The Hyperion Cantos

The four Hyperion books cover more than thirteen centuries in time, tens of thousands of light-years in space, more than three thousand pages of the reader's time, the rise and fall of at least two major interstellar civilizations, and more ideas than the author could shake an epistemological stick at. They are, in other words, space opera.

As the reviewer for the New York Times said of the last book in the series, "Yet The Rise of Endymion, like its three predecessors, is also a full-blooded action novel, replete with personal combats and battles in space that are distinguished from the formulaic space opera by the magnitude of what is at stake -- which is nothing less than the salvation of the human soul."

The salvation of the human soul -- in the sense of finding the essence of what makes and keeps us human -- is indeed the binding theme through all of these space battles, dark ages, new societies, and the coming of a new messiah.

How it began...

It is the twenty-ninth century AD, and the galaxy is on the brink of an all-out war between the human-colonized worlds of the Hegemony, and the Ouster swarms - humans (or ex-humans?) who have adapted to life in deep space.
And then there are the elusive artificial intelligences of the TechnoCore, who evolved beyond the control of their human creators in the early twenty-first century and now form an uncomfortable alliance with the Hegemony.

At the center of the conflict somehow lies the remote labyrinth world of Hyperion and a mysterious entity called the Shrike - monster, angel, killing machine. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who would have it destroyed. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

Now, on the eve of Armageddon, while Hegemony and Ouster warships clash in the skies above them, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives.

...

Lenar Hoyt, a young Jesuit priest, is following in the footsteps of Father Paul Duré, whose discovery of a lost human tribe on Hyperion led to some surprising and ultimately horrifying revelations about the world.

Renowned FORCE officer Fedmahn Kassad is seeking his true love, whom he met on Hyperion in the wake of an earlier war, and who seems tied to the Shrike somehow.

The aging poet, Martin Silenus, who was part of an early wave of colonization of Hyperion and witness to the reign of Hyperion's vanished Sad King Billy, and who considers the Shrike to be his muse. He is returning to finish his epic Cantos.

The elderly Jewish scholar, Sol Weintraub, whose daughter Rachel visited Hyperion 25 years earlier as part of a scientific expedition investigating the Time Tombs, and who was struck at that time by a peculiar condition causing her to age backward in time. Having run out of time and options, Weintraub sees confronting the Shrike as his last chance to save his daughter.

Brawne Lamia, a private detective from a high-gravity industrial world, who is travelling to Hyperion at the request of her former client, a "cybrid" (a gene-tailored human body, legally owned and remote-controlled by a TechnoCore intelligence) based on the persona of the Old Earth poet John Keats, who hired her to discover who has been trying to erase him.

An anonymous Hegemony diplomat referred to only as the Consul, whose story tells of a young man of decades past, who fell in love with a woman and a world during the construction of the farcaster transportation portal to the planet - and of his sense of loss, as he saw his love age and the world change during its assimilation into the Hegemony's WorldWeb.

And Het Masteen of the Templar Brotherhood, captain of the treeship Yggdrasill, whose reasons for joining the pilgrimage he keeps to himself.

...

Each carries a desperate hope--and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands...