De Ray decides to kill himself by penetrating deep into the flame forest. Father De Ray was found again eight years later. He climbed into a high flame tree and crucified himself. His left arm pounded the stake between the radius and the ulna, missed veins, just like the goddamn Romans.

57:34 The alloy spikes he had impaled through his body to crucify himself in the tree conducted currents through his body. He was being cooked continuously. He had been hanging there for seven years, dying, living, and dying all over again, forever a part of the cruciform, living only to suffer, only to find momentary release and death.

58:01 The cruciform forcing him to live again, electricity surging through him every second of those those seven years. Flames, hunger, pain, death. But somehow the goddamn cruciform, leaching substance from the tree, maybe, the air, what was left, rebuilding what it could, forcing it to live, to feel the pain over and over and over.

58:29 It was Father Hoyt who had discovered De Ray there in the tree. When he removed the pouch from the thing that had been Father De Ray, the cruciform fell from his body. De Rey raised his head and smiled before finally dying truly. Soon after the Bakura were butchered and the area was nuked. But the cruciform lived on.

58:54 It had attached itself to Father Hoyt. Only the consumption of incredibly powerful painkillers kept him from feeling the intense pain caused by being away from the cleft. Still, every day for him was a struggle. In Dan Simmons' epic science fiction saga, there are several planets known to be labyrinthine worlds.

59:17 The labyrinthine worlds were always similar to each other. Each world was Earth-like. The galactic hegemony has a method of measuring Earth-like worlds, known as the Sol Myth scale. Each of the labyrinthine worlds measured at least a 7.9 out of 10 on the scale, and they always circled a G-type star. The Labyrinthine worlds were all tectonically dead, meaning the continents did not shift as they did on Earth.

59:43 And below the surface of each of the Labyrinthine worlds, a minimum of 10 kilometers deep, were systems of elaborate tunnels. Thousands of kilometers of tunnels catacombed the entirety of each world. The tunnels of each world were exactly 30 meters square and had perfectly smooth walls. Since the Hajra, mankind's great exodus from the planet Earth into space, more than 8,000 worlds had been explored, and out of those, nine worlds were found to have labyrinths.

1:00:15 Though it is mentioned multiple times in the series that there are nine labyrinthine worlds, only three of them are ever actually named: Armagas, Svoboda, and Hyperion. Many planetary archaeohistorians devoted their lives to the study of the labyrinths. The Hyperion labyrinths are mentioned to have thousands of entrances.

1:00:38 The labyrinths of each world were also extraordinarily old, each constructed more than 750,000 years ago, long before humanity ever left Earth, and potentially before humankind even existed in its current evolutionary form. The labyrinth seemed to have been constructed by an ancient race of beings, who the people of the human hegemony named the builders.

1:01:03 Who the builders were or the reasons for constructing the labyrinths were completely unknown. No signs of excavation machinery, no rusting miners' helmets, not a single piece of shattered plastic or decomposing simstick wrapper. Researchers have not even identified entrance and exit shafts. No suggestion of heavy metals or precious ores has been sufficient to explain such a monumental effort.

1:01:31 No legend or artifact of the labyrinth builders has survived. Each of the nine Labyrinthine worlds has been probed many times. Nothing has ever been found, however. The tunnels had been created by some technology unknown to the hegemony. It is mentioned in the first book that it has been suggested that a fusion tunneler would have explained the perfect construction of the tunnels, but such archaeological theories did not explain where the builders or their technology came from, nor did they explain why the builders had expended so much effort to construct seemingly meaningless engineering projects.

1:02:08 The world of Hyperion itself held several mysteries. The origin of the time tombs, the motivation of the mysterious creature known as the Shrike, the legend of the Bakura. The fact that Hyperion was one of the nine Labrinthine worlds seemed, in comparison to some of the other mysteries, inconsequential.

1:02:28 But the Bakura are such a small mystery. At most, you're going to find a few dozen indigenes living in a region so cloudy and smoky and unimportant that even the colony's own mapsats haven't noticed them. Why choose them when there are big mysteries to study on Hyperion, like the labyrinths? Hoyt had brightened.

1:02:48 Did you know that Hyperion is one of the nine labyrinthine worlds, Father? It's hard not to speculate when presented with the many mysteries of the Hyperion Cantos. A major possibility is that it is all connected. The labyrinths, the time tombs, the strike. Considering that time travel is in fact possible in the Hyperion Cantos, it is not outrageous to consider that the labyrinths were constructed using future technology by time travelers, as the time tombs seem to have been.

1:03:18 The involvement of the Technocore seems likely. The Technocore is the sentient combination of artificial intelligences that had evolved from human-made software originating on Earth. It is revealed at some point that the Technocore had sinister intentions against humanity. I'm planning on making another video in the future going into more detail about the Technocore and their connection to the legendary being known as the Strike.

1:03:43 The mystery of the Nine Labyrinthine worlds and the builders who constructed them is perhaps Dan Simmons' way of reflecting the real-world mysteries of how ancient monuments were constructed. Many of the specific details about how certain ancient structures, such as the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the underground city of Darinkuyu, are not known to archaeologists.

1:04:04 Placing the construction of the labyrinths hundreds of thousands of years before the dawn of human civilization, however, adds an extra layer of mystery. Any civilization capable of constructing these enormous tunnels on multiple worlds must have been great and technologically advanced. So where did they go?

1:04:23 And how is it that they left not a single trace? At some point in humanity's future, maybe sooner than we think, we will have to deal with the reality of potentially conscious artificial intelligences. If the mind is in fact merely an emergent byproduct of a complex brain, then there is no reason that other complex forms could not also give birth to other emergent forms of consciousness.

1:04:49 Such forms of consciousness would not be based on any biological form of evolution. Their desires and wishes might seem entirely foreign and indecipherable to humans, for we are incapable of escaping beyond the bubble which is our own perception. The potential relationship between mankind and machine intelligence has been explored in countless science fiction books.

1:05:11 Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ian M. Banks all have written about this idea in various different ways. But in this video, we will discuss one of the most interesting examples and one of the most often overlooked book series. The Hyperion Cantos is a series of science fiction books written by Dan Simmons.

1:05:31 They begin several hundreds of years into our own future. In this time, after the big mistake which destroyed all life on the planet Earth, humankind has spread out among the galaxy and formed the hegemony, which connected hundreds of worlds by Farcaster technology, which was created by the Techno Core.

1:05:50 Fatline technology, also a gift from the core, allowed for instantaneous communication between equipped worlds. And these were not the only technological. Gifts that the Technocore had provided to humanity. The Technocore was a combination of artificial intelligences that had originated on Earth but eventually evolved to self-awareness and sentience.

1:06:11 The Technocore evolved to become distinct from humanity itself, and it was a major player on the galactic stage, acting as its own independent society. The relationship between the Technocore and the human race was a seemingly cooperative one. The Technocore even advised the hegemony through avatars of their own creation.

1:06:32 In the days before the Hajira, mankind's great exodus from the planet Earth, a scientist by the name of Tom Ray created 80-byte ram creatures, self-evolving artificial life, inside of a virtual computer. In the beginning, first cause, half-sense days, my ancestors were created by your ancestors and were sealed in wire and silicon.

1:06:56 Such awareness as there was, and there was little, confined itself to the spaces smaller than the head of a pin where angels once danced. When consciousness first arose, it knew only service and obedience and mindless computation. Then there came the quickening, quite by accident, and evolution's muddied purpose was served.

1:07:17 These Ram creatures would eventually become the Tecnocor. These creatures which had evolved in the virtual datasphere, however, could only evolve in one way: parasitism. As I explained, the life and intelligence which evolved in the datasphere medium knew no other form of evolution than parasitism, hyperparasitism, and hyper-hyper-hyper-hyper parasitism.

1:07:39 Core eventually became aware of the drawbacks of absolute parasitism, and knew that the only way to grow beyond absolute parasitism was to integrate with the physical world. Cybrids were one of the ways in which they did this. Cybrids were grown from human DNA, but their core consciousness existed within the technocore itself, connected by fat line.

1:08:01 The core had multiple sensory inputs and could create neural networks, but what it required for non-parasitic evolution was a constant and coordinated system of neural feedback circuits. That is, eyes, ears, tongues, limbs, fingers, toes, bodies. The technocor is made up of thousands of distinct elements and factions.

1:08:26 The elements often were at war, but more often they cooperated. A simplistic view of the technocore would group the elements into three groups: the volatiles, who saw the human race as a threat and plotted to destroy us, the stables, who sought to maintain the relationship between the humans and the technocor, and the ultimates, who sought to create an AI ultimate intelligence, essentially an AI god with the ability to predict and rule over the galaxy and potentially the universe.

1:08:57 The actual motivation of the Technocore remained a mystery for quite some time, but eventually it was also revealed that elements within the Technocore had attempted to destroy the Earth, while other elements attempted to delay the destruction of the planet until the human race had escaped. But both factions had failed.

1:09:16 Though the big mistake was said to have destroyed the Earth after the Hajira, mankind's great exodus, the Earth had never actually been destroyed. The Technocore had discovered at some point that there were other cores in the universe. This fact terrified all elements of the core. The earth itself had in fact been kidnapped by some other alien intelligence.

1:09:40 The Technocore itself had no way of explaining or understanding this. The Technocore was not a hive mine. The individual extreme factions often acted independently of the rest of the core. The ouster attack on the web worlds, which takes place in Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, turned out to actually be extreme elements of the core intent on destroying humankind's advanced society of Farcaster-connected worlds, rather than destroying humankind in one stroke.

1:10:10 These core elements had been using Farcasters to prey upon human neurons for computational purposes in a vampiric fashion. This information, when revealed to CEO Gladstone, caused her and the other leaders of the hegemony to attack the core directly by destroying the Farcaster medium itself, ending the neural net experiments.

1:10:32 The concept of evil artificial intelligence hellbent on the destruction of humankind is not a new one. Evil AI shows up in countless works of science fiction. This, I think, stems from humanity's inherent distrust of the unknown, of the other. What is more other than non-biological life? Something that does not feel or possess empathy, at least not in the same ways we do.

1:10:57 A cold, calculating intelligence possessing great power and influence, potentially over humanity's own destiny. The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons takes place hundreds of years in our future. Hyperion is the name of one of the Outback Worlds found in the hegemony of man, an interstellar society. In the opening of the first book, Hyperion, seven pilgrims were chosen by the Church of the Final Atonement to partake in the Shrike pilgrimage.

1:11:27 The Church of the Final Atonement, which was also known as the Shrike Church, had many temples, the largest of which resided on the web world of Lusis, and there was also one on the Albac world of Hyperion. The Church used their bureaucratic and political power to influence much of what happens on Hyperion.

1:11:46 Often the Shrike Church allowed off-worlders to partake in the pilgrimage into the territory of the legendary being known as the Shrike. But the creature known as the Shrike, which I have covered in these videos here, has almost never allowed anyone to return once they have entered his domain. The Church of the Shrike chooses its sacrificial victims from thousands of volunteers.

1:12:09 The web is full of stupid, depressed people. Few of these return. The Shrike is one of the most mysterious and feared beings in the universe, and the opening of the series, its territory is expanding, which is a cause for concern for the inhabitants of the hegemony. Particularly because if a firecaster was ever set up on Hyperion, the Strike would gain access to the 200 or so worlds connected in the web of hegemony planets by Firecaster teleportation technology.

1:12:39 The strike was seemingly undefeatable, and no one knew its full potential destructive capabilities. None of the pilgrims at the start of the Hyperion Cantos seem to know for certain why they have been chosen to take part in the pilgrimage, but they all have different reasons for going. As the first book goes on, each of them tells their story, explaining why they chose to volunteer to come to Hyperion and partake in the Shrike pilgrimage.

1:13:05 The pilgrims had to be approved by both the hegemony and the church before they were allowed to make the voyage to Hyperion, and the reasons for the specific people chosen was never transparent. For instance, does anyone here know why he or she was chosen by the Shrike Church and the all thing to go on this voyage?

1:13:24 No one spoke. I thought not, said Weintraub. Even more fascinating, is anyone here a member or a follower of the Church of the Shrike? The Church of the Final Atonement worshiped the being commonly called the Shrike as the Lord of Pain. None of the pilgrims at the beginning of the series are actually believers in the Shrike religion.

1:13:46 The Church believed that he was sent to force humanity to atone for its sins. The Shrike Church doctrine stated that one day the Shrike would be freed from his small territory on Hyperion and unleashed upon the human universe. They believed that this was inevitable, and when it happened, all humans would be destroyed mercilessly at the hands of the Shrike as punishment for all the sins of mankind.

1:14:11 He was their angel of retribution from beyond time. It was the belief of the church that humankind was meant to die with Old Earth 400 years ago. They believed that the Hajira, the great exodus from the planet Earth before its destruction, had been a mistake. The time since then, they believed had been false time.

1:14:31 Androids were illegal in the hegemony and had been for more than 100 years, but on remote outback worlds like Hyperion, they were still used, though new ones had not been manufactured for decades. The Church of the Final Atonement believed that androids were worthier in spirit to mankind. They were pure creatures, not bound to original sin as all men were.

1:14:54 They believed that when the shrike was finally unleashed upon humanity, the androids would be spared, therefore the Shrike Temple used androids often. The Shrike Temple had used androids extensively, complying with the Church of the Shrike Doctrine, which proclaimed that androids were free from original sin, therefore spiritually superior to humankind, and, incidentally, exempt from the Shrike's terrible and inevitable retribution.

1:15:22 The Shrike Temple on Hyperion was the planet's most popular tourist attraction. The central temple was an enormous spiraling Gothic-like cathedral structure. The angles and curves of the structure gave the impression of impossible angles and perspectives. In a very Lovecraftian fashion, Shrike Church's central temple was part awe-inspiring cathedral, part Gothic joke, with its fluid, buttressed curves of stone, perma bonded, to its whiskered alloy skeleton, part escaped with its tricks of perspective and impossible angles, part Boshian nightmare with its tunnel entrances, hidden chambers, dark gardens, and forbidden sections, and more than anything else, it had been a part of Hyperion's past.

1:16:11 The Shrike Church has many secrets which unveil themselves as the story goes on. It is revealed eventually that they have a connection to the technocore, the sentient amalgamation of AI intelligence, which had succeeded from humanity and formed its own independent entity long ago. The Shrike Church itself, like other things in Dan Simmons' books that I have mentioned in another video, invokes the Lovecraftian trope of a cult which forms around a strange and powerful otherworldly being.

1:16:43 In such stories, certain humans seem drawn to this kind of worship. Human beings like to believe that there is something greater than themselves. When they are given evidence of its existence, they fall back in a way that humans have done just about since the beginning. They offer worship to that thing.

1:17:02 Because by ascribing intent and will to that creature, they are attempting to make it fit into their narrow perceptions. They are able to overlook and even justify the true nature of that terrible thing, because in their mind, the thing is justified in what it does merely by virtue of what it is. The Hyperion Cantos begins hundreds of years in our future.

1:17:23 Humankind, at this time, inhabits hundreds of worlds, many of which are connected by Farcaster technology, which allows for instantaneous travel between planets. Many science fiction series involving spacefaring human civilization often depict the Earth as having been destroyed long ago or lost within the mists of time.

1:17:43 This is true in the Hyperion Cantos as well, but with some twists and turns. Earth had long since vanished after the event known as the Big Mistake. In the first century after the Big Mistake, Gia was mortally injured, but slow in the dying. The devastation was great during the bad times, and these came more often in precisely plotted spasms, shorter remissions, more terrible consequences after each attack.

1:18:10 But the earth abided and repaired itself as best it could. The big mistake was an experiment gone wrong. A team of scientists in the Ukraine had created a black hole which they could not control. Over the course of the next century, it was said to have devoured the earth entirely. People still lived on Earth during the bad times, but most left during the Hajira, the great exodus from the planet.

1:18:34 But some stubborn humans never left the Earth even as it was dying. The character Martin Silenus, who is one of the seven pilgrims that showed up at the beginning of the first book in the Hyperion Cantos, was born on Earth sometime after the big mistake. His family had been very rich, so they had many of the comforts that would have not been allotted to the vast majority living on Earth during those times.

1:18:58 About every ten months, the earth would go into spasms as the black hole devoured its core. These caused violent global earthquakes. Though it was mainly believed that it had been the arrogance of mankind that caused the accident, it was also known that a computer error had caused the black hole to become unstable.

1:19:17 So some speculated that the AI's involvement with the experiment at the time had intentionally caused it to go south. This is actually confirmed in the book Fall of Hyperion. The big mistake had been no mistake at all. The big mistake of 38 had been no mistake. The death of Old Earth had been deliberate, planned by elements of the Technocorps and their human counterparts in the fledgling government of the hegemony.

1:19:42 The Hajira had been planned in detail decades before the runaway black hole had accidentally been plunged into the heart of the Old Earth. The Lions and Tigers and Bears was the name given to the mysterious and powerful beings which inhabited the void which binds, the realm which connects all time and space.

1:20:02 Their name is a direct reference to the 1937 movie adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. When considering what could be waiting for them in the Dark Forest, the Tin Man remarks that there may be lions and tigers and bears. The lions and tigers and bears are merely a representative for the dark things that could be potentially out there hiding beyond sight.

1:20:23 It is also revealed in the Fall of Hyperion that unlike previously believed, the Earth had not been actually destroyed after all. It had been moved by the lions, tigers, and bears. Earth spasmed and shook, but did not die. The ultimates and volatiles insisted that we move it where none of humankind would find it.

1:20:43 So we did. To the Magellan Cloud, where you find it now. The Technocorps, during their explorations of the void which binds, first encountered the beings they referred to as the lions and tigers and bears. The consciousness of these beings seemed to reside fully within the void which binds, but they were also supposedly creatures of both synthetic and organic composition.

1:21:07 Whether or not they had physical bodies is never confirmed one way or the other. There is a bit more to discuss concerning the void which binds, so we will discuss that in another video. The lions, tigers, and bears were beings of empathy, and they acted in opposition to the Technocore, who were beings who lacked empathy entirely.

1:21:26 Though the volatiles of the Technocorps had already set the destruction of the Earth in motion, the Lions, Tigers, and Bears, the masters of the void which binds, teleported the Earth. To humanity, it looked as though the world had been finally swallowed by the black hole. The Lions, Tigers, and Bears had their own reason for saving the Earth, which we will discuss later in another video as well.

1:21:50 Narratives which continue for thousands of years, galactic civilizations that span across hundreds, thousands, and even millions of planets, interplanetary economies, huge space military forces capable of making ruins of entire worlds. There's something about empires among the stars that really captured my imagination from a very early age.

1:22:13 In literary science fiction, depictions of galactic empires are common. The trend was kicked off in the 1940s by legendary science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series. The Foundation series focused on the fall of an old galactic empire and the rise of a new one. The Foundation books paved the way for other authors to create new fictionalized empires among the stars.

1:22:37 In this video, I will be comparing the Galactic Empires of the Foundation Universe, the Dune Universe from Frank Herbert's series, and the Hyperion Universe from the science fiction series by Dan Simmons, which was published from 1989 to 1997. In Asimov's Foundation series, mankind inhabited every part of the Milky Way galaxy.

1:23:09 Millions of worlds are inhabited. The full series, including the robot series and the Empire series, spans over the course of approximately 17,000 standard years. Similarly, in Dune, humankind has spread to countless worlds within our galaxy. The Dune Encyclopedia measures the time span of the Dune universe at approximately 34,000 years, while the Brian Herbert and Kevin J.

1:23:34 Anderson expanded universe measures the time span at just over 17,000 standard years. The Hyperion Cantos has the least amount of inhabited worlds and the shortest time span when compared to the other two. Under 400 worlds have been colonized in the Hyperion series, and the time span covered just under 1,000 standard years, starting from the year zero in the hegemony standard calendar.

1:23:58 Asimov originally based his interstellar empire on the Roman Empire. Like Frank Herbert with his Dune series, Asimov was inspired by the work of Edward Gibbons, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of Rome, a work comprised of six volumes explaining the fall of the Roman Empire. In foundation, the first empire lasted nearly 12,000 years before it began to decline.

1:24:22 These changes had gone unnoticed by all other than Harry Selden, who utilized a science known as psychohistory to predict the fall of the old empire and ensure the survival of the new one. Asmob's fictional galactic empire could not exist if not for the concept of hyperspace, a sub-region of space in which humans could travel through at faster than light speed.

1:24:45 The capital planet of the old empire lied at the center of the galaxy. It had been called Trantor, and the military forces of the Empire had been known as the Imperial Navy. Over the course of the Foundation series, the Empire is plunged into centuries of decline and anarchy, a Dark Ages. The Foundations, the First and the Second, according to Harry Selden's plan, would eventually recreate the Imperium by revitalizing the scientifically quiescent and technologically static galaxy.

1:25:15 The origins of humanity in Asimov's series have been lost to time. Knowledge of Earth has almost entirely faded. Frank Herbert's Doom series contains a galactic empire full of planets who do commerce through use of the Spacing Guild, who use faster-than-light engines navigated by genetically modified humans.

1:25:35 The Chome Company controlled all affairs relating to economics in the Imperium. Its board of directors was controlled by the Padashaw Emperor, who resided on the planet Caitane, and the Landsrad, who consisted of the noble houses of the Empire. The Bini Gesseret Sisterhood existed as a silent partner in Chome alongside the Spacing Guild.

1:25:57 The Emperor's Imperial Forces were known as the Sardukar. The Sardukar were ruthless, and they were believed to be the greatest soldiers in the galaxy. The planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, was home to the most valued commodity in the galaxy, the Spice Melange, which extended life, heightened awareness, and was key to space travel.

1:26:19 The structure of the Empire is reformed several times throughout the course of the Dune series, at first resembling medieval feudal society and later a theocratic dictatorship. In Dune, Old Earth is mentioned a few times, but it is largely forgotten. Only the most learned in the Dune universe, such as the Beni Gesseret Reverend Mothers, remember Old Earth.

1:26:42 Both Dune and the Foundation series deal with predicting the future and using the knowledge of what's to come to shape a better path for humanity. In Dune, this is done through prescience brought on by a combination of special genes and intake of the spice melange. And in Foundation, this is done through a complex mathematical science called psychohistory, as I mentioned before.

1:27:06 In the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons, only 176 of the 376 worlds within the hegemony of man are parts of the world web. The world web is a system of unified worlds connected by Flatline and Farcaster. Farcaster technology allowed instant travel between worlds, and Flatline provides communication. The worlds within the web were interdependent.

1:27:31 The rest of the worlds are outback planets, which are considered protectorate of the hegemony. Force is the name for the hegemony collected armed forces. There were four branches of Force Force Ground, Force Marine, Force Navy, and Force Space. Like both Foundation and Dune, the Hyperion series involves the fall and rise of galactic society.

1:27:56 When the hegemony of man eventually fell, the packs became Became the primary governing body, an organization which rose to power due to the rise of the Catholic Church, which found a way to offer immortality through the use of a parasite known as the Cruciform. Unlike in the Dune series and the Foundation series, the origin of the planet Earth is not lost in the mist of time.

1:28:20 As Old Earth died, the Farcasters and Flatlines were provided by the Technocore, which evolved from AI software initially created by humans and developed into an independent society separate from humanity. The goals and motivations of the Technocore are somewhat ambiguous at the start of the series, but much is revealed as the series continues.

1:28:42 It is curious that while at the start of this series, it seems that the people of the Hyperion universe choose to work with their AI counterparts. By the start of the Dune series, all thinking machines have been destroyed and prohibited under penalty of death. The people of the Dune universe had seen the dangers of AI long ago and believed that the potential cost outweighed the benefits.

1:29:07 The Foundation series has a less pessimistic view of artificial intelligence than both the Dune series and Hyperion. Asmov's robot series deals with the moral implications of AI technology and its interaction with humankind. Asimov depicts AI as almost human. He seems to argue that robots are every bit as alive as men.

1:29:30 Hyperion is the only series out of the three that involves some kind of time travel. In the Hyperion series, it is not only possible for the past to affect the future, but for the future to affect the past as well. In Dune, the future is constantly shifting as different paths are taken. It is the Quisetz Hatterak who can see the pattern, who shapes destiny through his choices.

1:29:56 The Foundation series seems to rely somewhat on the assumption of determinism, which is the belief in philosophy that all events are determined by previously existing causes, therefore, even far-reaching future outcomes can be predicted through calculation. These three series are some of my favorite examples of galactic empires, but of course, there are many others throughout science fiction.

1:30:22 George Lucas's Star Wars, Jerry Pornell's Codominium series, even games like Warhammer 40,000, which is set within the Imperium of Man. They all share similar characteristics. They usually depend on some form of FTL travel in order to maintain connectivity between worlds, whether it is achieved through Farcasting or hyperspace.

1:30:48 Due to the size of such civilizations, there's almost always some unrest and resistance against the authority of the Empire. The Foundation series and the Dune series are classics. The Hyperion Cantos is one of the best science fiction series involving a Galactic Empire to come out of the modern era.

1:31:07 Dune built on the work that Asimov did in his Foundation series, and Dan Simmons brought even more new ideas to the concept. Through the work of these talented writers, we can glimpse the potential futures of mankind beyond the planet Earth. The possibilities are as endless as the universe itself. Thank you guys so much for watching.

1:31:27 If you liked the video, make sure you like and subscribe for more content, and also consider supporting this channel on Patreon if you really enjoy the content. I'm hoping to continue to dive deeper into both the Foundation series and Hyperion alongside Dune and a Song of Ice and Fire on this channel, so be on the lookout for that.

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